Guild Wars 2

The last few days, my tech team has been trying various configurations to see if they could isolate the bottleneck or track down the wide range of performance they were seeing on our test systems, and it appears users in the forums are as well.

Here are some things noted by my techs, that don’t make sense, except that there may be some major problems with both CPU and GPU threading.

•System 1
Intel Core i7-3770K (More than enough CPU)
ATI 6970 1Gb
16gb RAM
SSD
Win7 x64
Avg 26fps @ 1680×1050

•System 2
Intel Pentium 4 3.4ghz (Not even close to enough CPU)
NVidia 7950 512mb
4gb RAM
SSD
Win7 x64

Avg 29fps @ 1920×1200

Now why does this not make any sense? It is impressive that a computer from 2006 can hit nearly 30fps, but virtually the fastest computer you can build today does not seem to be using it resources wisely.

Before some goof jumps in with, “your System is Messed,” up we have a test center, and configured 8 different systems and tested several MB/RAM/CPU/GPU configurations and various OS/driver configurations.

Here are things we tried, that don’t make sense…

On System1, we put in a NVidia GTS 250 768mb, latest drivers, on clean OS install. W were trying to pin down NVidia/ATI over several generations. Overall, both ATI and NVidia sucked the same.

However, one interesting thing about the game, Hitting AutoDetect in Game shoves everything to Medium, and Native Resolution with the 3x slower NVidia GTS 250; however, with 6970, 6850, 5850 ATI Video Cards AutoDetect puts everything at Low, and even enables subsampling.

(**When Affinity was limited to 2 CPU Cores, the game would then Auto Detect the 3X faster GPU at Medium settings. Changing the affinity back to 4 cores, and Auto Detect would set everything to low again, but at medium on the slower GPU.)

That should not be happening.

On the i7, i5, and AMD CPUs that have 4 cores, the game would have a small amount of threads, yet consistently peg at 1/4 of each actual core. Leaving the game at about a 75% avg CPU usage.

Which does not make sense, because if the game if starving for CPU, as it appears to be doing, it is not maximizing the use of any core.

Expanding on this theory, if when we shoved affinity to 1 CPU Core, it would Hit 100%, on that core, and when we shoved affinity to 2 CPU Cores, both cores would hit near 90-100%; however, when we enabled 3 CPU Cores, each Core’s usage dropped to around 50%, and if we enabled 4 CPU Cores, usage would drop to 25% per core, and the game would still be starving for CPU.

There is no reason that expanding out affinity to all cores would ‘decrease’ performance and CPU load. (Yes there are some CPUs that drop with Heat, but this was not what we were seeing.)

If the system is starving for CPU usage, and threading out to 4 cores, as the GW2 client was doing, it should be consuming as much on each core as possible, shoving them all to 100% if needed.

After 2 cores, enabling 3 and 4 cores no longer increased FPS in the game, even though the game was using a portion of all 4 cores; however, not only a percentage of each core.

I am wondering if the new scheduling code that was added that Tom’s Hardware reported is maybe where this problem could be?

It is almost like it is threading too much and not ‘managing’ the threads well, which again would be wiser to shove to the NT kernel than to manage in the game internally.

There is no reason the Pentium 4 system should run ok, and a fast i7 with a much faster GPU and more resources should be so bad.

There is also no reason that the game performance with only 2 Cores set to the game would be ‘equal’ in FPS to using 3 and 4 Cores on the same system.

I see a lot of people being dismissive of players that are not happy with performance, telling them to get a newer CPU or newer GPU, etc… However, there is an issue with the game’s performance that does not match the performance specifications of the hardware.

So maybe be a bit kinder to your fellow players, as non-informative and dismissive statements are not helping find the solution, and it is also discouraging the developers from taking the performance issues seriously.

So take this information with a grain of salt or use it to figure out what is up with the performance of the game.

Good luck and hope that a developer is also listening/reading.

That’s a really great test case.

There’s definitely some bottlenecking somewhere, I hope ANet will figure it out eventually. There’s potential for the engine to run well even on really old rigs like this P4 one, it’s just that there’s a crippling bug somewhere…

I find what’s interesting is that adjusting graphics settings from Min to Max rarely changes performance all that much. That’s a definite sign of bottleneck, when it occurs on different systems. (I get the same 20 FPS regardless of whether everything is on minimum or maxed out, for instance.)

