Guild Wars 2

I swear this game is not the best looking compared to Far Cry 3, The Witcher 2 and BF3. I ran all those games better than this on max or to near max settings just fine at 1080P

My specs

I5 3570k 4.5ghz
HD Radeon 6950 2GB
8GB DDR 1600mhz

I have the game at settings all at the highest possible at 1080p. My idle fps as the camera is show the surrounding area is like 35. When its zoomed in on my character is like 45. Is this game REALLY that demanding? Or is it just badly optimized? My system should not have any problems with it. Can someone clear this up for me?

Thanks.

MMOs will always be way more demanding than single player games.

Just turn off some video options, I think the game actually looks better without post-processing. Shadows on medium look just as good as shadows on ultra. You could take down all the options to medium and still look good.

It’s more CPU dependent than most other games with “pretty graphics”. A high end graphics card combined with a mid range CPU will still give good performance in games that are GPU dependent but GW2 spreads the load out more.

Same spec except I have Nvidia 670 GTX.
50-60 FPS everywhere.

It’s also a fairly new MMO and most MMOs improve with time as optimizations are introduced. When Rift was launched my machine could barely run it on the lowest setting but they fixed up the engine quite a bit in the following months and I was able to get good performance on medium. You can probably expect the same improvements with time from GW2.

Compare it to other MMOs.
Just look how badly Aion or WoW or TOR run, and see their graphics.

In the games you listed the CPU/GPU do not have to render hundreds of other players and their armor effects etc… which kills frame rates the most in an MMO (and particle effects)

Many people with high end machines complain about the frame rate drops in wvwvw because there are so many players and effects going on.

As previously mentioned, in time they will (hopefully) optimize the game to perform better on a wider range of machines.

Guild Wars 2 is a badly programmed game, which makes it much more demanding than it would have been, if they would have spent time optimizing the code.

An example, if you go in a dungeon and do, for example, path 1, the entire instance contains all 3 paths, all the mobs, the entire map is loaded, and those maps are huge because they contain superfluous spaces that are never used but still built and still taking up memory, the entire scripts are loaded. Just an example of bad programming.

garbage optimization is the answer.

That’s the thing though. I was in town with no one else around when I tested this. When I move the camera around 360 degrees. I would get as low as 10fps. I don’t think its that optimized. As some of are saying that’s its more CPU intensive than GPU. I got a 4.5ghz quad core. You can’t get much better that.

Oh well. It was only a test and obviously my system has failed.

This game uses ALOT of the CPU and very little “comparatively” GPU power. That’s why we still have the turning lag.

Fadetoblack.6450:

That’s the thing though. I was in town with no one else around when I tested this. When I move the camera around 360 degrees. I would get as low as 10fps. I don’t think its that optimized. As some of are saying that’s its more CPU intensive than GPU. I got a 4.5ghz quad core. You can’t get much better that.

Oh well. It was only a test and obviously my system has failed.

Where exactly were you? Maybe it`s one of the known FPS drop spots, there are a few of those around.

And how well do you maintain your system? Do you know what you`re doing ?

I want to know because I wanted to get a bigger CPU just for this game but I`m worried it won`t make a huge difference.

Fadetoblack.6450:

That’s the thing though. I was in town with no one else around when I tested this. When I move the camera around 360 degrees. I would get as low as 10fps. I don’t think its that optimized. As some of are saying that’s its more CPU intensive than GPU. I got a 4.5ghz quad core. You can’t get much better that.

Oh well. It was only a test and obviously my system has failed.

It is actually the game’s code. I keep my system running smooth, with all the bells and whistles I’ve even started to use a tool to reduce garbage running in the background when I launch GW2.

I have disconnects all the time from teleporting, the FR drops entirely when i turn, I get dc’d in dungeons doesn’t matter which ones.

I reported the disconnects and the low FR to support did a plethora of tests. According to support it was my computer, they actually told me I was overclocking my system, my system was never overclocked, trust me. I then had my friend who is a perfectionist who works on a large corporate server base and did computer work commercially before getting his degree to work on the larger servers check my system out.

Needless to say it’s definitely NOT my computer. I run all kinds of demanding games on their ultra settings never have issues, save for this one. (still after about 4 months).

There’s something wrong with the code.

“its just bad code”

The single player games only have the player and whatever NPC’s to keep track of. Then again (as an example) there were many armor/clothing options removed from Skyrim so they could add in other items.

