Guild Wars 2

Sure PvE is mostly ok, but stepping into WvW was like hitting a brick wall.
On what systems have this game actually been tested on pre-release?
Up, up, up you go!

Hi everyone! Can somebody tell me which is the driver to be used for nvidia gtx560 ti? I’m loosing my mind already finding out what’s the problem because I don’t get past 20 fps. My average fps is 11 fps and drops down to 4-5 when I encounter even one player. ONE freakin’ player! I’m reading other forums and they have like 40+ fps for gtx560 ti.
Here’s my rig’s specs:
CPU: i7-2600 3.4 GHz OS: Win 7 x64 SP1 RAM: 4 GB VIDEO CARD: gtx560 ti 1gb gddr5 clocked830MHz
Current driver: 306.02 = <20 fps super low settings
Driver: 295.73 = fail
304.79 = fail
306.23 = fail

Do I have to configure my hardware like motherboard or video card via nvidia control panel? Please help.

ive done a bit of over-clocking and my fps has improved quite a bit. I think the sad reality is for alot of people I that the game is just REALLY CPU INTENSIVE. and by REALLY i mean prob the most out of any game is history. what I mean is the ratio this game uses your gpu compared to cpu is almost half of any other game.

to provide maximum performance out of my graphics card(gtx 670) i had to overclock my i72600k to over 4ghz. in other words i don’t think there is a standard cpu out there that can really play gw2 60fps all the time. this is why areas like WvW and cities impact so much because you get an insane cpu bottleneck.

BUT this could be because the game is not optimized that well either. it could be bottlenecking your gpu but not using your cpu efficiently. because even though i have an obvious bottleneck on my i7 2600k the core usage was a bit of a joke. this is why we prob haven’t heard anything from Anet about it because the reality is its just the engine so drivers wont help anything. its all optimization and Anet is prob snowed under with issues as it is.

I’ve run some gpu assessment tools like gpu-z and the windows gadget gpu meter and cpu tools like windows cpu-meter. The gpu tools gave the same result for gw2. Only 1% of my gpu is used. Can you believe it? It’s a spec of dust. I compared it with another game and that game used my gpu like 5-20% and that was only Torchlight 1. My cpu was going from 50-90% when running at gw2 while torchlight only used 50-60% of my cpu. I was like, “really?!”.

motmot.6123:

Hi everyone! Can somebody tell me which is the driver to be used for nvidia gtx560 ti? I’m loosing my mind already finding out what’s the problem because I don’t get past 20 fps. My average fps is 11 fps and drops down to 4-5 when I encounter even one player. ONE freakin’ player! I’m reading other forums and they have like 40+ fps for gtx560 ti.
Here’s my rig’s specs:
CPU: i7-2600 3.4 GHz OS: Win 7 x64 SP1 RAM: 4 GB VIDEO CARD: gtx560 ti 1gb gddr5 clocked830MHz
Current driver: 306.02 = <20 fps super low settings
Driver: 295.73 = fail
304.79 = fail
306.23 = fail

Do I have to configure my hardware like motherboard or video card via nvidia control panel? Please help.

^ those are all the driver versions I’ve had trouble with on my GTX560Ti, not just in this game but also back in SWTOR. I stuck with 285.62, maybe you could try those ones.

Also go into the Nvidia panel and try these in the GW2 profile (add the game in program settings tab):

The 1000th Reply!!! The biggest thread on Gw2 forum..Whoohooo.

Oh and I’ve been reading people saying that GW2 is using 1 core on their CPU and using almost no GPU, so I dunno what’s wrong with their setup since it looks normal for me.

[img]http://db.tt/cXGqpAs8[/img]

Well. Now would be a good time to hear from people who have upgrade their components or PC.

Any news? Have you noticed performance gain? I for one know that I have a sufficiently powerful computer for this game and still receiving bad performance.

I have an i7 3770 (locked multiplier version.) I have two EVGA GTX 670 cards in SLI. I am running the latest beta driver I could find.

My fps are as high as 150, and normally, I suspect I get 80fps average (rough guess.)