Send this to tech support. It’d be really helpful to them!

Good info. Consider this a bump. Someone needs to take notice and at least say..

“Hey.. Thanks for the info..”

Nice info. Bump.

With your lack of knowledge on how Games use mutli-threading I’m willing to bet you and your “tech teams” are the goofs and the source of your problems.

Games do not utilise mutli-threading as per intended – they cheat. They load the main module on one cpu, the sound module on another and so on. Restricting the availability of CPU’s forces them onto the ones remaining and consequently increases their utilisation. This is completely different to say a video rendering process that will fully load all cores.

Wouldn’t surprise me if you were fraps’ing your tests with it set to record at 29fps or something similarly stupid given your mutli-threading claims.

GPU threading LOL.

Its a brave man that throws out the goof challenge on the interweb – there are always people smarter than you (and me) out there.

Easypeasy.1246:

With your lack of knowledge on how Games use mutli-threading I’m willing to bet you and your “tech teams” are the goofs and the source of your problems.

Games do not utilise mutli-threading as per intended – they cheat. They load the main module on one cpu, the sound module on another and so on. Restricting the availability of CPU’s forces them onto the ones remaining and consequently increases their utilisation. This is completely different to say a video rendering process that will fully load all cores.

Wouldn’t surprise me if you were fraps’ing your tests with it set to record at 29fps or something similarly stupid given your mutli-threading claims.

GPU threading LOL.

Its a brave man that throws out the goof challenge on the interweb – there are always people smarter than you (and me) out there.

That still does not explain anomalies like this…

From the original poster.

“•System 1
Intel Core i7-3770K (More than enough CPU)
ATI 6970 1Gb
16gb RAM
SSD
Win7 x64
Avg 26fps @ 1680×1050
•System 2
Intel Pentium 4 3.4ghz (Not even close to enough CPU)
NVidia 7950 512mb
4gb RAM
SSD
Win7 x64
Avg 29fps @ 1920×1200”

Discounting that there was some flunk here.. There are countless other threads on this board with others users having the same problems. There is even a thread with Anet itself asking for Dxdiags and configs. Countless top of the line system are in that thread. Systems that should have zero issue at nearly all times.

My i7 at home plays the game significantly better than my Core2duo here at work. Which this thread and tests would seem to attest shouldn’t be the case. Pretty sure there’s a flaw in the testing methodology somewhere.

Tradewind.6913:

My i7 at home plays the game significantly better than my Core2duo here at work. Which this thread and tests would seem to attest shouldn’t be the case. Pretty sure there’s a flaw in the testing methodology somewhere.

Please see this thread and keep an open mind.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Low-FPS-or-FPS-drops/page/4#post9497

Jnaathra.6549:

Discounting that there was some flunk here.. There are countless other threads on this board with others users having the same problems. There is even a thread with Anet itself asking for Dxdiags and configs. Countless top of the line system are in that thread. Systems that should have zero issue at nearly all times.

Almost all the FPS issues I’ve read are a user issue. They all appear to be GPU memory bandwidth limited (“My GPU isn’t working flat out” is what gives it away) .

I haven’t seen countless top of the line systems in those threads mostly I’ve seen people with mobile GPU’s or cheap desktop GPU’s with a narrow memory bus width e.g. 64b, 128b etc resulting in low bandwidth capabilities in the order of 80-100 GB/s and wondering why they don’t get the performance of cards with 384b etc with 192 GB/s.

I have no doubt there are some quirks however in the vast majority of cases people have their aspirations ahead of their machine’s capabilities.

Jnaathra.6549:

Tradewind.6913:

My i7 at home plays the game significantly better than my Core2duo here at work. Which this thread and tests would seem to attest shouldn’t be the case. Pretty sure there’s a flaw in the testing methodology somewhere.

Please see this thread and keep an open mind.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Low-FPS-or-FPS-drops/page/4#post9497

I can peg most of those as being underpowered systems or unrealistic user expectations. A Q6600 getting only 10-15fps in WvW? Working as expected.

I appreciate that you both cherry picked a few bad examples out of multiple page thread.

I will toss my system out there and see what you think.