Has anyone tried “Planetside 2”? In some cases there’s easily an order of magnitude of stuff going on but again Sony limited the player outfit/looks choices so that the amount of data needed to represent a single player was minimum.

This game has lived with being poorly coded/optimized since at least Q1’12 if not longer. At this point I’m fairly sure that there’s nothing that they can do to fix it outside of a complete rewrite of the client and server.

If you want to see what the developer has commented regarding optimization issues read >>this thread, section Q11<<>

Does the dev really know what he is talking about? I find it funny that he thinks running the game in window mode would be better than full screen. Truth is running any game in window mode uses more resources than in full screen.

I more than well meet the recommended specs. Infact I surpass them by a great deal and I get low fps. No matter what settings I tweak their is not little fps to gain. The biggest FPS killer is Super Sampling. Now turning that down to native give me like 6-7FPS increase. Going down to none from native is only like 2-3fps more if that.

Yea the game is pretty badly optimized. I should have no problems reach 60+fps all on highest settings with my system.

So after doing some testing. I kept all the settings at max and turned down the resolution to the lowest it can go and getting really crappy FPS still (23fps idle). I think I did better at 1920×1080p….. This is just sad but what can you do about it? All I know you have to have a beast of a system to get proper 60fps in it. Ok maybe I didn’t do better at 1080 but the difference is only 4-5fps. Which is nothing really.

So yea… The bottom line is the game is definitely poorly optimized. My system is probably crawl once I get in to massive pvp fights or dungeons. I wish it wasn’t like this but its just sad. Oh well I think I am done now.

• There are “no” official recommend specs for GW2. Only “minimum”
• FPS = CPU + GPU.
• Running supersampling will strain the GPU a lot.
• Running lower than native resolution could actually strain the GPU more since it has to do extra steps to downscale.
• Settings likes “reflection” and “shadow” uses the CPU alot.
• Yes, gw2 could use more optimization to make it less cpu-bound. However, your system should get 60fps in most areas and 30+fps in Heavy WvW/Cities. (I know, cuz I have a i5-3570K @4.2 with GTX660)

So I’m guessing you all never played a slide-show pvp siege in Shadowbane circa 2004

Or 20fps in Daoc pvp most of the time.

Welcome to the online world of huge, resource-hog maps, effects and lots of ambience that will get you killed faster than they can yell: N00B.

Enjoy your lag… I mean stay.

yea this is what MMO’s do, they take a beast of a computer and then laugh at it :P

I can keep my fps abvoe 30 in all areas in all situations ..even WvW battles. However i had to OC my cpu to 4.6ghz to do it.
I dont run supersampling, i run reflections on terrain and sky, and shadows on high not ultra ..and at 1920×1080. rest of settings r maxed. 60hz Vsync

LA averages 45 fps, lowest is 30 and only in 1 specific place looking in 1 specific direction which no1 ever stands at :P

WvW depending on the size of the battle can be anything from 60fps down to 30fps..but usualy in medium siszed battles i get around 45fps or more. Only the really really big battles drop me down to 30, and thats usualy down to my GPU hiting 99% usuage due to the effects.

PvE is usualy a constant 50-60 fps including fluctuations.

OP i think your just gunan have to get sued ot the fact that although GW2 doesnt look or feel as good as some SP or Multiplayer games out their like First person shooter and such …it does requir massive amounts of power to keep performance up .specialy the ones that for reason unknown to any1 ,,run an outdated yet highly modified DX9 Engine.

My system: AMD Phenom II x4 945 @ 3.0GHz, 8 GB DDR2 800 OCZ, ASRock A770DE+ MB, Sapphire 6870 1GB. I have hit 60+ FPS at times in the world, as low as 5 FPS during major fights. I’ve tried low settings with everything off, and I didn’t see much improvement overall. I did however found a trick to increasing performance was rather simple. In your NVidia control or CCC turn AA & AF to application control, vertical sync to on or application control, triple buffering on, and all optional AA & AF controls to performance or off. By setting these I noticed my FPS holds more stable than by just setting in game options. But overall, until we see a few more tweaks here and there to the overall optimization of the game itself the results will likely remain unpredictable as to which system will perform at what level.

Well atm the only predictable thing is , if ur running a AMD cpu, u will get bad performance. And if ur runing Intel but its older or below an 2nd gen i5 ..u will also get bad performance.
Gw2 really is limited in what CPU’s it actually runs ok on, even then they have to be OC’d ..it is rediculus tbh.