Guild Wars 2

I recently purchased two R9 290’s, I was very disappointed to find out that these cards have not given me any fps boost over my two 460’s. I’ve run 4 benchmarks in Divinity’s Reach and the results were

5760×1080 – AVG 29FPS Cross Fire enabled
5760×1080 – AVG 31FPS Cross Fire disabled

1920×1080 AVG 43FPS Cross Fire enabled
1920×1080 AVG 42FPS Cross Fire disabled

Why are my AMD cards running at such low FPS in this game? I’ve had huge fps gains in the other games I’ve tested.

This may, or may not, be helpful:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/PC-FPS-and-Performance-based-issues/first#post338300

I have an AMD card and it seemed to work for me.

Good luck.

Those instructions are quite old, and the options that were the same were in the correct place.

When I followed the instructions on this site I realized crossfirex does not appear to be working for Guild Wars 2. I tried three other games and each had the logo in the top right, whereas gw2 did not.

I read several sites suggest that the profile for gw2 wasn’t pointing to the correct .exe in 2012, but with the current AMD drivers it doesn’t appear I can alter profiles like you could back then. I haven’t seen any real recent discussion on this matter either.

You need a better CPU to increase your frames significant. This game is barely any GPU loaded.. but outstanding heavily CPU loaded.

Glad you found the solution! =)

Using an i7 920. I guess if I want to improve my FPS in this game I got to overclock my CPU. For shame.

IIvIIozzie.9250:

Using an i7 920. I guess if I want to improve my FPS in this game I got to overclock my CPU. For shame.

dell 690 its old its gold its got enough power to up your frame rate way past anything you could dream

Don’t get carried away by the whole and usual gpu vs cpu thing. Shaders alone will give you unmeasurable performance issues not ready to be read by the fps counter on a card that badly supports it.

Lets put this in perspective, despite GW2 being graphically appealing, its way more sensitive to CPU strength above a certain “setting”.
GW2 is completely incapable of making use of crossfire and uses Nvidia SLI graphics cards poorly. However you do not NEED the most powerful graphics rig to max Gw2, however you DO need a powerful CPU with a high clock rate and good IPC.

What is your FULL system specs?

AMD drivers are crap.
Despite so ossom power numbers and other Shiny things, drivers which are supposed to allow to use such power simply are crap.

That’s about both, GPU and CPU if it comes to AMD.

Also, SLI isn’t really a way to go. Best option is to experiment with Nvidia Injector to find the most optimal setting.

What’s more, it’s not a rocket science, that MMOs are CPU Power Hungry, not GPU.

Tao.5096:

AMD drivers are crap.
Despite so ossom power numbers and other Shiny things, drivers which are supposed to allow to use such power simply are crap.

That’s about both, GPU and CPU if it comes to AMD.

Also, SLI isn’t really a way to go. Best option is to experiment with Nvidia Injector to find the most optimal setting.

What’s more, it’s not a rocket science, that MMOs are CPU Power Hungry, not GPU.

You clearly have not actually used AMD Graphics cards and drivers for a while and have very little understanding about what allows a CPU to function in Windows, cuz it ain’t drivers, its the chipset / AKA motherboard firmware.

I will gratn that AMD CPUs are currently behind and that in general MMOs, and particularly GW2, does very badly on AMD CPUs, but their graphics cards and associated drivers are perfectly up to snuff.

Okay, phrased it badly, since didn’t pay attention because majority won’t understand it anyway, and phrasing it even like that is fine.

So, let’s say it this way – chipset firmware and driver for chipset are crap if it comes to AMD. I do have AMD CPU which perform very good in Single Player games and so-so in MMOs.

If it comes to AMD Graphic cards – thanks to their failures, unstable drivers and software, repetitive mistakes of old ATI, I’ll stick with Nvidia. And just because AMD has MANTLE and drivers became Open Sourced, won’t change my attitude toward them. Cards are good, can’t deny that, but let’s be frank – poor official software support from AMD kills it, at least for me and others.

DX12 and OpenGL NG are still being drafted, I wonder when we’ll be able to experiment mostly GPU-driven high-scale applications/systems such as MMOs.

Tao.5096:

Okay, phrased it badly, since didn’t pay attention because majority won’t understand it anyway, and phrasing it even like that is fine.

So, let’s say it this way – chipset firmware and driver for chipset are crap if it comes to AMD. I do have AMD CPU which perform very good in Single Player games and so-so in MMOs.

If it comes to AMD Graphic cards – thanks to their failures, unstable drivers and software, repetitive mistakes of old ATI, I’ll stick with Nvidia. And just because AMD has MANTLE and drivers became Open Sourced, won’t change my attitude toward them. Cards are good, can’t deny that, but let’s be frank – poor official software support from AMD kills it, at least for me and others.

