Guild Wars 2

Hi,

The loading times for map zones are ridiculous. It currently takes around 30 seconds to 4-5 minutes to load, depending on how close the waypoint is – the closer it is the faster it seems to load.

I was advised ingame that the problem either lies with HDD or Ram. However, my desktop is relatively new, so I doubt that that’s the issue. Defragmenting is to no avail either, as I’m always at 0% fragmented on all drives.

Personally, I think it may be to do with the fact that I’m still using the same client from closed stress tests/BWEs. Since then, I haven’t redownloaded the client or changed anything; I don’t know if we were supposed to. The whole GW2 Folder at the moment is at 17.5GB, on disc. Maybe I don’t have the full game content downloaded?

Someone ingame also briefly mentioned “Command Line Arguments”, specifically “-image”. I’m not sure how this works, but it didn’t seem to do the trick.

I’m also having relatively low fps, somewhere in the region of 10-60fps on the lowest possible settings and around 7-40fps on the highest settings. Has the game not been optimised for my setup yet? Or is this kind of framerate the standard for the likes of my PC?

I’d be very grateful if someone could provide some helpful suggestions and advice.

System specs:

ATI Radeon HD 5770 @ 2GB (12.8 Beta / Graphic Driver)
AMD Phenom 9550 Quad-Core (4 CPU’s @ 2.2GHz)
4GB Ram
1680 × 1050 Screen Resolution
Windows 7, x64 bit

Thank you.

Disable System restore for every single drive, that is both bad for performance and can cause problems with viruses and malware.

Also Disable Indexing services for every drive/folder, also turn it off in services (start run services.msc)

Where is the GW2 installed, make sure it’s not on your Windows Drive.

Your CPU will be hurting performance a bit, and it really sounds like you have a problem with your hard drive. Is it nearly full? Has it been defragmented recently (don’t do that if it’s an SSD!), is your computer slow to reach a usable state once you’ve logged on?

Well, I can make some general comments that may or may not shed some light on your situation.

GW2 client: My client is taking up about 15.5GB on the hard drive, so your client is about 2GB larger than it could be. And while it may not be due to fragmentation on your hard drive, it’s almost certainly due to internal fragmentation of the GW2.DAT file. That’s where GW2 stores all the data it has to load. During the beta phases, updates, patches, etc, the data in the file gets overwritten, added to, deleted, etc and that will cause the file to grow and change, just like moving files around on a HDD. The problem is that there isn’t any automatic way to defragment the file internally. If the file is heavilly fragmented (and at 2GB larger than normal, it probably is badly fragmented), it could be part of a slow loading issue. I’m not positive, but you might be able to use the “-copydat” command line switch to create a new DAT file. It might re-create the file in a more optimized state. “-image” only forces the game to download all the latest updates, it does nothing to optimize what you have.

Waypoint Distance: Obviously, the game loads all the data required to display the area you are in. It can also guess at what areas you might go to from where you are and pre-load that information so that you won’t notice the game pause when you cross into that new area. If you take a waypoint that’s still in your current area or an area that’s been pre-loaded, the game doesn’t have to do as much work and can get you back into the game. If you jump to an area that’s partially loaded, the game will have to unload some unnecessary data, load some amount of necessary data, and then put you back into the game. The amount of data that needs to be shuffled in and out will determine how long the loading process takes.

Load times: The biggest issue is going to be data transfer speed. A slow hard drive will significantly slow down the data transfer, but so will RAM speed, the number of channels the RAM has for reading/writing, and how wide the data/memory path is. Some of the newer motherboards and CPU’s have technology that significantly streamlines data transfers to and from memory. So if you have an older motherboard/CPU, you might be somewhat stuck at how fast the game can load the data.

Memory: With “only” 4GB of RAM, you may also be seeing issues because the game is fighting with the operating system and other programs to see who’s data gets to be kept in RAM and who’s data get’s paged out to the hard drive. Depending on your OS configuration/drivers/etc, the OS can use up 1.5GB of RAM. GW2 seems to like to have about 1.3GB of data in memory most of the time but I’ve seen it up to 1.7GB. And this is going to vary depending on what you’re doing, how long you’ve played, etc. So with just OS and GW2 running, you’re already using up 3GB of RAM. If you have other programs running in the background, they’re going to be fighting for what’s left. And you can’t just assume “It’s just my web browser, it doesn’t take up that much.” I’ve noticed that if I let IE sit idle on a web page it loves to slowly eat up available memory. I’ve seen it allocate over 1GB for a single webpage before I reloaded the page and dropped the memory usage back to a reasonable 50MB. So check what you have loaded in memory and make sure that you’re not using up more than the 4GB you have or that will cause you problems. Luckilly, you have a 64-bit OS, so if you want to, you can put in more memory.

FPS: Not sure why it’s so low. The graphics card should be good enough for GW2, but I don’t know much about AMD CPUs. Maybe the game is being more CPU-bound than it should be. That’s hard to say. There might be some good tweaking guides that could help you out. I wouldn’t automatically jump to the “game needs to be optimized” conclusion. The odds are that something else is going on that’s slowing things down. It’s just a matter of figuring out what those things are and fixing them.

sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully some of it is useful.

I am also getting really slow load times and low FPS but only as of today.

I’ve been playing all this week and had only one issue when I first installed because my video drivers weren’t up-to-date. After I installed the new drivers the game ran perfectly at high settings.

As of today, when I logged in, the game run below 20FPS while at on the “Best Performance” settings group.

What happened from yesterday to today?

mathisk.6427:

…

Wow, thanks a lot for your time and advice. I really appreciate it.

And thanks to others for the suggestions too.

I guess I’ll try the “-copydat” command line first, hopefully it will improve a few things.