In some locations, I drop to low 40s. It’s not necessarily related to dynamic variations such as nearbye battles. It seems to be due to that area and and what direction you are looking which determines the drop. It could be CPU limited in these cases, in which case it’s not clear how to fix that except to OC the CPU, which I can’t do with a non K version of the CPU.

295 GTX running at ~30% usage. When my fps drops my usage spikes up to 100% but my fps still stays very low.

i7 920 OCed 3.6 ghz – This runs at ~25% usage average. I noticed that my first core runs ~70% usage while the other 3 cores run at ~20%

6 gbddr3 – 50% usage when the game is launched.

I could play the game on max settings and get around 50-60 fps in PvE with the occasional random fps drops. I choose to play on med-high settings just so I don’t stress my system to much (system is 4 years old).

What I find really odd is the random fps drops I’ve been getting by moving my screen. for example, if I’m at the highest point in the map viewing everything around me my fps is a constant 60. If im at a less graphically intense area, my fps will drop to ~40 (with vsync enabled anything below your monitors refresh rate is choppy). Sometimes I’ll be walking around exploring and all of sudden BOOM 40 fps – I move my screen and my fps shoots back up to 60. I don’t understand why the game does this.

I haven’t really tried WvW that much. I’ve joined 2 games in it my fps went ranges from 30 fps in huge 100+ battles to 60 fps in ~20 men battles. Adjusting my graphical settings does nothing to my fps in WvW.

P.S. I typed this on my crappykitten iPhone. Don’t mind the spelling and grammar.+

One small thing. Remember defrag your hard drive. One good free program that i use is Defraggler. http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
And one small thing is keeping registry clean and clean up your unused data and corrupted files. I use Ccleaner. It’s free too. http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER
Piriform is company from Finland and very highly trusted in here. And Piriform has other good programs too. After i used those two programs my fps jumped from 60 to almost 70. Now i use Vertical sync (60 fps) and game runs smoothly even i have all AMD stuff…
Hope this help even a bit.

-Joonas

I was able to solve the issue with the help of the Arenanet staff, and troubleshooting the CPU. Those of you that are experiencing similar issues I urge you to download a program called speccy, and make sure your cpu temps stay around 80 or lower. I am not positive of the exact thing that helped and I am not guaranteeing this will fix the problem, but this is what may have fixed it for me. (Note: No I did not buy new hardware other than a new fan for the cpu.)
Please try these out, and I hope it can at least help a few people.

1. Download Speccy and make sure your temps are safe. For my computer it would not run the game well until I got my cpu temps under 80 c. I am not sure why. I am not a genius with computers. _ I know my pc a lot better now though due to troubleshooting so much while trying to fix this issue.
2. Change the thermal grease on the CPU if it has been neglected. This lowered temps for me by 15 c and helped a great deal. My computer runs better overall.
3. Run a tool called Intel Processor Diagnostic tool to make sure there is no problems with the cpu.
4. I unhooked and reseated everything in my computer.
5. I followed instructions on the arenanet ticket. They had me alter some settings and it improved my fps by 10-15. If you have sent a ticket I am sure you got something similar. I’m not sure if I am allowed to post the ticket or not but I don’t want to risk it. I changed the power settings on my card to max performance as well as switched to single display performance. Setting the in game settings for refresh rate and fps to 60 also helped.

After doing all this and starting the game I am getting 40-60 fps. There is quite a few more fps drops then I had before, and I am sure that the cpu was able to get above 80c without issues before as well. Something may have changed to make the game a bit harder on the cpu, which made it slow down on my machine to an unplayable level.
This game heats up the cpu more then any other game I have ever had, and the game seems to not function or go above 20 fps unless the temps were under 80 c. Again, I do not know if this will work for any of you, but I wish all of you the best of luck with this issue.
My GPU usage was 10% before and is now at about 50-65%. Everything seems normal again, but with a few more sudden fps drops.

Special thanks to the Anet staff member that showed Speccy to me. It’s awesome!

And speccy can be found also from Piriform. http://www.piriform.com/speccy

Thank you, Juutas. _ I forgot to add that. Also if you think there may be an issue with the cpu I used this tool as well. I think it only works if you have an Intel, but it will tell you if there are issues with it.

Intel Processor Diagnostic tool
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19792

So some more intersting info

Since i noticed my GPU at 0% load in WvW (despite only getting 15 fps), i decided to try something.

