Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running GW2 for a year and a half now with no problems. I have it on 2 different systems and over the last month or so it’s degraded performance on both of them. Mostly I get what appear to be loading hiccups when I enter a new area and they seemed to scale with the shader graphics setting, high causing the most often brief freezes.

Today all **** broke loose. Just walking through Vigil Keep in fullscreen was so bad that I had about 5 fps. It was full of people so I figured that reducing graphics to max performance would help… no joy. So I thought that restarting the game in windowed mode would help and for a time it did.

As part of trying to fix whatever was messing with my performance over the past month, I had the system monitor running. It’s a good thing I did because I caught the whole history of things going from a tolerable 12FPS to being so bad that my character’s head stopped rendering for 1-2 seconds at a time.

Note: Don’t even bother tyring to blame it on my OS… I know better. This is intended to help Tech Support run down problems that everyone is experiencing and, to be honest, I seem to have having fewer problems than many friends who run windows 8.

GW2 has sort of an in and out history with multi-thread / multi-cpu issues… might this be part of it?

Hopefully this is a clue that can help Tech Support figure things out.

System:
AMD FX-6100 Bulldozer
16G RAM (hardly used, as you can see)
NVIDIA GT640 (I thought that was the issue but this pic shows otherwise)
Authentic Nvidia Driver 331.49 (current)
Running Mint 15 with POL and WINE 1.7.1 (Known worldwide as solid with GW2)
System and GW2 are both fully up to date.

AGAIN: This system has run GW2 just fine for over a year. This new issue isn’t the system.

download CPU-Z and GPU-Z.

in CPU-Z Mainboard tab, what is your PCI-E link speed

In GPU-Z there is a Bus interface section. What is the read out there?

In GPU-Z is a ? next to Bus Interface, if you hit that then choose Render Test, what is the read out in the Bus Interface then?

Working on the GPU-Z thing…. it’s a little different with this OS. GPU-G doesn’t show info for the bus interface other than the fact that it’s a M5A97 and it won’t run tests on the video hardware.

However InfoSistema will. I’m downloading it and will run a few tests after dinner.

well, you need to make sure your GPU is linked at 16×. From your description it really sounds like its at 4x or 1x instead.

and since your running a completely unsupported setup, I am not sure of how to reset the drivers in Linux to bring the GPU out of that power saving mode. If its actually stuck like I think it is :-)

Okay.... I’m sure this isn’t precisely what you wanted but it was VERY enlightening.

InfoSistema was a bust but lshw was a winner. Among a lot of other things in it’s report was this info on PCI-0. Please remember that my Nvidia Settings dialog says I’m running 331.49 (just triple checked... that’s what it still says.)

I’m wondering if the original drivers were never properly purged because get a load of this:
" product: GK107 [GeForce GT 640] "

That is the old driver that came with the install. There is no mention here of the 331.49 driver that the Nvidia settings tool claims is currently in use.

*-pci:0
description: PCI bridge
product: RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port B)
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=pcieport
resources: irq:52 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fd000000-fe0fffff ioport:c0000000(size=301989888)
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GK107 [GeForce GT 640]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
resources: irq:80 memory:fd000000-fdffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:fe000000-fe07ffff
*-multimedia
description: Audio device
product: GK107 HDMI Audio Controller
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0.1
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1
version: a1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0
resources: irq:25 memory:fe080000-fe083fff

Linux has specific power saving options for the graphics. I’ll check that and make sure it’s in 16x, thanks.

PCIe is set to x16 and has always been there.

Though it most likely has nothing to do with the CPU issue stated in my OP the Power Saving Mode may still be a huge factor in overall performance…. get this:

I keep selecting “Prefer Maximum Performance” and after every reboot it’s been reset back to “Auto”. After re-re-resetting it back to Max Perf the tab now looks like this:

Nvidia Settings: PowerMizer:

Adaptive Clocking: Enabled
Graphics Clock: 901Mhz
Memory Transfer Rate: 1782Mhz
Power Source: AC
Current PCIe Link Width: x16
Current PCIe Link Speed: 5.0 GT/s
Performance Level: 1

NOTE: Performance Levels are listed as follows:

………………….Graphics Clock…………………Memory Transfer Rate
…..Level………..Min………………..Max………………….Min……………….Max
………..0………..324Mhz………..324Mhz………..648Mhz………..648Mhz
………..1………..329Mhz………..901Mhz………..1782Mhz……..1782Mhz

Edit: Killing off all older drivers and installing 331.67 … seeing if that helps.