Guild Wars 2

I’ve had this issue for a while now but recently it’s become so bad the game almost becomes unplayable. It doesn’t matter where I am, or what graphics settings I’m using. When I’m standing still my FPS will be around 35 – 40, but as soon as I move the camera around, it’ll drop to below 10. This happens everywhere, regardless of whether I have the graphics set for Best Performance, or for Best Appearence.

My laptop, which has much slower hardware, doesn’t have these slowdowns but keeps a steady 25 FPS. Why is my desktop PC unable to produce a steady FPS?

Some specs:
CPU: AMD A6-3670 APU (quad-core, 2.7 GHz)
RAM: 8 GB DDR3
HDD1: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120 GB
HDD2: OCZ-Agility 3 64 GB
Videocard: AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB
Internet: 500 Mb/s (wired, no wifi)

Using monitoring software (task manager, radeon driver) I can’t find anything that gets stuck at 100% while running the game. I tried both harddisks, there’s no difference between them either.

which SSD are you running GW2 from? the 850EVO’s have firmware issues after so much GB has been written to the SSD. There is a firmware update to resolve this. You can test this by moving GW2 to your OCZ SSD.

That firmware issue was with the 840 EVO (which I have in my laptop) but just to be sure I had already checked for firmware updates for the harddisk after I installed it. I ran the game from both SSD’s, no difference in performance.

If you turn the camera back and forth, does it eventually stop lowering FPS? That would be a loading issue where either the drive isn’t accessing it fast enough or the memory isn’t storing it fast enough.

Are your SSDs plugged into the proper SATA ports? I had an OCZ Agility 3 64 GB and it would slow down, freeze the system or simply disconnect when under heavy load. Through experimentation, I found that it would only work properly when plugged into the first Intel SATA3 port.

Is your GPU in the right slot defined by your motherboard manual?

Use a read/write benchmark tool to determine the speed of the drives. Gw2.dat could just be heavily fragmented, but that’s not really an issue with later versions of Windows, especially SSDs.

Have you looked at the disk activity under the resource monitor? (Task Manager, Performance tab)

Just a question, what cpu did you have in that laptop? This is a very cpu intense game, and your apu is really crap, it barely meets minimum specs necessary to play gw2.

Actually my CPU is fine for this game, I’m usually able to play on high detail just fine (unless there are too many people around, then it slows down).

So I just went and reinstalled Windows and this time I didn’t install the latest driver from Ati and it seems the game’s working fine again. Guess that latest driver doesn’t work well with my Radeon HD 7850 or something… :/ I’m now using the driver Windows got from Windows update, which is probably quite a bit older, but it works fine now.