I underclocked my card. Lowered it from 775 mhz, down to 500 mhz.

No change in performance.

One might think id get an even lower framerate, but nope, stayed around 15 fps.

This just goes to confirm that my GPU is not being utilized by the game much, if at all, during WvW battles.

Why is this?

A bottleneck would slow down how well my system performed, not cause a total roadblock, keeping ANY data from being sent to the card. (IE: 0% usage)

Are you asking WHY it’s CPU bound? Some claimed it’s due to the occlusion culling being done in the middleware called Umbra. I am not claiming this, just passing along the info.

occlusion culling, from the little I understand, is mostly to do with 3d objects like buldings, trees, etc, and not rendering the stuff behind them that you cant see.

Im not sure why in WvW battles, this would suddenly cause a huge performance issue, being that many battles take places in large open areas, without much that actually has to be “occluded”.

Unless, the 3d player models take advantage of it as well. Meaning Player A is standing in front of player B, and Umbra determines that large portions of of player B do not need to be rendered. More players = heavier impact on this. In fact, it almost seems like removing this functionality from player models all together may cause a performance increase for many people, or at least remove the workload from the CPU and put it back on the GPU where it should be.

I am not sure if I already mentioned it in this particular thread already,
but I noticed that my frames per second drop significantly whenever I am near
buildings, such as gates, walls, castles and so on.

When I look at stone mist castle my FPS drop to around 20, with nothing going on, only gazing at the castle.
Just being near a gate drops me to 35 FPS and when a big crowd is somewhere,
my frames stay low (down to 8…), even though I am not able to see them,
for example when they are far away or behind walls.

The same goes for PvE. It is like my frames are set to a specific number, depending on the city (always around 23 at Black Citadel, always around 30 at Lions Arch and so on),
while my frame rate is around 60 (Vsync on), when there are almost no buildigs to be seen.

I am not very experienced with programming, unfortunatly, but what you are saying about occlusion culling would make sense.

It is like the processor is so busy to decide what the graphics card is supposed
to process and what not, be it buildings or crowds, that the graphics card stops processing altogether.

So the processor would be very busy with deciding what to process,
and the GPU does not get anything to process because the CPU is still busy
with deciding, which also unnecessarily consumes CPU processing power needed for the game.

That would explain some other posts stating that the processor is almost at 100% workload, while the GPU is idling about and why it seems that this is even more the case the more is going on, for example WvW.

This also explains while only the best of the best and overclocked CPU´s can handle this.
This would be a serious, serious optimisation problem, in the event this holds true.

So, buggy occlusion culling, the most plausible cause I have read so far, might be worth a look at.

I wouldnt call it buggy occlussion culling. Its working how its supposed to work.

I would just say its poorly optimized at best. If its being used for player models, thats probably a downside, because graphics cards are great at handling the rendering of lots of polygons these days. No real point in using occulusion for character models. Buildings and stuff on other side of big rocks or hills, makes total sense. It might even be better to just auto lower the quality of player models in big groups. Thats how other games have managed to deal with performance issues in the past.

Let the GPU handle more, so that workload can be lesser on the CPU. Its probably something that involves a lot of work however, here is hoping Anet is at least trying, and not just hoping “eventually everyone will have i7s or better and the problem wont be there anymore”.

end note: An option to reduce particle effects could help too. Not just with hardware performance, but with gaming performance as well. 10 people attacking the same target = one big glowing ball of goo. Cant see anything going on really.

Hi everyone, I’m here because I have serious problems with GW2 performance, and I hope that someone can help me. Before I start, I must say that I am absolutely not an expert of PCs/software/hardware, and I never overclocked or ‘manipulated’ anything.

I play GW2 on an Asus G73sw laptop, and its specs are

Windows 7 64
Geforce GTX460M 1.5GB (with the latest beta drivers, checked daily)
8GB RAM
Intel i7 2630QM

I play with everything on medium, and while normally my fps is about 50-60, after a few seconds I log in a strange phenomenon begins: often, even if I stand still, the fps drops to 15-20 for about two seconds, and then rises to 50-60 again. This event occurs spontaneously, but curiously also every time I open the Black Lion Trading menu, when I change tabs, and even when I look the various Style Tab accessories. These continuous slowdowns are totally destroying the gameplay, because the game shifts from 60 to 20 fps almost cyclically, creating a frustrating stuttering experience expecially in combat situations.

