Guild Wars 2

I am usually about 60+ FPS occasionally hitting 90-100, but the game still feels like crap. Spinning the camera will drop me into the 30s. 30 FPS may be playable, but when you’re going from 60 to 30 it makes the game feel awful. Some zones I will get into the mid 50s but it feels like 30 FPS. I’m not sure if I’m getting mico stuttering due to my SLI GPUs or if it’s something with the game.

I’m playing with all the settings maxed and supersampling turned on. Even with supersampling off, I still get huge FPS drops.

With my hardware, I should never be dipping below 60 FPS. This is stupid.

i5 2500k @ 4.4GHz
2 x GTX 670 FTW SLI
8GB DDR3
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Windows 7 x64
Nvidia drivers 306.23 (Most current)

Try running the game with SLI off, one GTX 670 is capable of running this game.

I used to have that problem when I turn my camera while using my GTX 560 ti in sli, as soon I turned SLI off it stops stuttering when I turn. Hope this helps.

I used to play with just one 670 and the game still ran like crap.

Dropping shadows from ultra to high fixed the camera stutter for me (seems to affect nVidia only). 30FPS in large WvW fights and most of Lion’s Arch seems about right for your specs, nothing we can do about it til some minor improvements from ANet.

have you tried turning on threaded optimization in nvidia control panel, in guild wars 2 profile? I might be a long stretch but it might improve the performance.

Wow dropping shadows from ultra to high made a huge difference. My FPS is still around 75 or so but I’m not having it dip constantly. Still have crappy GPU usage, but it’s a relief to see that it’s not micro stutter. I sure hope Anet patches in proper SLI support soon and really takes advantage of GPUs. 90+% CPU and 40% GPU is not cool.

I am disappointed with poor sli support, for some reason guild wars 2 runs better with sli off than on for me anyway, guess I’ll wait for proper nvidia drivers to optimize it.

Shadows is nvidia’s problem (works on all the HD7000 devices we have).
Threaded Optimization deals with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476891%28v=vs.85%29.aspx, DX11 only.
SLI does work, but for the moment the game relies solely on single-threaded CPU performance.

deltaconnected.4058:

Shadows is nvidia’s problem (works on all the HD7000 devices we have).
Threaded Optimization deals with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476891%28v=vs.85%29.aspx, DX11 only.
SLI does work, but for the moment the game relies solely on single-threaded CPU performance.

My understanding was that the i5 can handle 2 threads per core, so 8 threads. Are you saying that GW2 uses a single thread on each core, or one core? I really don’t understand the technical workings of the CPU as well as I would like.

deltaconnected.4058:

Shadows is nvidia’s problem (works on all the HD7000 devices we have).
Threaded Optimization deals with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476891%28v=vs.85%29.aspx, DX11 only.
SLI does work, but for the moment the game relies solely on single-threaded CPU performance.

I don’t completely understand how it works. I have amd athlon II x4 640 @ 3.5Ghz and my core temp cpu graph shows its using all 4 threads but they are all averaging around 50%-70% usage and never goes higher. does it run the speed of a single thread across 4 cores?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx is a much better tool than the default task manager for windows (has an option to replace it as well if you copy it to c/prog files). It’ll give you much more in-depth info, including threads.

Depending on what the system is like, Windows can switch a thread from one core to another as many as several hundred times a second to distribute the load (there’s ways to override this with affinity, but ANet didn’t set any). I’ve always assumed this to be for reducing the amps per core and therefore resistance and leakage = less heat, but idk. Other OS’s, like Linux, don’t do this by default.

As for why a single thread can’t use more than a single core – concurrency. In short, let’s say the next two things the thread would do is “x = x + y” followed immediately by “x = x + z”. If those statements were split across different cores, they would both attempt to store the new value of x at the same time (shared clock source). Doesn’t matter which value ends up being stored, neither will be the “x = x + y + z” that we want.

GW2 itself has plenty of threads, but when you look at ProcessExplorer while playing, you’ll notice one doing a lot more work than the others. It’ll also be reported as using 1/#cores, physical or logical, you have (25% on desktop i5, 12.5% on i7 with hyperthreading etc.)

Enable Vsync, lower shadows & reflections a little.

As mentioned by someone else, use Vsync from the ingame menu.
Also, instead of the default one try to use this SLI compatibility bits 0×02C0680D i found that it help a little on crowded area, mostly big events.

Tekla.2139:

As mentioned by someone else, use Vsync from the ingame menu.
Also, instead of the default one try to use this SLI compatibility bits 0×02C0680D i found that it help a little on crowded area, mostly big events.

I don’t have that string listed under my compatibility bits. Can’t just enter it manually either. Hmm.