Guild Wars 2

I have a very high end system and run very demanding games at about 60-120 fps (Starcraft, Planetside2, Wow, Diablo3..etc.) I run every game I play on the highest of settings and get on average about 100fps. But I can’t figure out why I am getting such low fps in this game? I really want to play this game. I followed it for years. But 20fps for me, is just unplayable. I’ve read countless numbers of threads on this and have seen no real answers to this problem. Most people are either pulling the bottleneck card or saying that gw2 is poorly optimized.

Is this something that the game is addressing currently and will patch in later? Or am I missing something here?

I’m running a custom built high end rig, with a fx 8150 processer, gtx690 gpu, solid state drives, custom water cooling, and basically all high end components. I’m seeing 100 fps in a 1000 man battle in planetside 2 so it nearly brings me to tears when I enter the sylvari starter zone after creating a new character and only see about 20fps.

Any answer for this? Any reason? Any Help?

1) WoW,Starcraft, Diablo …not demanding games
2) FX 8150, not high end. (overall)

3) Reason: GW2 takes most of its performance from CPU, specificaly ..single thread performance. All AMD CPU’s do not have the required Single thread performance even when OC’d to keep GW2 from droping below 30fps in Large WvW battles.
For that u need at minimum, a Intel i5 2nd/3rd gen or better at around 4.5ghz OC or better.

Feel free to search this forum for examples of it

Also
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
For the CPU hierachy for single thread performance.

The sylvary starter area (inside the dream) does tend to be very demanding, once u get out of the dream into the proper world map u should see performance increase.

That said ..ur FPS does still seem a bit low. Turn reflection to terrain and sky ..the ‘all’ option is arguably bugged. GW2 also doesnt tend to like SLi very much ..this is unfortunate for u since ur running a 690 and disabling SLI would put u down the the equivalanet of a underclocked 670 ..but should still be enough for High settings all around ..minus supersampling and max reflections.

There are other things we can try to increase ur FPS, but for now try those ingame setitngs, then try disabling SLI.

I understand that Gw2 may not properly use cores and assume that is why the fx 8150 may not be good enough. Although I must admit, i find that a bit odd seeing though the 8150 is the best of the new amd processors.

But what I"m confused about is, every other mmo I play and also games like planetside 2 which are extremely demanding due to the massive player battles, all run at 60fps or more. And, I’m to understand that gw2 demands more from your gaming rig than every other mmo and other pc games of the like? So to run this game properly, I’m required to invest another $1,000+ into my rig to jump from amd to intel, change ram, motherboard…etc. And this is what’s required to effectively play this game? The absolute best of the best gaming rig? The top of the line graphics card on the market(or top 2) and the best amd processor with 32gb or ram, ssd, windows 7, 1200w corsair psu, is not enough to get good fps for guild wars 2 when it does for every other game on the market?

I really appreciate your help solar, and I’m not trying to be an jerk over here…I’m just alittle frustrated is all. What I have should definitely, without a doubt, be enough to run this game at 60fps. Now, should and does are 2 different things apparently. And I suppose following this game for many years only to be severely disappointed with the fact that my $3,000+ rig cannot run the game effectively completely blows my mind. And I’ve never set foot in wvwvw. I can’t get past the fact that i get horrible fps during questing. For me, it ruins the game. If anyone has any other help, please jump in. I do not have the best of the best systems…but it’s kitten good, and much better than most..so i need a better answer than switch to intel.

Wait for Anet to make optimizations to the game then, if they ever do make optimizations. You can go with the FX 8350 if you want the best of AMD.

I understand.. yes ur Rig ‘should’ be good enough ..but CPU wise it isnt (for WvW deffinatly, possible for big PvE events and Lions Arch ‘city’)..

In Caledon Forest at the Astorea waypoint (starting area outside the initial Dream when u 1st make the character, u will be maybe lvl 2 or 3 when u exit that dream part) , i can look around get solid 60 fps.
And tbh i think u should be able to aswell with a FX 8150.

I do think somthing is amiss if ur getting 20 fps in the starter zone ..that still seems low to me.

What is ur GPU and CPU utilisation at the point of low fps ?
Try disabling SLI.
Try 306.97 nvidia drivers.
Set GW2 priority in task manager to High.
Disable or turn down reflections ..and shadows.

Im sure it is already but check make sure ur 690 is running at PCIE x 16.

