Guild Wars 2

Having the same issue, my FPS hasnt gone down but i have been noticing horrible input lag in both camera movement and icon movement.
I also notice it when moving items around in my inventory, simply holding and dragging an item around shows how bad it is.
Edit: All started after last patch (15OCT)

Same.

The game plays fine at 38-60 FPS everywhere, but then dips down to single digits at random times for a few minutes, and then goes back up. Never had this issue before today.

Also, it’s not an environmental effects issue or anything. I was standing at the armor crafting station making things when it hit me just now. Nothing had changed except my frame rate.

This is how I interpret bottlenecking on my Q6600/GTX660 when my CPU utilization is only barely over half on each core.

GW2 is probably optimized for about 2-3core so a person with a quad core will think that two core should register 100% load and the other two at low 0-1% load.

But in reality, the OS will nicely divided up the work evenly among the four cores making each one show 50% utilized. Sorta like an invisible bottleneck you don’t see but it exist.

Try disabling a core or two, not much will change in terms of fps or gpu utilization, but you will see the active cores reach 100%.

Some games are more optimized for multicore; like Left 4 Dead 2. It used all my four cores. I get 70-85% CPU load, and also 70-90% GPU load. It didn’t bottleneck my GPU much or at all.

But other games are not optimized; like Team Fortress 2. It only really use two cores, so I have about 50-55% CPU load overall (but logically two core is at max load). Because of that my GPU load was only 15-20%. Here bottlenecking exist.

In both games I still got over 100-200fps, do it didnt matter much. GW2 is way more compute intensive to not be optimized to use more cores.

Hopefully GW2 will be more optimized for quad core or higher and maybe nvidia release some optimization as well.

Anyone found a fix to this issue?

I’ve been playing on my Asus G74sx. I’m interested to know if people that are having these sudden issues are also running the game on Asus laptops.

Yup I noticed some unorthodox FPS rates while in WvW last night and in one of the events, it dropped down to 11fps. The Oct 1 and Oct 7 patches lowered my fps while in WvW but remained fine in the rest of the game, but last night it was the worst.

PS- someone mentioned a couple weeks ago that the game performed better when the trading post was offline (down for maint or so), I wonder if that has something to do with it. When I attempted to open the TP las tnight, it took about 45 seconds before it finally came up.

Same here.

It was fine before the Oct 15 update. After, my FPS has dropped to single digits and this is when I’m idle. It’s practically unplayable now.

I hope this gets fixed soon.

Same here.

It was all running fine before the last update. Now, doesn’t matter which config i choose, there’s no way to play with 8-15fps.

Please, Anet, fix it!!

I also noticed a big drop recently. I looked and saw that there was a new driver released on nvidia’s website. I downloaded it and when running the install I did a custom instalation. This gives you the option to do a clean install which I did. After that my frame rate went back up a whole lot! I still dip down into the teens during a huge fight in wvw but my normal running around is again back up in the 60’s.

However I do still think there are some big time leaks in the game. My FPS does seem to jump around a lot when just looking around and moving around. But make sure your drivers are up to date. It did make a difference for me.

Same here for God sake

Ok, so I was able to fix my issue this afternoon. In my case, the power setting on my laptop was changed. I changed it back to High Performance and everything works fine again. I feel like a moron for not figuring this out sooner. However, maybe this will help some of you.

Check the power options on your laptops and make sure none of the settings were changed from your usual gaming setting.

Well I’m probably going to “call it a night” for my GW2 days in the next 24 hours but here’s one last ditch effort to fix my WvW FPS:

Everything off/low as it can go – 10-20 FPS in large WvW fights.

1) Windowed vs. Fullscreen – does this matter?
2) My monitor’s refresh rate is 120hz – does this matter?
3) Anything to disable in nvidia control panel?

System is i7 920 D0 @ 4ghz, GTX 570, 6gb 1600mhz ram

I did attempt to ask if any optimizations would be made to the game in order to give everybody a better experience in GW2 on the reddit AMAA thread today; however the programmers seemed to skirt around any question of relevance straight to questions like “zomg how can I be like you guyz?” Sorry. I tried.

My CPU was already bottlenecking my GTX 660 and only getting 40-50% utilization on avg. Turned things up to Ultra setting and supersampling + ambient occlusion and got utilization to 90-95%. Might as well get more eye candy if my fps can’t go higher because of my CPU =]

@Swordbreaker
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa/c6nwhy1
They seemed to answered questions on optimization, looks promising. At least they are aware and trying to fix it, but whether they can or not is a different story.