I read about checking CPU and GPU temps and usages, and I did various tests in game, so here’s my observations and notes.

- While the slowdown seems to happen when the game needs to ‘load’ something (Black Lion tabs for example) and I thought that it might be a Hard Disk problem (like for the infamous Diablo 3 stuttering issues), in GW2 the HDD leds don’t blink during the stuttering so it doesn’t appear that it’s ‘working badly’. I also tried with an external drive, and it didn’t change nothing. I run the defrag tool every week so it’s not a fragmentation problem either.
- Modifying graphic settings alters the maximum fps, but it does not stop the problem. Even putting everything to minimum does nothing for that.
- When there are ‘special effects’ like snow, smoke, and combat flashes, the problem appears more often. It’s not that my pc can’t handle those effects because even if there are 10 pgs, it stutters randomly for two seconds and then jumps back to 50-60… Only to return to 10-20 after a couple more seconds. For example, in Hoelbrak and Lion’s Arch crafting area I stutter almost cyclically, while in more ‘plain’ zones these slowdows are less frequent.
- It’s obviously not a ‘specs’ issue because a friend of mine with an inferior laptop plays with less maximum fps, but no stuttering problem, using the same (if not superior) graphic settings.
- I noticed that while I play, the CPU usage is about 25% average, but ‘CPU 7’ in the monitoring program appears to have a constant 80-90% usage (that becomes 99% when I alt-tab to check). I don’t know if it’s a meaningful detail.
- CPU temps are about 70 °C.
- GPU usage is constantly 95-97%, and its temperature is about 85-92 °C when I’m playing and not alt-tabbed.

Since I understand almost nothing about Pcs when things become technical, I have no clear idea of what the problem could be. I read somewhere that for a GPU such a high temperature is ‘not alarming’ and ‘normal’, but I’m not too convinced about that because others said that it’s too high. Before telling me that I should have opened my laptop to clean everything as my first try to solve anything, mind that I can’t do that without making the warranty void, so I tried other solutions first. While I still suspect that it may be the cause, can the GPU overheating really be correlated with fps drops during things such exploring the Black Lion Trading menu? Or are these problems ‘know issues’ or something similar that don’t have nothing to do with the heat? Can I consider myself in the “unreasonable GW2 bad fps club”?

Thanks in advance to everyone that knows something or has ideas about this. And sorry for my ignorance if the solution is stupid. :P

one think i really cant believe is that arena is about releasing mac version of gw2 while pc version is still barely playable and not optimized

It seems like either Umbra is using a lot of CPU cycles to perform culling or the engine has no optimization what-so-ever.

There are several spots in lions arch that gives you a massive fps drop when there is a pool of water behind an object, if it is actually culled then there should be no performance increase/decrease when playing around with the reflection settings.

All in all, the quality of the visuals in the game does not remotely justify the really low FPS on such a high end hardware.

I know its unsupported, but any tips on getting better FPS with Wine under Linux?
My specs:

• AMD Am2-5000+
• NVidia GeForce 9600 GT (512 MByte)
• 4 GByte RAM (Upgrade coming soon…)
• Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64 (Gnome3 in “Fallback Mode”/Gnome2-UI)
• Wine 1.5.1 with needed patches (PlayOnLinux package)
• Game running with -dx9single (Otherwise broken chat and a black login screen…)

In some regions of the Human start area, especially the underground areas, my FPS go down to ~4. With graphic settings that let good old TES3 look like a 2013 game. -.-
The Charr region works much better, tough, even with so much more going on there and so much more polys to paint for my graphics card.
Havent seen the rest yet.

BTW: I play the game under my main OS becausekittenWindows restarts the graphic drivers all the time. Not funny. How do you Windows folks live with that crappy excuse of an OS? My system works wonderful under Linux but Windows just behaves very very crappy.

