Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if anyone can help, but if they can I’d really appreciate it. My old laptop was a Thinkpad T530. It had a NVS 5400M as a graphics card, 8gb RAM, and an intel i5 processor. Not a great gaming laptop for sure, but it ran GW2 at medium settings, staying at over 30 fps in pretty much any situation. More than good enough for me.

Recently my hard drive died and I purchased a new laptop, a Thinkpad W550s. Everything about it seemed to be better. It has 16gb RAM instead of 8, an intel i7 processor, and a Quadro K620M (which, while I understand is not a gaming card, seemed to be at least better than the one I had before). It also had an SSD.

The problem is GW2 is basically unplayable on my new laptop. With settings at absolute minimum I get 20-30 fps if I’m sitting still in an empty location, and in populated locations, during events, etc. I get 5-10 fps and frequently crash. If I try to change the resolution through the settings I also crash immediately.

I made sure that I’m really running GW2 with my dedicated GPU (and not the integrated graphics), and that my Nvidia drivers are up-to-date, so I’m not sure what’s going on. If anyone knows if there is something I could do to fix this, or if my new laptop is just incompatible with GW2 for some reason, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

As far as I can tell, your resolution has increased from 1600×900 to 2880×1620... a x3 jump in terms of absolute number of pixels, whereas your CPU/GPU combo hasn’t increased in performance enough to make up for it.

IDK why you’d crash when you change resolutions. Try changing your windows resolution to a lower one (like 1080p) to force GW2 to use it. Then manually select that same resolution in your in-game settings so that it will keep that setting when you change your windows resolution back.

Well CPU wise you are still in the same ballpark. Both CPUs are 2 core/4 thread clocked around 2.5GHz with boosts a tad over 3GHz. Due to generation improvements maybe 10% to 20% improvement with the newer CPU, depends on which ones each had/has (there was a choice of two in each). GPU is definitely and improvement but if the CPU performance is throttling then the impact can be minimized.

Check to find out what else may be running in the background on the new system.

I would suggest checking the thermals to see if the CPU and GPU aren’t being clocked down because of heat. GPU-Z can monitor GPU clockspeed and temperature and there’s a lot of utilities that can monitor CPU temps and clock speeds.

onevstheworld.2419:

As far as I can tell, your resolution has increased from 1600×900 to 2880×1620... a x3 jump in terms of absolute number of pixels, whereas your CPU/GPU combo hasn’t increased in performance enough to make up for it.

IDK why you’d crash when you change resolutions. Try changing your windows resolution to a lower one (like 1080p) to force GW2 to use it. Then manually select that same resolution in your in-game settings so that it will keep that setting when you change your windows resolution back.

Thanks for the reply! I should have specified, but my new laptop has a resolution of 1920×1080, as compared to my old one which was 1600×900. I just tried setting my Windows resolution to 1600×900 and running GW2, but while this does change the resolution of GW2 successfully, the lag is really no better unfortunately.

The main issue is that you’re playing in a resolution that gpu is nowhere near capable to manage.

Unless you severely drop the resolution to 900p or 720p you won’t be able to play at decent framerate.

Behellagh.1468:

Well CPU wise you are still in the same ballpark. Both CPUs are 2 core/4 thread clocked around 2.5GHz with boosts a tad over 3GHz. Due to generation improvements maybe 10% to 20% improvement with the newer CPU, depends on which ones each had/has (there was a choice of two in each). GPU is definitely and improvement but if the CPU performance is throttling then the impact can be minimized.

Check to find out what else may be running in the background on the new system.

I would suggest checking the thermals to see if the CPU and GPU aren’t being clocked down because of heat. GPU-Z can monitor GPU clockspeed and temperature and there’s a lot of utilities that can monitor CPU temps and clock speeds.

I’m not sure exactly how to tell if something is being clocked down because of heat, but I tried running hwmonitor when playing the game. For the intel processor (i7 5500U) the clock speed seems to be hovering around 1000MHz, with a temperature of ~50C. All 4 cores seem to be at 80-100% utilization.

For the Nvidia Quadro K620M, the temperature is also ~50C. It doesn’t give me a clock speed, but says utilization is 30-50% only. (GPU-Z gives a Core Clock speed of ~600MHz and a memory clock speed of ~1000MHz).

I’m not totally sure how to interpret these numbers, but the load on the CPU, combined with the fact that the rest of my computer seems to slow down substantially when GW2 is running in windowed mode, suggests that maybe this is a CPU rather than GPU problem? In which case, I suppose, there’s not much to be done. Would that be a reasonable conclusion?

Ansau.7326:

The main issue is that you’re playing in a resolution that gpu is nowhere near capable to manage.