My drivers are up-to-date. I’m using an AMD video card and the last update was on August 15. I’m using a desktop so power settings shouldn’t be a problem but I did maximize it long ago and it hasn’t changed.

I even deleted Steam as it was the only program that I had installed around the time this problem started but FPS hasn’t improved.

I can’t play on idle 5-7 FPS.

Geforce GTS 250 – 2796MB
4gb ram
2x AMD Phenom II 550 Processor

So I’m getting 9fps in large fights on high settings. Any idea what would help that? Thank you.

geforce gt 620-1gb
4gb ram
amd a4 3200 2.8.
how can i stable the fps please!

michaeljhuman.3940:

In some areas, I get very high fps. I might get over 180fps in some areas, and the GPU is hitting it’s max OC, and the GPU fan is on full power. Then you move to a different place on the map, and the fps drops, and the GPU starts underclocking as it’s not being fed. Ok, so maybe that’s CPU bottlenecking, but I see where nothing can be done.

Just because your CPU bottlenecks the GPU, does not mean the problem is your CPU.

Bad code can cause that.

That’s the thing all of the people blaming hardware can’t seem to understand.

Its very easy to write code that causes instruction and data stalling or generates much more load than it should by being inefficient.

You are putting words into my mouth. CPU bottlenecking simply means the CPU is the piece of hardware where the limiting is applied. Of course more efficient code runs faster…etc.

michaeljhuman.3940:

You are putting words into my mouth. CPU bottlenecking simply means the CPU is the piece of hardware where the limiting is applied. Of course more efficient code runs faster…etc.

If its poorly written code that runs poorly on even powerful hardware, its not a CPU bottleneck, its a software bottleneck.

For instance, if I put a “wait 30 seconds” command after EVERY request for player assets on purpose, then no matter how fast your hardware is, its still gonna seem very slow. Thats not the CPUs fault, even if my code makes the CPU seem busy the entire time.

I think many people also get confused by the term “optimized code”. This again, is the code that isnt running efficiently, NOT the hardware.

Put sludge into your Ferrari’s gas tank, and the car isnt going to run well at all. Its not the car engine thats at fault, even if it looks like its struggling to even turn over.

Code = gas
CPU = engine

On the flip side, great gas wont make a bad car engine run much better. However, in the case of GW2, if Everyone with an 4ghz i7 SLI system was getting a steady 60 fps or better in all areas of the game, you could say that the code wasnt an issue. This isnt the case however, especially in places like WvW. In GW2, good systems are running poorly in very specific areas of the game. Some of these common places include Lions Arch and WvW. It seems to be related to when the game exceeds a certain number of players in the area at once, which means its most likely tied to the code behind this specific aspect.

Indeed ..theres no doubt that it is the game engine that hass issue under high load .. However …we as players cant do ANYTHING about that ..what we can od however is beaf up our computers to run the game engine that little bit faster.

If you can afford that then great ..if not ..you will have to play the waiting game ..a game engine upgrade may come along and solve our problems ..it may mot ..thats up to Anet.

In the end all we can do is Upgrade our computers to get better performance ..is it the best solution? ..no …is it the only one we have at out disposal? …yes.

SolarNova.1052:

Indeed ..theres no doubt that it is the game engine that hass issue under high load .. However …we as players cant do ANYTHING about that ..what we can od however is beaf up our computers to run the game engine that little bit faster.

If you can afford that then great ..if not ..you will have to play the waiting game ..a game engine upgrade may come along and solve our problems ..it may mot ..thats up to Anet.

In the end all we can do is Upgrade our computers to get better performance ..is it the best solution? ..no …is it the only one we have at out disposal? …yes.

Or more simply this:

If you already take care of your system, keeping things up to date, dusted, clear of spyware, properly cooled, and tweaked like crazy for the purpose of gaming, then dont bash your head in over trying to get GW2 to perform better. For most people, there is no secret fix, there is no hidden setting, or system configuration that will suddenly make things work better if you are already someone who maintains their machine properly for the aspect of pc games. Try to enjoy the game as best as you can as it is, because struggling to fix something that isnt within your power to fix, will just cause you to resent the game as a whole.

Gadzooks.4687:

If its poorly written code that runs poorly on even powerful hardware, its not a CPU bottleneck, its a software bottleneck.