Teknobug.3782:

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

-Anistropic filtering: application controlled
-antialiasing – gamma correction: off
-antialiasing – mode: application controlled
-antialiasing – setting: application controlled
-antialiasing – transparency: off
-CUDA GPU: all
-maximum pre-rendered frame: 2 (default is 3, try 2 or 1 if you get some input lag)
-multi-display/mixed-GPU: single display performance (this may be where the problem lies for some users, it’s default to multi display)
-power management: adaptive
-texture filtering – anistropic sample optimization: off (those that get flickering with 304/306 version probably has this on)*
-texture filtering – negative LOD bias: allow (toggle between allow & clamp to see if any difference for you)
-texture filtering – quality: quality
-texture filtering – trilinear optimization: on
-triple buffering: on
-texture filtering – anistropic filtering optimization: off
vertical sync: use 3D application

Thanks for the tip Teknobug.3782 but sadly none of these helped. I’ve got GW2 working on a low end pc of mine for guests. It’s specs are i5 @ 2.93GHz, 4gb ram (3.0 gb usable coz its running on Win7 32-bit), and ATI HD4650. The game runs on constant 40 fps with players around, in or outside the city, on low setting. Its not pretty but it’s my only shot playing the game. So I’m really, really mad with my video card right now. I’ll dual boot my pc and install 32-bit win7 and install nothing else but gw2 and the necessary drivers and see if it works.

Someone posted to let the game run in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2 or SP3. This has worked for me. It forces the game to run in a DX9 environment. My game ran on the lowest settings on 15-19fps. Now, forcing it to run in DX9, it runs mildly good on Medium to High settings in 25-30 fps.

I run this on an Intel i7 2670QM 2.4 GHz with an NVIDIA GT555M. I had great performance a few weeks back but with a patch, the fps was horrible. Now, it runs OK.

To force the game into the DX9 environment you can follow these steps (this only applies if you run the game on Windows Vista or Windows 7):
- Right click your GW2 icon on your desktop or the GW2.exe in your program folder and select “Properties”
- Select the “Compatibility” tab
- In the option “Compatibility Mode” tick the box and select “Windows XP Service Pack 2” or “Windows XP Service Pack 3”
- Click apply and and start the game.

I hope this helps some people… It helped me at least.

“After doing some digging, I did not have to dig deep to find out that the game is not large address aware.
Process Memory <—*
Private: 1194MB
WorkingSet: 996MB
PeakWorkingSet: 1430MB
this is after 6 hours of random testing.
I ran the 2gb max memory removal patcher as stated previous and fps went from 40 to 120”

I am wondering if anyone has a link to the “Max memory removal patcher” ? Sounds like it could be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

I went over to the Umbra site.
The technology seems very useful indeed, and I get the impression these guys know what they’re doing.
If theres a problem, I’d bet it has to do with the GW2 implementation of the tech rather than Umbra itself.
I hope the GW2 developers, call the experts for consultation.

Umbra Software

Yeah, this game definitely needs to be fixed on the fps. I’ve been playing various mmo’s now for 10 years and this is some of the worst frame rates i’ve seen. If you’re running top of the line hardware and still can’t get 30-60fps in pvp, it’s broke. Not to mention that means that everyone running on older hardware (which the vast majority do) are screwed. You should not be playing with a slideshow even at min specs.

psyway.4356:

one think i really cant believe is that arena is about releasing mac version of gw2 while pc version is still barely playable and not optimized

Buy to play format, buddy. They gain nothing from people who already have the game, at this point. Mac compatibility means more copies to sell. More copies sold means more money. Perhaps more money means they’ll be able to afford better ways of fixing what’s still broken!

Or so I’d like to think. Still crashing; been suggested to me after a few hours of waiting for my ticket to upgrade to 64-bit, but I can’t see this working for just everyone. Keeping an eye on this thread and the updates. Fingers crossed they sort this out soon.

Auruan.2837

Buy to play format, buddy. They gain nothing from people who already have the game, at this point. Mac compatibility means more copies to sell. More copies sold means more money. Perhaps more money means they’ll be able to afford better ways of fixing what’s still broken!

Reminds me of a certain indie developer with that open world game about cubes and mines and crafting written in Java…

Hello again,

Just letting you know – after the most current update the described problem reappeared again.

I concur. Doctor, do you concur?

I have also experienced the low fps in these caverns just yesterday, so it has not been fixed.