Motherboard: Rampage II Extreme
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1366/Rampage_II_Extreme/
Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231356
CPU: Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz (Overclocked to 3.4ghz)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
GPU: ZOTAC AMP! ZT-50702-10M GeForce GTX 560
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500210

(Yes I am aware of all the little tweaks and all the beta drivers out there)

Large events and WvW are between 15-20 fps “most” of the time. This to me is unacceptable. Settings have very little impact on the FPS during said events. I can go all low or all high and it is single digit difference.

I know that not everything can be pegged on the game, but when Anet is on here admitting that there are issues and asking us for extra information to help track things down… People need to stay open minded and back off a bit.

Edit – Also I would like to tack on a link to system requirments for this game.

http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=684&game=Guild%20Wars%202

Easypeasy.1246:

Jnaathra.6549:

Discounting that there was some flunk here.. There are countless other threads on this board with others users having the same problems. There is even a thread with Anet itself asking for Dxdiags and configs. Countless top of the line system are in that thread. Systems that should have zero issue at nearly all times.

Almost all the FPS issues I’ve read are a user issue. They all appear to be GPU memory bandwidth limited (“My GPU isn’t working flat out” is what gives it away) .

I haven’t seen countless top of the line systems in those threads mostly I’ve seen people with mobile GPU’s or cheap desktop GPU’s with a narrow memory bus width e.g. 64b, 128b etc resulting in low bandwidth capabilities in the order of 80-100 GB/s and wondering why they don’t get the performance of cards with 384b etc with 192 GB/s.

I have no doubt there are some quirks however in the vast majority of cases people have their aspirations ahead of their machine’s capabilities.

Right now I’m running an i7-2600k on a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3.
I have 16gb of DDR3-1600 Ram and a Geforce GTX690.
The game itself is running on a raid0, while windows is running on a ssd.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out ANY bottleneck my system is supposed to have running GW2, yet I run into framedrops far more regularly than I should.

I’m running a fresh installation of windows 7 as I just recently reinstalled, thinking that it might be my OS.

I do have the latest beta drivers.

The reason changing settings makes no difference is because your card is bandwidth limited even at lowest details. GTX 560 Memory Bandwidth: 128.2GB/sec

One way to really test it is to not only lower your settings to the minimum but lower the screen resolution to the lowest possible and make sure anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering etc is off – I know it will look like crap but its a test. If your fps goes up more with the lowest screen resolution then it verifies you are bandwidth limited.

GW2 WvW is pretty unique really – a spectacular looking game, effects and many people all in one spot in a HUGE outdoor setting. A strain for sure – a solution may be to lower the minimum rendering distance setting further.

Farami.2519:

Right now I’m running an i7-2600k on a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3.
I have 16gb of DDR3-1600 Ram and a Geforce GTX690.
The game itself is running on a raid0, while windows is running on a ssd.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out ANY bottleneck my system is supposed to have running GW2, yet I run into framedrops far more regularly than I should.

I’m running a fresh installation of windows 7 as I just recently reinstalled, thinking that it might be my OS.

I do have the latest beta drivers.

My system is i7-2700k @4.8GHz, 16GB Ram, 2xGTX580 SLI, 2xSSD Raid 0

I’m playing on max settings including ultra shadows and I experience drops in frame rate under certain conditions. Often I’m at the ceiling of my monitor (120 fps aka 120Hz vsync) in PVE world but I do get drops.

The GTX690 has the same bandwidth as the GTX580 (the 6 series was more about power usage reduction than processing power) at 192 GB/s and as we both have SLI that’s 384 GB/s – still not enough at 1920×1080 ultra settings it seems.

Seems varied, my GTX 690 chews up the game pretty handily at 5760×1080, at 1920 I don’t even see a stutter unless I’m in a major city overflow server and I expect that but even then it’s minimal.

Only issues I have is with surround and the UI

i7-2600k, 8gb mushkin blackline ddr3-1600, evga p67 ftw, asus gtx 690, ocz vertex 3 120gb ssd

also not entirely sold on the whole 580/690 thing :P the GK104 chip has 3x the cuda cores per chip (6x total), faster core speed, faster memory, 28nm process and the 192GB/s is per core etc. Plus all of the microstutter reduction shenanigans. Even in benchmarks, like Metro 2033 the 690 chews up a 580 SLI setup

Jnaathra.6549:

I appreciate that you both cherry picked a few bad examples out of multiple page thread.