Using Dual HD7950s for more than 2 years now, no issues.
So I will ask again, when last did you use an AMD card?

So the only reason you think AMD card drivers are bad is because you have not used them since before the HD 5xxx series. Because since then drivers have worked just great and improving even more each generation.

This escalated quickly.
The thread turned into AMDvsNvidia holywar in 11 posts, lol.

cheshader.5081:

This escalated quickly.
The thread turned into AMDvsNvidia holywar in 11 posts, lol.

LOL not quite, since I am not routing for any 1 company, just refuting incorrect information.

as many already mentioned

the game is more cpu hungry than gpu hungry
if you are using AMD processor, the performance wont be that good, test and proven

Gaile Gray.6029:

I think you may wish to post this in the Technical Support section, so someone with knowledge of this can answer you, whether player or staff member.

Thanks.

Silly question? Why didn’t you move it to the better place?

IIvIIozzie.9250:

Using an i7 920. I guess if I want to improve my FPS in this game I got to overclock my CPU. For shame.

The answer is a resounding YES. I’m using an i7 950 and I have currently running at 4GHz (before summer had it running at 4.2GHz, but the gain difference in terms of FPS, between 4 and 4.2 is almost zero).

An i7 920 can reach 4GHz without problems; but do not forget to use a good cooling.

Lukhas.1962:

IIvIIozzie.9250:

Using an i7 920. I guess if I want to improve my FPS in this game I got to overclock my CPU. For shame.

The answer is a resounding YES. I’m using an i7 950 and I have currently running at 4GHz (before summer had it running at 4.2GHz, but the gain difference in terms of FPS, between 4 and 4.2 is almost zero).

An i7 920 can reach 4GHz without problems; but do not forget to use a good cooling.

Thanks for this. I have an i7 920 with 58XX crossfire & cooling pad. It’s not overclocked (yet) and the only issues I’ve seen so far is in WvW zerg on zerg, or full World Boss maps. Good to know I’m not the only one with an older i7.

EDIT: Crossfire enabled doesn’t make much difference. With a third party monitoring software running you can see only one card is doing the work. Also edited because I’m an idiot and forgot the gpu model of my cards.

Forget Crossfire for GW2, the game does make any use of it.

IIvIIozzie.9250:

Those instructions are quite old, and the options that were the same were in the correct place.

When I followed the instructions on this site I realized crossfirex does not appear to be working for Guild Wars 2. I tried three other games and each had the logo in the top right, whereas gw2 did not.

I read several sites suggest that the profile for gw2 wasn’t pointing to the correct .exe in 2012, but with the current AMD drivers it doesn’t appear I can alter profiles like you could back then. I haven’t seen any real recent discussion on this matter either.

Humm Custom profile are in since 2011. You can make one then it will warn you that there is a existing profile , you can choose to override it. And also CrossfireX only works in fullscreen mode… even if a game support CrossfireX , it will never work in windowed mode. But any duals card setup nividia/AMD or whatever is totally useless in MMOs

cheshader.5081:

Forget Crossfire for GW2, the game does make any use of it.

Thanks for the tip! I was debating my next move on the graphics card front, and this will save me from making that mistake.

crossfire/SLI is a waste of money at this point in time, the tech just isn’t where it needs to be to be worth it. the pitiful performance increase you get from dual cards is not worth the money.

Refund one of your cards, play on just one R9

It’s worth noting that the game’s performance changes update-to-update.

The GPUvsCPU argument is slightly off. Initially I had an i5-750 and a pair of 6870s. Upgrading to an i5-4670k yielded a small increase.

Why? Because i5-750s are still pretty good.

Upgrading from 6870s to a single R9 290 yielded a massive increase.
(These were done seperately)

HOWEVER, my framerate during chapter 6 (I think) of season 2 was amazing. Like 60 at the height of Teq action. A recent update pushed that down to 29.

Same deal on my old hardware when culling was first added. Amazing framerate in zergs, next update after that brought it way down.

Not sure what the engineers are playing with over there, but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Crossfire only works in full screen mode (not windowed mode), so if your looking at GPU-Z while GW2 is in windowed mode, that’s why only one GPU is working.

the i7 920 is not fast enough to drive 290’s to their full potential for this game above the OP’s original GTX460’s. The 920 is 4x’s slower then a current gen i7 with out any OC applied and 6-7 times slower then a 4790K at 4.6Ghz.

That is why you do not see really good frame rates on the 290’s. You’ll have to upgrade your CPU as well for this game. Or turn down CPU bound settings in game to give your 920 more room to breathe.