Guild Wars 2

Greetings folks,

I was here at launch and for several months following, even when Lions Arch was packed I enjoyed a nice 60+ fps at ALL times.

Specs.

Intel Core i7 950 (3.06ghz Core) OC @ 3.68ghz
6GB Ram on Triple Channel (DDR3 3×2GB DIMM)
eVGA x58 Classified MB
eVGA Geforce GTX 680 (Standard Clocks)
Win7x64

Today I decided to return to the game, from a fresh install of both client and OS w/ latest drivers. I am experiencing 12-24fps (min-max) in Lions Arch, even the overflow where population is much lighter is unacceptable.

What has happened in the year I have been gone to cause such a drastic change in performance? Hardware has not changed, driver updates have occurred but if it was in fact driver related I would certainly not be a cry in the wilderness and rather a voice among the screaming masses.

Any ideas or even speculative responses would not be without value.

verify your PCI-E link speeds are 16×. You can download GPU-Z and CPU-Z to verify these while running GW2 in full screen-windowed mode.

use this tools on a regular basis, and the aforementioned values are proper. Thank you for the suggestion though.

they made player/npc culling a graphics setting under character model limit. Set this to low/lowest to achieve the same performance at launch.

My performance dropped by over 50% since the last patch and it has nothing to do with culling. The engine has seriously deteriorated.