I will toss my system out there and see what you think.

Motherboard: Rampage II Extreme
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1366/Rampage_II_Extreme/
Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231356
CPU: Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz (Overclocked to 3.4ghz)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
GPU: ZOTAC AMP! ZT-50702-10M GeForce GTX 560
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500210

(Yes I am aware of all the little tweaks and all the beta drivers out there)

Large events and WvW are between 15-20 fps “most” of the time. This to me is unacceptable. Settings have very little impact on the FPS during said events. I can go all low or all high and it is single digit difference.

I know that not everything can be pegged on the game, but when Anet is on here admitting that there are issues and asking us for extra information to help track things down… People need to stay open minded and back off a bit.

Edit – Also I would like to tack on a link to system requirments for this game.

http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=684&game=Guild%20Wars%202

Just a question have you tried dropping the CPU back to stock speed? I remember in the beta weekends they were having problems with overclocked video cards and I think maybe overclocked cpus too.

Keep in mind I’m only suggesting it as a test to see what happens

Easypeasy.1246:

Almost all the FPS issues I’ve read are a user issue. They all appear to be GPU memory bandwidth limited (“My GPU isn’t working flat out” is what gives it away) .

I haven’t seen countless top of the line systems in those threads mostly I’ve seen people with mobile GPU’s or cheap desktop GPU’s

That is just simply untrue.

If you are such an expert you should have figured out by now, that pretty much EVERY SINGLE MMO on the market has the exact same issues (massive framerate drops in crowded areas).

It’s client -> server -> client communication that is the bottleneck, not our rigs.

Drintar.1246:

Just a question have you tried dropping the CPU back to stock speed? I remember in the beta weekends they were having problems with overclocked video cards and I think maybe overclocked cpus too.

Keep in mind I’m only suggesting it as a test to see what happens

Yeah, no change I’m afraid.

Because ANet are still collecting information from people running into issues with low FPS, that they have acknowledged the issue, because we know most people running into such issues are well above recommended system specs, we can easily assume the issue is real and not subject to “Just go get a better computer.”

Telling people to upgrade is simply unhelpful. The game should run like knife through butter for what it is.

I’ve been getting expected performance from my hardware, but I’ve been surprised to see people with more powerful systems get half or even less in the way of fps.

I have an i5-3450 with an HD 6870 and I get a steady 60fps on maxed settings (minus reflections – just terrain and sky there), I haven’t yet been in a fight that’s really dropped it, it’s never gotten visibly choppy.

Yet I’ve seen people whose systems out-power mine in every way that are getting only 30fps or lower no matter what they try.

I would wonder if it’s overclocking / not letting the game dictate settings, but it seems people have tried that without it helping.

CptBadger.5918:

That is just simply untrue.

If you are such an expert you should have figured out by now, that pretty much EVERY SINGLE MMO on the market has the exact same issues (massive framerate drops in crowded areas).

It’s client -> server -> client communication that is the bottleneck, not our rigs.

That is just simply untrue.

If you are such an expert you should of figured out by now that approaching an area with a massive population places a significant load on your CPU / GPU to render the 100’s of new models.

You can sit stationary in Stormwind (or any mmo) for example with 100’s of other people stationary and suffer reduced frame rates. It has nothing to do with latency beyond a minimum and everything (more CPU in that case) to do with your rig.

I am no expert btw thanks though.

Easypeasy.1246:

With your lack of knowledge on how Games use mutli-threading I’m willing to bet you and your “tech teams” are the goofs and the source of your problems.

Games do not utilise mutli-threading as per intended – they cheat. They load the main module on one cpu, the sound module on another and so on. Restricting the availability of CPU’s forces them onto the ones remaining and consequently increases their utilisation. This is completely different to say a video rendering process that will fully load all cores.

Wouldn’t surprise me if you were fraps’ing your tests with it set to record at 29fps or something similarly stupid given your mutli-threading claims.

GPU threading LOL.

Its a brave man that throws out the goof challenge on the interweb – there are always people smarter than you (and me) out there.

Really? Wow…

GPU Threading? Is this a new concept to you? Have you never worked with user mode shaders?