I experienced this problem as well – first time today. Never had actual fps drop before in the game without there being a huge commotion, and have played Bandithaunt Caverns before without the fps drop.

Despite that I tried to drop my graphics settings – which of course didn’t help since I have been able to play there smoothly before.

Going to bump this. GTX 680 here and while I hold 60+ most of the time, harder areas put me in the 40s (not counting Bandit Cave). Finally just did some video testing with Precision and my GPU is solidly sitting at about 50% utilization at 1600×1200 all settings on High or Ultra. I’d have to try a WvW and see if FPS plummets.

Running Xeons at 3.6. I can’t go much higher due to the board I have.

Even at 1920×1200 at the top of Divinity’s Reach near the Queen’s Court garden area, I only lost 2-3 FPS despite a higher res change. This either means:

1. Game is CPU-bound
2. Kepler / 306.xx drivers (or the game) are not yet fully optimized

If people who have good I7s in the mid to upper 4Ghz’ have problems and lots of 680/690 concerns, then I think I’d be correct.

Any other game (BF3, WoW, Metro 2033, Crysis 2 etc.) except this runs nearly flawlessly on my system.

Edit 1. Nothing regarding CPU heat is bugging me. System is idling at upper 20s to low 30s and some cores are barely peaking 40 when in the Pale Tree. No overheating issue here.

Just for peace of mind, and to keep everyone from pulling their hair out, can we get some ANet confirmation that they’re still actively working on these issues?

AMD FX-4100 @ 4.0-Ghz
AMD Radeon HD 7870 @ 1100Mhz
8GB Ram

CPU sits at about 55-60% utilization
GPU sits at 40-60% utilization

My enjoyment of the game would increase dramatically if they can figure out what is causing this. We haven’t heard a thing about it since the devs requested “-perfdebug” profiles (which didn’t work for anyone).

I’m getting 10-15FPS in moderately sized, one champion fights. :-(

I have screenshots of weirdness and more explanation that were merged into this thread already.

Thanks.

TheRealLink.3861:

1. Game is CPU-bound
2. Kepler / 306.xx drivers (or the game) are not yet fully optimized

If it was CPU bound, people wouldn’t consistently be reporting that their CPUs are being underutilized. CPU usages has been reported at anywhere from 10%-60%. There’s a lot of CPU that’s not being used at all.

Same goes for GPU across the board.

There are some definite software optimization issues causing some problems here.

There is no specific hardware that has the issue. It’s been reported on NVIDIA & AMD cards of all kinds, Phenom 2’s, i5’s, i7’s, AMD-FX, of all different speeds.

I still say I am CPU bound. I don’t assert everyone is. When I hit 40fps in some areas of Sylvari area, GPU util is low, CPU util is high.

The overwhelming level of anecdotal evidence, pointless suggestions, and amateur quick-fixes in this thread makes me weep for the future of humanity.

Shanaxe.4285:

Hi everyone, I’m here because I have serious problems with GW2 performance, and I hope that someone can help me.

I play GW2 on an Asus G73sw laptop, and its specs are
….

Hi, it’s possible that your FPS fluctuations may be caused by CPU throttling. It’s been known to happen on this specific Asus model. There is program you can download and try that will stop it. See this notebookreview thread for more details:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/576468-g73-53sw-owners-cpu-throttling-798mhz-how-fix.html

One month later, still having performance issues
I Already gave my dxdiag before.
For some reason dungeons are the worst for me. I would expect them to perform the best, but I get 5-10 FPS. Everything else just varies. Sometimes i get 40-45 FPS outside, other times i could be standing in cave and near a wall with nothing going on and still get 5-9 FPS.

Hello everyone,

I have to add another post with this very same problem. At launch, my frames were really great. Even with lots of people in the area. My average frames were 30-40s. The very least were 24 frames, and they never stayed that low; my frames would jump up after a few moments. Also, my load times between zones would at most be 20seconds; the average was 15seconds.

I’ve noticed after every patch not only do my frame rates suffer, but my load times are incredibly long. I rarely see anything over 32 FPS, and the average is mid to low 20’s. My load times are 30seconds – 1min+!