Precisely, you hit the nail.
Even more outrageous is the fact they are being silent about it. As if the problem didn’t exist, or worse, as if the problem only affected a portion of the users. When in fact it affects all the user base.
When asked about Performance issues, in their recent Reddit AMAA they deflected most questions, and only gave a “The client is generally CPU bound, so more + faster cores will contribute to better performance” and “We are actively working on client performance improvements across a wide spectrum of hardware configurations” Perhaps I’m naive but I was expecting more of an apology, or at least an admission that there is an issue with code.

They didn’t have any problem with accepting, celebrating and rejoicing in all the compliments and praise they received for the “stability”, “scalability” and lack of downtime of the game. Why Then not be a little more open about the performance issue. Is it perhaps because any improvement done in this regard will be at best minimal, and not much can be done without a major rewrite of the code base ?

For kitten’s sake…

There’s always one thing on a computing system which is the weakest link. That’s not even debatable.

In the case of this game, it’s the CPU, at least on the client side (obviously the server side is another matter.)

Hence, the bottleneck on the COMPUTER HARDWARE is the CPU. That’s all I meant, and why debate that just to argue semantics…

<sigh>

OBVIOUSLY improving the software’s performance will improve the performance.

We don’t generally talk about software being the bottleneck, as it’s self evident that the software’s own performance is almost always a limiting factor. But I was talking HARDWARE.

When we talk about software bottlenecking, we look at what component in the software is the limiting factor. We don’t talk about the software as a whole.

Ok?

I am not competent to judge whether their software, in general is poorly written. I am not even sure how so many people here feel they are competent, unless they have worked with it, and analyzed it. There’s almost always room for improvement though. Maybe they have exhausted the easy options.

Been following this thread since it began, it annoys me at how bad the game plays, and won’t be playing again until its fixed.

Pawddy.8329:

Been following this thread since it began, it annoys me at how bad the game plays, and won’t be playing again until its fixed.

Same upgraded system still runs like pants in WVWVW, I actually think game ran better before the upgrade which was proir to patch, dont think however much I spend will fix the issue.

MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
Processor
AMD Phenom II X4 965 40 °C
Deneb 45nm Technologie
RAM
8,00 GB Dual-Kanaal DDR3 @ 2833MHz (9-9-9-24)
mainboard
MSI 970A-G45 (MS-7693) (CPU 1) 44 °C
Graphics
BenQ GL2240 (1920×1080@60Hz)
1535MBGeForce GTX 580 (MSI)

max settinges around 30 40 fps when i rotate 360 than it goes to 20
will there be a patch or something ?

I just upgraded my 295 gtx to 690’s in SLI.

I lost performance… I went from a constant 60 fps on medium settings to a constant 30 fps on low settings. WTF is that kitten?

I have the best intel cpu money could buy, so it’s not a bottleneck.

Spent 1000$ in upgrades and lost kittening performance. kitten. I’m getting over 200 fps in BF3 and the witcher but in gw2 I get 30 fps? fix your kitten client, anet.

^^ more money than sense

How people spend their money is their business, IMO. I don’t see the usefulness of saying ‘more money than sense’. His question is legititimate and in line with the thread.

HomeStyle, if you read through the various fps threads, you will see that the GPU is not the limiting factor. So it’s not going to help having that much GPU power.

If you have the “best” processor Intel makes, that means you have 6 cores, and 12 total cores with HT. That also won’t help, as the game can’t utilize more cores. You may be limited by the speed of a small number of threads in the software. Maybe only one thread. And the only way to run that thread faster is with a faster clock.

Even with overclocking my system higher, I saw limited gain.

Home Style …you have a 3960X ?? ..r u mad ?! o.0

Lol ..doubt you have but still..probably better to state what cpu you have rather than say you have the best money can buy..becouse in this case that just silly ..since the 3960X is just not worth it. And if it isnt the 3960X ..it isnt the best money can buy :P

Anyway moving that aside ..your total right about the client ..it really needs improving.

Don’t Question how I spend my money. I’m an it manager at Cigna health care and maintain a pretty hefty income. I also use my 690s for an intense amount of graphic work and my processor for Intense coding, so thank you to all the computer gurus out there saying I wasted my money.

This game is broke.

Home Style you just said it yourself “This game is broke” upgrading to all that hardware and complaining about not having great FPS increases.

I am using Intel i7-3770 GPU
16 gb ram
window 7 64bits
using a grahpic card of GTX 670 Windforce…..

first time i played full max out setting 37 days ago….. FPS 120

3 days later a new patch hits my FPS drop to 50-70

and it keep getting worse and worse from 50-70 to drop to 40….

