Guild Wars 2

Anyone else experiencing a sudden graphical slowdown while playing the game lately? It wasn’t like this before, I think they changed something in the graphics code (in time for the F2P release), and that change is causing this. I could play the game fine on auto-detect settings before, with anti-aliasing disabled and the character models set to lowest. Now, my client randomly drops to single digit frames per second. Even at the lowest settings, EVEN WHILE LOOKING AT THE GROUND, there’s something messing up with the frame rate that causes the frame rate to drop by 12 FPS (see second pic).

HaxTester.9816:

Anyone else experiencing a sudden graphical slowdown while playing the game lately? It wasn’t like this before, I think they changed something in the graphics code (in time for the F2P release), and that change is causing this. I could play the game fine on auto-detect settings before, with anti-aliasing disabled and the character models set to lowest. Now, my client randomly drops to single digit frames per second. Even at the lowest settings, EVEN WHILE LOOKING AT THE GROUND, there’s something messing up with the frame rate that causes the frame rate to drop by 12 FPS (see second pic).

Yah i’m getting it too. Best way to describe it, i think is micro-stutter. It started since the big trait patches change. I was @ win7, patch day. Upgraded to win10 recently. It persists through both. Cores are unpark, no problem with ram, system is stable. No problem on other games. It’s definitely GW2 client.

I’ve had my ping jump to over 1k yesterday, while my fps didn’t drop much at all. I thought it was just me. And I’ve been getting really bad lag for a few weeks in some places. The Ley Line Hub is the WORST.

I experienced this FPS drop before, and it’s generally caused by a crashing audio in gw2 (well in my case it tends to be…).

Symptoms:

• I can continue to play but sound is in a (rather long) loop.
• Combat sounds often no longer occur
• FPS drops from 40-80+ to 12-18 max

Ways to recreate?

No actual idea, I suffer it sometimes while playing :

• When playing and moving main audio from my realtek (connected to analog 5.1 headset) to Nvidia audio (connected to speakers using my screens mic jack) (I always have gw2 sound through the headset),
  then reverting this change (returning default audio to the headset (realtek) my games sound BOUND to the REALTEK shifts to the speakers, (is processed by the Nvidia audio driver now), if I check in the f11 menu page, under audio, you’ll see the realtek should still be the audio device, and then swiching back audio INGAME (can be done by selecting default, and then realtek).
  Crash occurs within 1,5-2hrs playing later in my case, giving me the assumption this causes a leak somewhere… mostly after a map change (giving me the idea the data is no longer flushed.) (I have not yet actively trying to port map to map to create full audio/ sample buffers if they are used, could speed up the process though; could work…)
• And sometimes while just playing the game, though way less frequent,

In both cases: having higher quality audio seems to aggravate the problem & frequency.
All based on personal observations, I’ve heard people talk about these problems before on TS when playing with the guild, low FPS and looping audio.
I have no data to support it any further.

Solution?:
No way out but to terminate the proces (gw2.exe), it’s an indirect App Hang…

• If I terminate gw2 by using the task manager and restart, all is fine.
• If I exit through the normal methods (alt+F4, or try log out) I get a crash warning: this application is not responding bla bla bla and I need to terminate it in task manager first, and only then I can restart, else gw2 will remain active and looping. cannot reenter though.

Related hardware in my case:
Realtek ALC 898 audio 7.1, used in 5.1 config (headset), is audio solution of my Asus Rampage IV Extreme (X79 chipset, i7 3930 @3.8Ghz, 32 Gb 1866Mhz Ram, 2 GTX 780 in Sli (secondary audio via HDMI from card #1)
Had this error on Win 7 and now on Win 10, All drivers ok, been replaced
(and updated), error persisting & still occuring.

Non related:
Oh and lag is bad lately , 1-2.5 seconds…. in some maps, I have both chat lag and skill lag. but it doesn’t cause my fps to nosedive, maybe too lose 3-5 fps on 60+

OK thanks PaxTheGreatOne for that clue to what might be causing this.

Before all this happened, my computer had been having start up problems, it’s like explorer.exe is constantly hanging and restarting. I tried to find out what might be causing the problem, my initial guess was that it was the audio driver. The problem went away eventually, I don’t know exactly what I did that worked.

Now, in trying to solve this FPS drop problem, I tried to reinstall the graphics driver. And the explorer.exe hanging/restarting problem came back again. I think it’s because of the Intel graphics driver that’s installed alongside the nVidia graphics driver (it apparently installed some audio driver as well). I have uninstalled it. Now I don’t know if that will solve this FPS drop, Lion’s Arch is still around 12-30 fps. It wasn’t like this before, or maybe I’m wrong. Could anyone with a similar rig (i7-3770k, GTX680) share their fps performance in Lion’s Arch?

I’m experiencing it with onboard graphics and a mediocre sound card, I can’t test it on my better gpu because the fan is broken. But the onboard driver is the newest driver. Worth checking out on the sound front though. Thx for the detailed report Pax.

I’ve had this happen twice to me since most recent patch. I suspect it’s because the graphics options get reset every time they put out a patch. Currently my graphics settings default to high, with all check boxes enabled, each time I start the game.

Manually setting my graphics options back to what used to be “auto detect” then exiting the game normally has fixed this.