I’m making this post, because the game is becoming unplayable. I log in, and I’m getting 8 – 12 fps. Load times are well over 45seconds. I’m also aware of many others having this exact same issue. Several people in map chat have stated 3-5fps.

Here are the details:

Most Recent Event:
Log-in time: 24 Sept 2012, 1:50AM PDT
Locations: Lion’s Arch, Black Citadel (I couldn’t test any other cities, because the load times were just too ridiculous. However, my FPS in Caledon forest were low to mid 20s. I’m assuming this issue is mainly in the major Cities. The population in both locations I tested were minimal.)
FPS: 8-15 frames
Load Time: 1min+

Computer Specs:
Intel Quad Core 2.66 (all drivers are up to date)
ATI 5850 1gig
System: 4gig

In Game Settings:
Everything Medium except shaders (low), Reflections (sky and terrain only)

Other games to compare:
I have top Frames (mid 40’s to 60) in the following games:
Skyrim
FFXIV
GW1
Batman Arkham Asylum
Diablo III
WoW
LotRO
SWtOR (and many many many more lol)

I would really like to see someone post on this issue. Thank you

Synyst.2163:

The overwhelming level of anecdotal evidence, pointless suggestions, and amateur quick-fixes in this thread makes me weep for the future of humanity.

Are you implying that you have a “professional” fix for people with issues?

So ,, about 1000 post and no real solution from Anet? or anyone? frustrating..

Having the exact same problem here too. I’ve just started a Human Thief and as soon as I enter these caverns my FPS drops from it’s usual 40-50 down to single digits. Then if I walk out again it goes back to normal. Strange thing is, I’ve played through this area before without a single problem. So it must’ve been something in the last patch that caused this.

Yes, they have fixed them in pre-last update, then the latest patch reintroduced the issue.

There are several other places like those caverns – but not as bad, Metrica Province to name the one is a bit less fps friendly than Qeensdale.

What helped me with my r7850 card and fx-8150 compo was turn AA to override mode and 8xEQ + Edge Detect with 24xEQ samples. And MSAA changed to Adaptive Multi Sample AA. Smoother gameplay even it may sound crazy to turn every eye candy to it’s maximum. Maybe it break something and I get better FPS or it fixes something. I don’t know. But atleast worth to try.

Well, the problem isn’t with the game/video/driver settings….at all.

If you read a lot of what’s going on here, the CPU and GPU are simply not being utilized properly. It’s a game bug. I don’t ever get over 60% GPU or CPU utilization. The highest I’ve seen it was a simultaneous 60% on both CPU and GPU on my rig. That means 40% of the power of the CPU and/or GPU are being wasted. If at least one of them was maxed out it would be obvious that it would be the bottleneck, but neither one is maxed…ever.

Back around post 500, i have a screenshot in Lions Arch with all settings maxed, getting 22FPS. I then took another screenshot with all settings at absolute lowest, and I only went up to 40FPS. That’s definitely a problem. Even if 22FPS was legit at max (which it’s not), the min settings should have boosted me to over 100FPS. My machine (if you scroll up a bit and look) is a pretty good, pretty new rig (only built it two months ago).

@Hickeroar

Yep. But it helped me somehow. My GPU was always 90-99%. I don’t have problem with GPU utilization. CPU is between 20 and 30%. Maybe it’s just that GPU doing more job and it helps me when setting every eye candy maximum.

Well, if your GPU is maxed out, you’re GPU bottlenecked anyway and not a victim of this issue. This problem, as far as everyone can tell, really only applies to people who have issues with their CPU and GPU BOTH being underutilized. It’s usually with systems that should be more than capable of achieving far greater performance than they’re getting.

Hickeroar.9734:

This problem, as far as everyone can tell, really only applies to people who have issues with their CPU and GPU BOTH being underutilized. It’s usually with systems that should be more than capable of achieving far greater performance than they’re getting.

This pretty much seems to be the issue. We are at the mercy of the developers it seems. Throwing more powerful hardware at the issue can help, but is only a bandaid solution.

4ghz i7 machines running SLI should be getting a steady 60+ fps anywhere in the game. There is no excuse for a DX9 game to perform worse than that on a system like that.

Lets hope the devs have a solution, and a speedy deadline for implementing it.