Go ask a developer about shaders, or threads per pixel, and see if they think you are funny when you tell them GPU threading is a LOL.

In addition to internal shader threading on the GPU, there is a higher level scheduling that occurs in the game, and more recently at the OS level.

Have you never read ANYTHING about the WDM/WDDM technologies in Windows Vista/7/8? Windows has GPU level threading/scheduling, that was previously up to applications to provide yielding, like OpenGL does on Linux. Now, threading and scheduling can be granularly handled by the OS or the application, but Windows gets the final say in ‘threading’ and ‘scheduling’ of GPU operations, with an increasing level of preemption since WDM 1.0 and Vista.

(This is one reason Windows is and continues to kick Linux and OSX in graphics and gaming, as the OS is handling the GPU, and a Game or GPGPU operation is not going to cause the UI or another GPU dependent application to stutter for fail.)

Go look up WDM/WDDM, or start reading here, little one.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg487344.aspx

PS
Hit up the SWTOR forums, notice the name that posted the GPU VRAM issue and how to trick the client so it would listen to the OS when it sets up VRAM.

The HeroEngine client (used by SWTOR) checks for Vista/7/8 and then ignores the OS reported VRAM and the VRAM supplied by the OS through the GPU virtualization technologies. This is why turning on ‘XP Compatibility Mode’ increases the performance of SWTOR, as the game is not ‘disregarding’ the OS reported VRAM level and goes ahead and attempts to use all VRAM (virtual and physical) supplied to the game.

I don’t care WHO you think I am, but there is a threading issue with GW2, and if you don’t give a flip, go away and troll the WoW forums.

Ok?

Easypeasy.1246:

Jnaathra.6549:

Discounting that there was some flunk here.. There are countless other threads on this board with others users having the same problems. There is even a thread with Anet itself asking for Dxdiags and configs. Countless top of the line system are in that thread. Systems that should have zero issue at nearly all times.

Almost all the FPS issues I’ve read are a user issue. They all appear to be GPU memory bandwidth limited (“My GPU isn’t working flat out” is what gives it away) .

I haven’t seen countless top of the line systems in those threads mostly I’ve seen people with mobile GPU’s or cheap desktop GPU’s with a narrow memory bus width e.g. 64b, 128b etc resulting in low bandwidth capabilities in the order of 80-100 GB/s and wondering why they don’t get the performance of cards with 384b etc with 192 GB/s.

I have no doubt there are some quirks however in the vast majority of cases people have their aspirations ahead of their machine’s capabilities.

Wow, trying to be technical, and you don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
GPU memory bus width? Really? 64bit,128bit? Really again?

I haven’t see even a ‘credible’ sub-128bit VRAM bus in about 10 years, and you are talking about people playing this game with a video card with 64bit memory bus?

GDDR5/4 is 256-bit, and the ‘old’ stuff is GDDR3/GDDR-2 which is 128bit and has been ‘common’ since 2003.

Are you maybe talking about the Geforce 7xxx Series, where some of the low end cards used 64bit internal blocks, but still had a 128bit memory bus? That is about as old as I can think that would even remotely have anything to do with what you are talking about.
(And I don’t think many are trying to play the game with a PS3 class GPU.)

The grownups are talking, go play outside, or troll another forum, please.

Yes finally someone who knows what s going on and isnt spouting the “oh your computer is bad, time to upgrade” nonsense.

The game engine has horrible issues. I m not sure what exactly they are but this should not be happening:

Q6600 @3GHz
560Ti
6GB RAM
SSD
Win7 x64

If i turn off reflections and shadows the FPS goes to 53 BUT for drawing not even 10k polys (or is it? – occlusion) that is still horrible. Not to mention my PC is not even being used properly.

I m bumping this up because its the best explanation i ve found so far as to why people like me are getting horrid framerates. Devs really need to look at this.

Just an interesting tidbit i noticed in wvwvw (where i mostly have issues with framerate).

I was standing within visual range of a 25vs 25 battle, getting about 12 fps. Note: I wasnt close enough to actually be taking part in the battle.

I was actually trying to sneak around and get a Vista in the center Fortress while the enemy was occupied.

Even inside the keep, my framerate continued to be low, even though I couldnt see the actual battle outside. Climbing on top of the keep, standing at the Vista mark, I could see the battle below, my framerate was STILL low.