But the latest patch works fine for me, for now… all i did was update my driver and now i am running on 80-90 fps

[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img821/2997/gw001co.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img534/3634/gw002ui.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img37/7397/gw005un.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img18/1834/gw004sh.jpg[/IMG]

Home Style.9640:

Don’t Question how I spend my money. I’m an it manager at Cigna health care and maintain a pretty hefty income. I also use my 690s for an intense amount of graphic work and my processor for Intense coding, so thank you to all the computer gurus out there saying I wasted my money.

This game is broke.

Nice rig Also for some reasons the 690’s are a little behind the performance of the two 7970’s at this point it seems and running two of them isn’t scaling as it should. This is kind of a mystery to me as the 690’s should outperform two 7970’s in crossfire in most games, but then again, maybe its not an optimization issue, and the 690’s just don’t do as well in this game.

Janhyua.8130:

I am using Intel i7-3770 GPU
using a grahpic card of GTX 670 Windforce…..
…
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img821/2997/gw001co.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img534/3634/gw002ui.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img37/7397/gw005un.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img18/1834/gw004sh.jpg[/IMG]

You compare FPS with 4 screenshots from different places, angle, camera distance, etc?
It’s not too significant.

i will not lie i do feel a grahpic lag some time… like dragging my screen to rotate 180degree….. like draging a person face on the floor to another….

Not sure I would call the game broke. I would say ‘it could use some work’. As mentioned before, I only see a few areas where fps drops below 60 (at 1080p, on close to max settings.)

I have far less GPU power than homestyle, but as many say, the game is not GPU limited with a fast enough CPU. So throwing more GPU power at it does nothing. I would not characterize that as broke.

Having more cores past a certain part also won’t help, because the game does not have that many threads (I think this is a common state of affairs with games.)

That being said, some people have serious fps issues and sufficient hardware. Whether that’s a game bug, or an issue on their end I can’t say – if that was a common problem, I would lean towards calling the game fairly defective. I have no idea on how many people have the serious issues, and where their issue stems from.

Let’s compare some PC-CPU-GPU on same place.
Lion’s Arch – In front of the lion statue / fountain.
(far away camera and watch the middle bottom of the statue)

- 45-55 fps with Best Appearance settings
- 95-110 fps with Best Performance settings
- 18-25 fps in larger WvWvW fights (20+vs20+) so it is less than half of this Lion’s Arch fps

Low or high setting doesn’t matter!
It is unplayable (for me) in WvWvW!
With a fast PC!
Intel i5-2500k @ 4500 + 2*670 GTX !
(in WvWvW dual GPU means around only plus 10-15%! performance increase!)
In every other games my fps is absolutely all right and in PVE I get around 120-200+.
I tested it with new Win 7 + Win 8 OS and I tried every tip what I found here on tech forum, but I saw these results again and again.

I don’t think so that anyone can get 60-70+ fps on that Lion’s Arch statue place.
Which nearly means no one can get 30-35 minimum fps in WvWvW larger fights…

[img]http://i.imgur.com/aKwDy.jpg[/img]

I tried this too. i73770k OCd to 4,6 Ghz. GTX 670×2. 1080p

Horizon level, zoomed all the way out. Tried to stand in same place.

(Note, it takes some time for fps to stabalize into a pattern – I am giving the typical low value of a range)

54 fps on max appearance
70 fps with reflections set to terrain and sky ( I recommend this setting)
100 fps max perf. (wow that looks awful, lol)

They definitely changed something after the minor update. Was previously running 40-50 fps in lions arch looking at the mystic forge. Now I’m in the single digits and can’t play at all.

Shame. I was back from a break after playing xcom but now I can’t play gw2. Is anet aware of this issue?

i dont have a high end rig since things are not that easy in terms of $$, in fact i play it on a laptop with medium/high settings, noticed too that eversince the “minor” update my fps became way more slugguish, at start i though it was my system lacking its usual maintance and there i gone checking everything out but… it wasnt, i allways played the game fine caped at 30 fps with the triple buffering option on etc (besides WvW there i lower everything…) but now its just unstable with hips to 25/20 all of the time even in the pvp arenas. while not looking like much diference it is unplayable and lowering the graphics even more because of it is just bleh since the game gets so ugly :\

michaeljhuman.3940:

Having more cores past a certain part also won’t help, because the game does not have that many threads (I think this is a common state of affairs with games.)

Actually gw2 uses about 50 threads and is using all cores available, but not efficiently. The problem is gw2 rely a lot on a single thread for doing certain task; probably the main game loop.

