Terrible FPS Drops Since August 13th Patch

Terrible FPS Drops Since August 13th Patch

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

I’ve been running the game fairly comfortably on medium settings for the last 11 months, but, since the last patch (Aug 13th), I’m getting really awful FPS drops during regular play. Running around in an unpopulated zone (such as Bloodtide Coast), the FPS counter on the options menu is pinging wildly between my usual ~60 fps and about 10-20 FPS. In the Crown Pavilion, I’m getting 10 FPS on average and dipping as low as 1 FPS. I didn’t have any problems of this sort until a few days ago – performance was quite serviceable in the Pavilion zergs and I had only the occasional frame drop during the Gauntlet. Turning my settings down to minimum boosts my FPS by a tiny amount, but the massive 30+ drops still occur with regularity.

This problem seems to be isolated to GW2 – I’ve tried a few other games (including GW1), and I’m not getting any sort of frame drops. In GW2, I can’t go 10 seconds without having a problem. I’ve tried a few things on my end – updated my NVidia drivers, rolled back some Windows updates that coincided with the start of my performance issues, and ran a disk check to make sure my hard drive wasn’t failing – but nothing seems to have helped.

Is anyone else having similar problems? Sadly, this has made the Queen’s Gauntlet more or less unplayable for me, amongst other pieces of content. I hope a solution can be found.

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Posted by: Nalora.7964

Nalora.7964

I have been getting the same thing for the last two months, actually. The only thing that helps is a complete log off and reboot, have done all the usual “client side” checks, to no avail.

I guess the game is just meant make me feel like I am running in a big pool of pudding most of the time.

DEMAND Bunny Slippers and a bathrobe!

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Sadly, logging off and rebooting does nothing at all to fix the problem. It’s the first thing I tried.

Still no improvement, despite trying a bunch of things on my end. The random frame drops are honestly quite headache inducing. Performance does depend on the area of the game, but the FPS dropping is happening across the board. My rough estimates would be:

Crown Pavilion – Can go as high as 30 fps, and as low as 1 fps. Just idling is usually 10-15 fps. Before the last patch, I was comfortably getting 40 fps on average and only had large drops if the zerg was beneath me – and even then, only down to about 20 fps. (edit: I just tried to do one of the bosses in the Pavilion and the zerg brought my computer to its knees. It was essentially a slideshow – 5 fps and under the entire time. My computer handled more than a few much larger zergs when this content came out without much trouble.)

Bloodtide Coast – Getting 60 fps (frame limiter), but with frequent spikes down to 15-20 fps. Never had any performance trouble in this zone pre-patch.

sPvP – I can’t seem to get over 20 fps regardless, and it keeps spiking down sub-10 fps.

The thing that really puzzles me is that most of this is regardless of whether I’m on medium (auto-detect) or absolute lowest settings. I can get a bit more peak fps on lowest settings, but I still get the massive frame drops that are rendering the game borderline unplayable. While I don’t have a top-of-the-line machine, my computer definitely surpasses the recommended requirements and I’ve enjoyed decent framerates for the last 11 months. I’m utterly puzzled as to what has happened.

[edit] I’ve also noticed that I can twirl my character around endlessly on the character select screen without any sort of fps drop, so perhaps it has something to do with rendering the terrain? I’m stumped.

(edited by Zyk.3597)

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Posted by: Pyx.1906

Pyx.1906

Absolutely unbelievably bad design and implementation of the program for what must be widespread lag and connection problems. I have a year old mega$ gaming computer that works flawlessly on all internet related programs, except GW2 (lagwars2). My horrendous lag and disconnection problems also started with the August 13th patch. Tonight my spell panel went blank, and I was pummeled to death by invisible enemies in a beginner area. What kind of person would design a game where the character gets cut off with no spells nor defenses but the enemies cant continue to attack and destroy? I’m completely disgusted. There are time limited achievements that cannot be done because ANETS servers are incapable of allowing players to play. And THANKS for a design that cost money (and potentially REAL money) to repair and transport my character when your bad design and inadequate servers kill me for no reason.

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Posted by: Girion.5483

Girion.5483

I’m having the exact same problem.
I don’t have a high-end engine either (AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3,4Ghz; Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 with 2GB v-RAM; 8 GB RAM; Gigabyte 970A-UD3 motherboard), but it should be more than capable to deal with GW2. Over the last 11,5 months I could play flawlessly on medium to max graphics settings, but since last week (or perhaps the last 2?) I’m suffering from massive performance issues. Framerate drops as low as 10-12 FPS, which basically makes the game unplayable.