Clicked the Vista marker, the screen broken into the typical movie like cut scene. Low and behold, my framerate sky rocketed. I was getting a solid 60 FPS (capped by vsync). AND, the cut scene showed the battle going on as well, and yet, it was running smooth as silk.

As soon as the cut scene was over, I had 1-2 seconds of smooth framerate, and then it dipped back down to around 12-15 fps.

I have no real understanding why the above happened like it did, but I figured its just more info/data for the devs to trouble shoot this.

I think it’s because the Vistas are just what you said, cutscenes. They don’t require much in the way of power from the GPU to play.

Someone on reddit posted an interesting “workaround” for low FPS, maybe it will work for some of you;

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/zvv45/if_youre_struggling_with_fpsperformance_issues/

ZaxanRazor.6235:

I think it’s because the Vistas are just what you said, cutscenes. They don’t require much in the way of power from the GPU to play.

Someone on reddit posted an interesting “workaround” for low FPS, maybe it will work for some of you;

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/zvv45/if_youre_struggling_with_fpsperformance_issues/

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Make a shortcut to GW2.exe on your desktop if there isn’t already one. In the “Target” field in the “Shortcut” tab, add “-dx9single -nomusic -nosound” (without the quotation marks of course) after the quotations of GW2.exe. ;

Wouldn’t that remove sound and music from the game? I don’t think playing the game with no sound is a viable solution.

ZaxanRazor.6235:

I think it’s because the Vistas are just what you said, cutscenes. They don’t require much in the way of power from the GPU to play.

Someone on reddit posted an interesting “workaround” for low FPS, maybe it will work for some of you;

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/zvv45/if_youre_struggling_with_fpsperformance_issues/

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Make a shortcut to GW2.exe on your desktop if there isn’t already one. In the “Target” field in the “Shortcut” tab, add “-dx9single -nomusic -nosound” (without the quotation marks of course) after the quotations of GW2.exe. ;

If cut scenes removed all mobs and players from the scene, id agree with you on this. But they dont. The battle between the 50 players was going on VISIBLE in the cut scene. Meaning the cut scene was still having to render the animation and effects and textures and whoosiewhatsits for the battle still.

The only thing the cut scene removed, was the games need to process my characters interaction with everything else going on around him. This seems more like a client/server/netcode issue almost in a way. But then, Im not the expert on the matter, Im just supplying some info ive gathered so the real experts can fix it.

pretty sad how this game is bad optimized and bring trouble for people with nice rigs.
Devs should prioritize this issues above all things right now.

yangshindo.1527:

pretty sad how this game is bad optimized and bring trouble for people with nice rigs.
Devs should prioritize this issues above all things right now.

It’s not everyone with high end systems – and that’s probably why Anet haven’t been able to fix it for everyone yet.

For someone claiming to be a tech and knowing about programming, OP seems to know nothing about concurrency. Take a look at GW2 in ProcessExplorer. There’s 1 thread there that fits Easypeasy’s ‘main’ module, which uses several times more cycles than any other.

Let’s assume a perfect architecture where there’s 1 level of shared, infinite, and instantly accessible cache available to an infinite number of cores. Let’s also assume that the only thing running is that main thread. Our computer isn’t Zeus either, it can’t read ahead and know what the outcome will or should be (Turing machine). How do we split it to run on more than 1 core? The answer is we can’t.

Assume at one point in the thread, you get the following consecutive statements:
1) y = y + x
2) y = y + z
In a linear sequence, the answer is easy. All we’re doing is adding x and z to y. But if we split this up onto two cores, the second statement will be using an old value of y. What we end up getting will be y+x OR y+z (depending on whether x or z was smaller bitwise), neither of which is the expected result. The only way this works is if those are ran in series, and they’ll only be ran in series if the thread is assigned to a single core at any given point in time.

Don’t get this confused with Intel/AMD’s own internal scheduler. It will move the thread from core to core hundreds or thousands of times a second to lessen the load on single core. Less load, less VA, less leakage, less power consumption, less heat.

TL;DR: Four cores doesn’t mean 400% power. It means 4×100%.

yangshindo.1527:

pretty sad how this game is bad optimized and bring trouble for people with nice rigs.
Devs should prioritize this issues above all things right now.