I used the program ‘ProcessExplorer’ and inspected gw2 thread CPU utilization. Of the 50 threads, one was using 22-24% CPU, the next one was 17% and third was 10%. The remaining 47 thread each used barely 0.25% of the CPU. This is why on my Quad core it only use 55-68% of my CPU total utilization. The big thread using 22-24% is already maxing out one of my core.

As you can see gw2 relies heavily on single thread performance, and only about 2-3 thread is actually doing the bulk of the work. Hence having more than 3+ core give little to no benefits. By overclocking people are improving there single thread performance and it is sad that people have to over lock a core i5/i7 just to get 30fps in WvWvW.

Man, I would just love an ANet response at least. Even if it’s “We have no idea wtf is going on but we’re looking into it.”

The most frustrating thing about this sudden issue is it’s hard to be optimistic when nothing is being said. I had an issue in SWTOR way back when it launched where a sudden patch literally would crash my game when I joined a group. I found out quickly I was among an extreme minority this issue happened to. I quit shortly after, since it made end game impossible. This feels very similar. I almost no FPS in WvW and there’s no logical reason for it.

So, please ANet, at least address this. Issues happen, that’s fine, I can even be patient, but an acknowledgement goes a huge way with your customers.

Arena.net did respond in this post. Of course the response was ‘we are looking into it’. So I think you got your wish already.

kirito.4138:

michaeljhuman.3940:

Having more cores past a certain part also won’t help, because the game does not have that many threads (I think this is a common state of affairs with games.)

Actually gw2 uses about 50 threads and is using all cores available, but not efficiently. The problem is gw2 rely a lot on a single thread for doing certain task; probably the main game loop.

I used the program ‘ProcessExplorer’ and inspected gw2 thread CPU utilization. Of the 50 threads, one was using 22-24% CPU, the next one was 17% and third was 10%. The remaining 47 thread each used barely 0.25% of the CPU. This is why on my Quad core it only use 55-68% of my CPU total utilization. The big thread using 22-24% is already maxing out one of my core.

As you can see gw2 relies heavily on single thread performance, and only about 2-3 thread is actually doing the bulk of the work. Hence having more than 3+ core give little to no benefits. By overclocking people are improving there single thread performance and it is sad that people have to over lock a core i5/i7 just to get 30fps in WvWvW.

Good point. What I should have said, was that it only has a few threads which dictate the game performance.

It’s not unreasonable to assume it’s not easy or nearly impossible, to increase parallelism of the main thread(s).

While I am a software engineer, I admit I know little about making code highly parallel. But I can promise you it’s hard. Even when you mange to improve code by breaking the code into more threads, you almost always run into hard to find problems. Problems that may only repeat one in ten times. Or worse. Or deadlocks. And you may find that the improvement is small. After all, you still have resource contention or dependencies…not easy at all.

-..-’’-..-..-’’-..-..-’’-..-..-’’-..——→ GET OVER HERE

This is clearly a bump. Fps is still bad.

Have you read through the various threads, Home Style? There’s been a lot of things to be tried.

I assume you turned off vsync and/or frame limiters?

Making sure you are getting 8x or 16x PCI (can be checked with GPU Z.) Look at power/performance settings. Use driver sweep, then re-install the drivers.

Try only one 690 (turn off SLI.)

More drastic – pull one of the cards out of the system, then try that. Then put the card back in, pull the other card, then try that. Just in case one of the cards is causing the problem.

michaeljhuman.3940:

Have you read through the various threads,

Have you?

By now it´s a pretty safe bet that it´s either sunspots or planetary alignment that have the most impact on this clients performance.

Though props to you for trying to approach this issue rationally.

Hey ArenaNet, i got some problems ingame with my fps i even got new CPU and graphic card.
intel quad Q9550 @ 2.83GHz
GTS 450 2g
4g RAM
i get around 35 / 40 fps in wvw when i get together with more people ‘’attacking a gate ’’ i get around 20 fps and this is on high, and the most wierd thing is that when i make low graphic i get less fps, gets even wrost i dont understand hope its a temp problem
Hope it gets better
Thank you guys!

My god . !! HawkMeister ..your a genious ! ..You found the problem ..ofcourse i shoulda seen it .. Planetary alignment in relation to sunspot activity.

Ok now we know the source of the problem ..ideas for tweeking said alignment and sunspots :P ? Anet get your genious group of guy, who’s soul job is to think random s*it up, out here and help us ! :P

Note: For those halfwits who cant tell ..im joking around :P