The interesting thing is, that these performance issues, while often, don’t seem to be constant. Sometimes everything goes back to normal and I’m playing at 45 – 80 FPS, depending on the region and then again, out of the blue, the framerate drops through the bottom back to 10.

I really don’t know what’s causing this. Deinstalled my graphics card driver, downloaded the latest version and manually installed it again. I also followed Anets instructions on how to improve the framerate for ATI video cards, but without much effect on game performance. The only thing I noticed, is that this issue is of recent occurance, like the OP already mentioned.

(edited by Girion.5483)

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Over the last 11,5 months I could play flawlessly on medium to max graphics settings, but since last week I’m suffering from massive performance issues. Framerate drops as low as 10-12 FPS, which basically makes the game unplayable.

The interesting thing is, that these performance issues, while often, don’t seem to be constant. Sometimes everything goes back to normal and I’m playing at 45 – 80 FPS, depending on the region and then again, out of the blue, the framerate drops through the bottom back to 10.

This is exactly what happens to me. Nice to know that I’m not alone…? Let me know if you figure out a solution! Hopefully, Tuesday’s patch will revert whatever odd outlier bug that’s causing this for us.

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Posted by: Girion.5483

Girion.5483

Forgot to mention: I’m running windows 7 64 bit and all other games I play perform as good as ever. Stress-tested my entire system for a couple hours last week and no failures occured for my hardware components. Only GW2 is causing these issues, which has me thinking whether ArenaNet recently changed something with the GW2 engine, perhaps? But yeah, like I mentioned, I’m rather clueless.

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Posted by: Flatley.1620

Flatley.1620

I have been getting the same thing for the last two months, actually. The only thing that helps is a complete log off and reboot, have done all the usual “client side” checks, to no avail.

I guess the game is just meant make me feel like I am running in a big pool of pudding most of the time.

^ This. Same here.

Gosh, seems I already said that on another thread! Guess I’m not the only one experiencing FPS issues

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Posted by: Girion.5483

Girion.5483

Just an example of how weird it can get:
Yesterday, I went to Bloodtide Coast for a while, to just gather some materials and complete the dailies. I got about 50-60 FPS (capped to 60), but when I entered the Chamber of Secrets and moved on to Straits of Devastation, the framerate dropped instantly to 10-15 FPS after loading into Fort Trinity. I mean, wtf?! There’s nothing ever going on in Fort Trinity, so what would cause such a drastic framerate decrease remains a mystery to me. And no, there were no other programs running in the background on my computer. Just GW2.

(edited by Girion.5483)

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

I wrote up a list of things that I’ve tried, but the forum ate my post and I don’t have the energy to rewrite it. That said, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. I’d be willing to try any of the things I’ve done again. :P Still holding out hope that this little problem will go away with tomorrow’s patch. Not sure what I’ll do if not, a lot of the content that I enjoy the most is unplayable or borderline unplayable right now.

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Posted by: Pyrii.3652

Pyrii.3652

The biggest hit int he game I’m finding is reflections. I find using it on the “Terrain and sky” setting helps immensely. This is an issue that’s been ongoing for months, back from the Molten alliance story.

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Patch didn’t do anything, and the removal of culling has made the game even more unplayable in some areas. :\

Thanks for the suggestion, Pyrii, but my problem happens no matter what settings I have – highest, lowest, or autodetect.

[edit] I’m currently trying a full reinstall – uninstalled the game and deleted all the GW2 folders I could find (appdata/temp/gw2cache, Documents/Guild Wars 2, and the installation folder). I’ll let you all know if it works out… Oh, I did back up my screenshots, of course.

(edited by Zyk.3597)

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Yup, the full reinstall didn’t help at all. I’m completely out of ideas. Is there anyone from ANet reading that has some idea of what I can do? I’d like to be able to enjoy the game again.

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Posted by: Fatenekki.5904

Fatenekki.5904

Zyk, it’s ANet problem, not yours, no matter what you do you can’t fix it.

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Tried updating to the latest NVidia beta drivers released today, but still no relief in sight for the massive frame drops. Has anyone had this problem as well, and did it go away with the last patch? :\

@Fatenekki – That’s my guess too, but it could be on my end. I’m honestly just trying to keep this topic alive in the vain hope that ANet will see it or someone might give me some more ideas to try.

