Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for a little help with fps and game performance. This past weekend, I finally talked my wife into trying some wvw. Now she has never had any problems running the game, fps dips here and there in expected places – no real problems.

Upon joining wvw and getting into that first zerg, her fps dropped dramatically. We shrugged that off as normal, seeing as that would tax any system. Once we broke off from the zerg and started to roam a bit, her performance remained hindered. Again, we shrugged it off as there were still a lot of people around. Shortly after, we logged.

The next day, and ever since then, her performance has remained at a constant 2-5 fps (usually the game is around 30-40 fps) with laggy movement. No matter what graphic settings are used, from best performance on up, there is no change in fps. This literally came out of nowhere, it’s almost as if wvw broke her game.

She’s using an Alienware Mx15, it’s not top of the line anymore, but it’s been just fine. The laptop is relatively warm but within a safe range (60°- 64°). Her system has been dusted, and we have a cooling base. I un-parked her cores, made sure her battery power was set to max, and updated her video drivers. Even with all of that, no change. We also tried other games (portal 2 / Left for Dead 2) just to make sure there wasn’t some sort of catastrophic problem with her system. They all run just fine.

I’m at my wits-end. Has anyone else dealt with this problem? If so, any solutions?
No, we can’t go out and buy a new laptop.

Thanks in advance folks, I appreciate any help.

Would deleting the ‘gw2.dat’ file be a possible solution?
I’m a bit wary to start deleting files. Thoughts, anyone?

No since that is essentially the entire game and would take hours to download again since it’s 16GB.

What you are describing is a FPS drop associated with large numbers of players. Sadly that’s an unintended “feature” of the game engine, it doesn’t do crowds of players well at all. Most solutions center on using different graphic settings in WvW but the reality is the CPU is getting bogged down.

Now since she’s using a laptop the two things I would look at are thermal throttling and power throttling of the CPU. But you sound like you’ve done all that already so I don’t know. Perhaps getting a utility to log CPU temp and frequency and see if any throttling is still occurring. Other than that, I don’t know.

Yeah, I totally understand the problem with fps dips in wvw. It was expected, and we didn’t expect her rig to really excel there in the first place.

It’s just that after that, no matter where we are in the game (from Lion’s arch to zones where we are literally the only two people) her fps stays at 2-5 fps with laggy input. It’s nearly unplayable, and certainly not enjoyable.

Is there any way to manually adjust throttling?

Try uninstalling the video drivers and running a driver sweeper software. Then re-install.

Also, make sure you’re not playing at “maxed” settings. Specifically reflections should never be set to “ALL”. It will render all reflections; even that pesky water under the earth that you can’t see but is there.

I’ll try re-installing drivers when I return home. Again, all other applications and games work just fine. It’s only gw2 that is showing problems.

Also, it doesn’t matter what settings we set her graphics. Whether in ‘best performance’ or ‘max settings,’ the condition is unchanged. It’s almost like the game had an aneurism when she went into wvw and never recovered. I’m about one step away from reinstalling.

Use the -repair option before re-installing.

Not a bad idea