Well they said as much during the first BWE. There priority was getting it to run well on low end hardware since that’s where the money is. But now they need to make sure it’s running well for the enthusiast.

I still find it annoying that because a handful (in terms of game population) of people with high end rigs (a large amount of those, by the way, have had their issues resolved by simple maintenance) are struggling with performance that some people can equate that to;

“this game plays poorly on any high end rig”.

It doesn’t, it’s a select few who are having issues.

You should calm down. We understand you are trying to help but when you get mad like that and start spouting off nonsense you lose all credibility.

“DDR4/5 is 256-bit”

1. My 570M is DDR5 with 192-bit memory bus.
2. Video card makers are free to pick and choose memory and bus and this is one of the first things they skimp on to make cards cheaper.
3. Via Newegg search 128-bit bus has the largest amount of cards and some of them are even DDR5.

So before you flip on someone get your facts straight.

P.S. Newegg shows over 184 video cards with 64-bit memory bus.

MartinSPT.6974:

Easypeasy.1246:

Jnaathra.6549:

Discounting that there was some flunk here.. There are countless other threads on this board with others users having the same problems. There is even a thread with Anet itself asking for Dxdiags and configs. Countless top of the line system are in that thread. Systems that should have zero issue at nearly all times.

Almost all the FPS issues I’ve read are a user issue. They all appear to be GPU memory bandwidth limited (“My GPU isn’t working flat out” is what gives it away) .

I haven’t seen countless top of the line systems in those threads mostly I’ve seen people with mobile GPU’s or cheap desktop GPU’s with a narrow memory bus width e.g. 64b, 128b etc resulting in low bandwidth capabilities in the order of 80-100 GB/s and wondering why they don’t get the performance of cards with 384b etc with 192 GB/s.

I have no doubt there are some quirks however in the vast majority of cases people have their aspirations ahead of their machine’s capabilities.

Wow, trying to be technical, and you don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
GPU memory bus width? Really? 64bit,128bit? Really again?

I haven’t see even a ‘credible’ sub-128bit VRAM bus in about 10 years, and you are talking about people playing this game with a video card with 64bit memory bus?

GDDR5/4 is 256-bit, and the ‘old’ stuff is GDDR3/GDDR-2 which is 128bit and has been ‘common’ since 2003.

Are you maybe talking about the Geforce 7xxx Series, where some of the low end cards used 64bit internal blocks, but still had a 128bit memory bus? That is about as old as I can think that would even remotely have anything to do with what you are talking about.
(And I don’t think many are trying to play the game with a PS3 class GPU.)

The grownups are talking, go play outside, or troll another forum, please.

Those selected “few” who have problems, are in their absolute right to post about any technical issue they might have, within this subforum, dont you agree? Be happy you dont experience these problems. You initially (some days ago) made some useful suggestions on how to solve these issues, some of which were quite good and well thought through, but as time goes and more and more users are having problems (4 pages, not mentioning most posts have been removed or merged)
Imagine the frustration any average gamer (and the average gamer DOESNT have much knowledge about hardware and software) with a gaming rig that is advertized as being well above the needed requirements to handle the game have, when experiencing not being able to play the game. You cant expect the average Joe to idle with BIOS setup, cpu meddling and whatnot (and I dont know the terms because I am a noob too). According to anyone entering this subforum at the moment, it seems like the game is running poor, as thats what all threads, bare 1 or 2 are about, cant we agree about that? Then, most users never even visit the boards, ever. How many of these experience issues? If the forums represent the average gamers, quite a few.

edit due to raging issues (sorry)

Fantastic review and analysis.

Er yea, I haven’t said anywhere that people shouldn’t post their technical problems on a technical problems forum. Once again you have managed to infer a completely random argument out of my posts that bare no relation to what I actually say. And you wonder why I get annoyed?

Have a read again, and you will see I am annoyed at the attitude. “I have this problem, so everyone else must have it and the game is interminably broken and riddled with bugs.”

And how are your comments about how annoyed you are towards those posting about their issues going to solve any hardware or software problems? I like you better when you try to give answers thank you

And that is what I am doing in countless other threads. You’re welcome.

I know, and to be honest, some of your suggestions are really good :-)