Unless you severely drop the resolution to 900p or 720p you won’t be able to play at decent framerate.

Thanks for the reply! I’m just a little confused because my last laptop had a weaker gpu and managed to play just fine with medium settings on 1600×900. I’m trying that resolution here and, even with the lowest settings possible, it’s lagging very badly.

Try turning windowed mode off… i.e. “normal” fullscreen instead of windowed fullscreen. Windowed fullscreen is more resource intensive.

Also, I’m not sure if Nvidia has G-sync enabled for their laptop GPUs nowadays, but that doesn’t behave well in windowed modes for some games (Despite claiming “compatibility”, it still is a work in progress). Either disable g-sync or windowed fullscreen.

firecy.8651:

Behellagh.1468:

Well CPU wise you are still in the same ballpark. Both CPUs are 2 core/4 thread clocked around 2.5GHz with boosts a tad over 3GHz. Due to generation improvements maybe 10% to 20% improvement with the newer CPU, depends on which ones each had/has (there was a choice of two in each). GPU is definitely and improvement but if the CPU performance is throttling then the impact can be minimized.

Check to find out what else may be running in the background on the new system.

I would suggest checking the thermals to see if the CPU and GPU aren’t being clocked down because of heat. GPU-Z can monitor GPU clockspeed and temperature and there’s a lot of utilities that can monitor CPU temps and clock speeds.

I’m not sure exactly how to tell if something is being clocked down because of heat, but I tried running hwmonitor when playing the game. For the intel processor (i7 5500U) the clock speed seems to be hovering around 1000MHz, with a temperature of ~50C. All 4 cores seem to be at 80-100% utilization.

For the Nvidia Quadro K620M, the temperature is also ~50C. It doesn’t give me a clock speed, but says utilization is 30-50% only. (GPU-Z gives a Core Clock speed of ~600MHz and a memory clock speed of ~1000MHz).

I’m not totally sure how to interpret these numbers, but the load on the CPU, combined with the fact that the rest of my computer seems to slow down substantially when GW2 is running in windowed mode, suggests that maybe this is a CPU rather than GPU problem? In which case, I suppose, there’s not much to be done. Would that be a reasonable conclusion?

Okay, 1 GHz is very low as the 5500U should be running between 2.4 and 3.0 GHz so something isn’t right there, you may have to look at your power profile and switch it to high performance. GPU clock also seems a bit slow.

I found this review – http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-W550s-Workstation-Review.137989.0.html

The review does indicate the laptop overheats and the CPU speed will be reduced.

I use HWiNFO to provide me system and sensor information.

Behellagh.1468:

firecy.8651:

Behellagh.1468:

Well CPU wise you are still in the same ballpark. Both CPUs are 2 core/4 thread clocked around 2.5GHz with boosts a tad over 3GHz. Due to generation improvements maybe 10% to 20% improvement with the newer CPU, depends on which ones each had/has (there was a choice of two in each). GPU is definitely and improvement but if the CPU performance is throttling then the impact can be minimized.

Check to find out what else may be running in the background on the new system.

I would suggest checking the thermals to see if the CPU and GPU aren’t being clocked down because of heat. GPU-Z can monitor GPU clockspeed and temperature and there’s a lot of utilities that can monitor CPU temps and clock speeds.

I’m not sure exactly how to tell if something is being clocked down because of heat, but I tried running hwmonitor when playing the game. For the intel processor (i7 5500U) the clock speed seems to be hovering around 1000MHz, with a temperature of ~50C. All 4 cores seem to be at 80-100% utilization.

For the Nvidia Quadro K620M, the temperature is also ~50C. It doesn’t give me a clock speed, but says utilization is 30-50% only. (GPU-Z gives a Core Clock speed of ~600MHz and a memory clock speed of ~1000MHz).

I’m not totally sure how to interpret these numbers, but the load on the CPU, combined with the fact that the rest of my computer seems to slow down substantially when GW2 is running in windowed mode, suggests that maybe this is a CPU rather than GPU problem? In which case, I suppose, there’s not much to be done. Would that be a reasonable conclusion?

Okay, 1 GHz is very low as the 5500U should be running between 2.4 and 3.0 GHz so something isn’t right there, you may have to look at your power profile and switch it to high performance. GPU clock also seems a bit slow.

I found this review – http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-W550s-Workstation-Review.137989.0.html

The review does indicate the laptop overheats and the CPU speed will be reduced.

I use HWiNFO to provide me system and sensor information.

Oh alright, that must be it. I tried putting power settings on high performance but it didn’t make much of a difference – still ~1GHz for the CPU and a lot of lag. The laptop even feels hot though, so I guess it must just be that this laptop gets too hot for the CPU to be able to handle much gaming. Oh well, thanks anyway for all your help!