Guild Wars 2

As the title suggests, I’m getting very low frames in WvWvW ( i know that this requires some hefty CPU power) but my CPU is sitting at around 70%, and my graphics card at around 65%

The two screen shots show the current framerate (12fps) and the speccy screenshot was taken at the same time.

Read my post here

Thanks for the info, guess I’ll be staying away from WvW and large groups of players until I can afford to up-grade.

I think the system requirements should be adjusted to better reflect the games actual requirements, 12 fps just really isn’t playable.

Problem from day 1 was that the only requirements ANet’s given were minimum requirements. Nothing about recommended.

When you do upgrade, stay away from AMD. Intel’s been miles ahead in single-threaded performance since the Core series, and judging by Piledriver APU review, this likely isn’t going to change for a while.

Yeah Intel really is the way to go, if you have the money. I would also need to upgrade the motherboard as it doesn’t support Intel socket types.

What Processor would you recommend to play with a steady 40-50 fps in WvW?

With overclocking, the cheaper option between a 2500k or 3570k. It’ll come down to luck of the draw for how high it can reach. Without, 3570k. Both should work no problem on a Z77 board.

You will want to OC if you have enough money for a top end air cooler ..or mid to high end water cooler.

That said Sandybridge are better at overclocking so i sugest ether a:
2550k: Its100mhz faster than 2500k and doesnt have the inbuilt gpu, this will help when OC’ing, and the 2550k cost the same as a 2500k within £10. Nether has hyper threading.
2600k : This has hyperthreading (4 core 8 threads)
2700k : Same as above just faster base clock.

Anything higher than that and your looking at Sandybridge E (LGA 2011)which leaves you with only 1 real option out of the 3820 3930k and 3960X ,,that being the 3930k ..becouse the 3960X is totaly overpriced ad pritty much identical to the 3930k… and the 3820 isnt really OC’able.

So if your on a budget get the 2550k with a good air cooler and OC it to 4.5ghz.

Your over heating pretty badly with that 955BE, 65c is 149F which is kitten hot, which is part of the cause for your slow downs, the other is your 550Ti, yes there Decent cards but for WvW your need more horse power then what it can put out.

I’m playing GW2 on a 955BE @ 3.9GHz paired with a HD4890 and at 1680×1050 res with mostly high settings minus shadows I average 40-50+ FPS ofc like you I also dip to 15-20 FPS in Heavily crowded area’s an I mean Heavy!, but my CPU and GPU Never hit 60c Yes my 4890 stays under 60c.

An as everyone else is suggesting I’d go Intel on your next upgrade, I’ve been with AMD for 13+years and I’m sad to say that I’m very disapointed in there recent changes to there CPUs, Though there GPUs are great I just hope they don’t take there GPU line down the same path some how. My next major builds deffinitely Intel.

Thanks to Michael in another thread put it perfectly:

Low frame rate ? GPU processing less frames per second ? low GPU usage ? CPU not fast enough ? GPU idle, waiting for CPU
CPU ~45% load means ? core0 90-100% usage and core1,core2,etc.. only 0-10% usage because they are waiting for core0.
Conclusion:
low framerates = core0 is not fast enough so the other CPU cores and the GPU are waiting for the finalization of core0 tasks.

@Alteris, I think that screenshot’s probably showing package temperature and not core, which was always something like 4-5c cooler on my 955BE server box.

65c is pritty cool tbh.

I know my cpu is completly different but i’ve got my one set to max out at 75c ..many people OC the 3930k and have their temps set to max out at 80c or even 85c.

My GPU which is a 560ti frequently hits 70 to 75c playing GW2 .a.gain nothing to owrry about.

CPU danger zones are usauly in the region of 90c where they start throttling and 100c where they, if the havnt throttled allready, throttle or shut down. Those being the danger zones its recommended you dont go any higher than 80 or 85c since anything higher ‘could’ potentialy reduce the lifepsan of the cpu.

EDIT: Nevermind ..i checked up on that CPU and it does seem that 62c is the stock top end temperature. AMD really dont have good temperature thresholds do they :P

It hasn’t given me any problems thus far, stock speeds is 3.2GHz and I’ve clocked it up to 3.8Ghz which has actually helped in GW2 over all (around 5-7 frames in pve, negligible differences in WvW ).

Might have to try re-setting the heat sink and re-applying some thermal paste to bring the core temps down a bit, would rather not clock it down again as even the slightest frame differences make up for a lot with low end hardware.

Are you still using the stock cooler that came with that 955BE ? For reference I’m using a Zalman CNPS10X Performa with 2 120mm fans in a push/pull config, you might want to look into that, there about $50 atm last I knew and totally worth it lols. That 65c should drop to around 45c at load at that OC with this cooler. Just some food for thought!.

I will look into an aftermarket heat sink and fan when I can finally afford to upgrade, I’m a student at the moment so money is tight. Thanks for all the suggestions though guys

Have any of you tried turning off hyperthreading to see if it helped?

I wonder if the game code is smart enough to avoid using that, because it seems to use two threads on one CPU instead of splitting up threads by physical CPU.

Hyperthreading is a gimmick except for fairly light processes.

I don’t really think hardware is the issue anyway: the game ran fine on my system a few weeks ago, and only had issues with performance after some of the patches.

The scheduler is part of Windows, all GW2 can do is the affinity trick but I’ve only seen that help very marginally on Bulldozer (run /AFFINITY 55 or 1A or 05 /B path-to-gw2.exe). No difference on a friends 3770k machine.

@Shannon.9583: Makes no difference. HT on or OFF, FPS exactly the same. Anyone that says otherwise is full of it.