(edited by Zyk.3597)

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Okay, so, I found a band-aid solution that makes the game playable.

To deal with the random/no clear explanation frame drops: Limiting my FPS to 30 completely fixed this problem. With a 60 FPS limit, it’d dip down to about 10-15 fps even in empty areas. Now it stays solidly at 30 FPS all the time. Sadly, 30 FPS is noticeably not smooth.

To deal with populated areas: Set culling settings to lowest. Enjoy as everyone becomes a placeholder character. I still get big frame drops, but it’s not as bad.

There’s still something seriously funky going on, but at least the game is playable again and Lion’s Arch is a little less of a slideshow. XD

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Posted by: Markadis.9012

Markadis.9012

Also, check your hardware. I suggest getting HWmonitor program and checking your vid card and CPU temp. For me, it turns out that whoever put the thermal paste on my CPU did a poor job, and I had to redo it. Worked like a charm and my FPS skyrocketed!

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Posted by: Zeta.3198

Zeta.3198

So, had a long chat with Anet support and they were not able to locate any problem with my system, even though in the last month my fps dropped from 50 in best performance to 5-20, I guess I just have to stop playing then.
This sucks.

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Posted by: Reborn.2934

Reborn.2934

I’ve been running the game fairly comfortably on medium settings for the last 11 months, but, since the last patch (Aug 13th), I’m getting really awful FPS drops during regular play. Running around in an unpopulated zone (such as Bloodtide Coast), the FPS counter on the options menu is pinging wildly between my usual ~60 fps and about 10-20 FPS. In the Crown Pavilion, I’m getting 10 FPS on average and dipping as low as 1 FPS. I didn’t have any problems of this sort until a few days ago – performance was quite serviceable in the Pavilion zergs and I had only the occasional frame drop during the Gauntlet. Turning my settings down to minimum boosts my FPS by a tiny amount, but the massive 30+ drops still occur with regularity.

This problem seems to be isolated to GW2 – I’ve tried a few other games (including GW1), and I’m not getting any sort of frame drops. In GW2, I can’t go 10 seconds without having a problem. I’ve tried a few things on my end – updated my NVidia drivers, rolled back some Windows updates that coincided with the start of my performance issues, and ran a disk check to make sure my hard drive wasn’t failing – but nothing seems to have helped.

Is anyone else having similar problems? Sadly, this has made the Queen’s Gauntlet more or less unplayable for me, amongst other pieces of content. I hope a solution can be found.

if you want to take help you must post your dxdiag file or any crah log that maybe you have in your gw2 ’s folder.

how to take the dxdiag file : press windows key + R and then type there dxdiag . after this it will open a window and choose yes in the dialog . when it stops collecting data you can save these informations in a text file by pressing the down right button that says [Save all Informations]

then you post here the file to see what are your pc specs and what are the best options for this

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Posted by: Zyk.3597

Zyk.3597

Hokay! So, I finally figured out the problem and my game is running smoothly once more.

I downloaded a different temperature monitor this time, HWMonitor. It’s quite a bit more detailed than the crappy one I was using before and made me realize that my CPU temperature was reaching super high levels. A quick download of CPU-Z later, and I watched as my large drops in FPS corresponded precisely to my computer throttling my 2.0 GHz processor down to 0.8 GHz. Cross-referencing that with HWMonitor made me realize that my clock speed was oscillating wildly because I was approaching fairly critical temperatures. CPU-Z also made me realize that I was getting such bad temperatures because my processor was in some sort of bloody turbo mode. GW2’s extreme use of the CPU was making turbo mode decide that the processor really needed to run at 2.5 GHz all the time. So, essentially, my problem was overheating caused by the game’s CPU intensiveness overclocking my processor. I imagine it had always been somewhat marginal, and a recent patch just pushed the CPU usage over the edge – or, alternatively, I somehow accidentally turned on this turbo mode I knew nothing about.

tl;dr: Overheating and subsequent throttling due to my CPU’s turbo mode was my problem. Disabled the auto-overclock, and my GW2 experience is saved! Life lesson: Use HWMonitor and CPU-Z to check things, accept no substitues.

(edited by Zyk.3597)

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Posted by: Reborn.2934

Reborn.2934

nice zyk . i am also using msi afterburner ( free app from msi ) for overclock my vga and it displays the temperatures too .