Both GPU and CPU usage is floating around 40%. I did disable SLI and turned down some options within gw2. I went and made all the recommended Nividia gpu changes per the anet thread. None of that did much. However, I then overclocked my cpu a great deal from 4.2 ghz to 5.4 ghz and that made a world of difference. So to my dismay, I believe your are right. GW2 is not utilizing my 8 cores correctly and pulling primarily off of 1 I suppose although I haven’t done any benchmarks yet, I thinking that’s it. After overclocking, I got around 50-60 fps.

Now of course, I have a new problem of the game crashing every now and then. I researched the crash error message and there are threads that point to the cause being overclocking which makes sense.

If it wasn’t for all of these problems I would have been a die hard gw2 player by now. It’s just a bit frustrating. Overall, I went with Amd because despite being behind intel, I support their business model and tech of multi cores, good power, less $. But it’s unfortunate that the one game that decision bites me in the butt in happens to be the one game i’m most eager to play. Again, frustrated. Thanks Solar for your help here. If you have any other input, bring it on. It’s been most helpful for me and hopefully others. I’m hoping gw2 will patch in some sort of optimization that could fix these issues. Do you think that is part of the problem?

Didn’t see your comment about optimization ilithis. Thanks for chiming in. I need this game to run better. This was supposed to be the game to end my boredom in wow. And everything about gw2 is amazing but something needs to happen here because as I said, I should be able to get better performance here without burning out my cpu.

This game is pretty fresh. All of us in the forums with problems, We are all the pioneers right now. Just gotta hang in there and keep trying. I’m sure in time it’ll all be figured out as we keep failing and fixing. There are some pretty affordable machines that can make this game amazing and a lot of high end rigs are messing up also. I hope we get the low fps thing figured out.

How can we tell if it’s an official arena.net or gw2 staff post/poster?

Mike.

TBH i did assume you had already OC’d ur CPU since u said u had custom water cooling..if i had known it was stock i would have recommended that right of the bat :P But anyway good to hear the OC helped…now though.. this error.

Is it a BSOD ? (Blue screen of death) if so is it a o9c 101 error 124 error ?

If it is a BSOD with ether of those 2 then its related to ur voltages, look up some OC’ing guides for ur CPU and make sure to use programs like Prime95 to test stability and CoreTemp or AIDA64 for monitoring ur temperatures.

I cant help with actual settings for ur specific CPU OC as i have no hands on experience OC’ing that one..so it would be up to u to find suitable guides.

A few other options: Under your Nvidia Control Panel – set AA & AF to app control, Morph AA/AF off, Mipmap to Performance, Vert Sync to On-app control, Triple Buffering On.

Overall as for optimization, Arena is in process from my understanding of tuning a features to help pull more from the GPU than it currently does. As it is now it relies too heavily on 3 single thread codes which direct everything. As a result even a $3000 rig with max everything will perform at 100% in this game. However it is possible to still get 40+ FPS, but it takes work.

My system is a bit weaker, by standards, with a Phenom II x4 945 @ 3.0GHz, 8 GB DDR2 800 OCZ, Sapphire 6870 1GB, and my game is on my non-os WD Caviar 400GB drive. I’ve found turning AA, AF, Morph filtering, Vert Sync all to app control, Triple Buffering on, and Mipmaps to performance, the game is capable of getting very high FPS.

The best thing to do at this point, unfortunately, is to wait for the patches and updates to the game optimization to take effect.

I don’t want to start an argument here but please keep the age old argument about what the human eye can/cannot see out of tech support ..each living person can discern for themselves what they can and cannot see.

@OP, try googling disable core parking.

Frozencapsule.1534:

This game is pretty fresh. All of us in the forums with problems, We are all the pioneers right now. Just gotta hang in there and keep trying. I’m sure in time it’ll all be figured out as we keep failing and fixing. There are some pretty affordable machines that can make this game amazing and a lot of high end rigs are messing up also. I hope we get the low fps thing figured out.

How can we tell if it’s an official arena.net or gw2 staff post/poster?

Anet staff have the red watermark/call-out on their posts.

I’m not sure why you’re getting that fps. When ever I’m on LA I never go below 45 fps. I have FX-8150 oc to 4.2ghz, 16gb ram, and HD 7970. I have my settings all at max (except reflections), I even have supersampling on.

On WvWvW, the lowest I’ve got is at 35 fps and I guess I’m ok with that lol.

Have you tried following everything on this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FPS-and-Performance-based-issues-1?

On medium settings I was getting 10 FPS before installing service pack 2 and now it’s around 35.

-1.83 Hz Quad Core Processor, 8 Gb RAM, 2-Nvidia 9800 S Graphics Cards 1Gb