Guild Wars 2

So, today i logged into the game finding myself looking at a framerate of a mere 6FPS. It doesn’t go lower than this, it doesn’t go higher than this unless i change the settings to lowest which cranks it up to an unplayable 20. First thing i did, naturally, was reboot the game. This changed nothing so i decided to reboot my PC. This again did nothing so i decided to resort to the last option which was to re-install the game. After hours of re-installing i find myself looking at the same terrible framerate.

My PC specs are:
CPU: i5-2500k @ Stock clock speeds
GPU: Radeon HD 6950 2GB
RAM: 8GB Dual Channel
MB: Asus P8H67 Rev 3.0
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

If anything else is needed i’ll be happy to provide more info.

Now the best part about all of this is that the game ran fine the day before(Steady 60fps in PvE). It has always run fine and i literally shut the game down, went to bed, woke up and stuff like that, booted my PC and launched the game again. Nothing that i know of has changed and i haven’t a single clue what could be causing this to happen.

What i have noticed though is there, whereas the usual 60-70% CPU usage the game would cause, it is now using merely 10-20% in crowded areas (Sparkfly main). Temperatures are normal (CPU at ~50 °C and the GPU at ~50 °C) and the GPU is not overclocked as i read that might cause performance issues or inconsistencies.

EDIT: While taking the screenshots i noticed it was not just causing FPS loss in the game. While the game is running my entire computer starts slowing down and for example my mouse starts skipping.

EDIT2: And now i even tried re-installing my GPU drivers. I’m about out of options here now and it’s just frustrating at this point. Just tried a few other games and they seem to be running without issues.

And just an attachment to show my current FPS on lowest settings in Divinity’s Reach and my HWMonitor along with it.

What does GPU-Z see? Is the PCIe bus still at x16 (Bus Interface, graphics card tab)? Is the GPU frequency normal or throttled (sensors tab)?

Frequencies are fine as far as i can see (800MHz Core clock and 1250MHz Memory clock while in game)

However the other thing you’ve pointed out, it currently says “Link Width: x1” “Max Supported: x16”. Could this be the problem then? And if so, how do i go about fixing this?

That’s the problem and I don’t know of an easy solution. There is a little ? next to Bus Interface you can press that and see if it improves (GPU-Z’s suggestion). Otherwise power down the computer and reseat the card (pull it and put it back in). Also check your motherboard manual to make sure that is truly a x16 slot and not one that changes if you add additional PCIe cards (like sound). We had a few people here who had placed their video card in a slot that looks like a full x16 slot put electrically was not. Normally the slot closest to the CPU is the full x16 slot.

If your GPU is idle it will read that it’s running at x1 speed due to power saving features.

Launch up your game or run a quick Furmark or you can simply click the blue question mark next to Bus Interface and click start render test, so monitor GPU-Z and see if your Bus Interface reads one of the following

PCI-E 2.0 x16 1.1
PCI-E 2.0 x16 2.0 or maybe it reads 2.1.

It may also read PCI-E 2.0 x4 which means you may have it in the wrong PCI Express slot as Behellagh mentioned.

I checked out your motherboard on ASUS website and your PCI-Express slots are as follows

1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (blue)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black)

So make sure you have your GPU sitting in the blue slot.

I’m seeing more and more people experiencing abnormal performance of the game, as you can see in this topic: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Sudden-FPS-drop-3/first#post3095036

Your PCI-e bus probably throttles down in idle times, but if it really sits at x1 during gameplay, your FPS should have been bad since the very first time you logged into the game. However if you played just fine up until now, perhaps your issue is the same as all the others’ in that topic, me included.
Now, what’s the cause of this and how to fix it are the real questions. I’ve sent a ticket 4 days ago, got replied twice then all went silent after I followed their instructions and nothing had changed.
To me, however, the issue seems to be happening unevenly. While sometimes I can log in just fine with no performance problems, other times the game is unplayable and I have to resort rebooting my system multiple times before getting it to work properly.
I’m also under the impression that if GW2 is the first application run upon startup, it’s less likely to exhibit the issue, but even this might be just a coincidence.

The ? next to bus interface in GPU-Z launches a little graphics app that should take it out of idle.

Yep… Same thing happening to me. I’m not sure what the problem seems to be but for now I’m blaming the seasonal. If things continue this way after the update has been removed then I guess I/we may be screwed. For now I’m going to refrain from playing until the Halloween event is over and hope when I come back all is well and fine again.

As in GPU-Z is reporting the PCIe width to the graphics card is x1? That’s nothing the game can affect.

A quick reseat of the GPU seems to have resolved the issue. Thanks for the help guys!

Well well, guess what? I tried reseating the graphics card as well and it seems to have done the magic.

The myriad of “ULTRA LOW FPS AFTER LAST UPDATE!!!” threads need to have “reseat video card” as first solution to try…..