Guild Wars 2

Ok to start, Please if you have nothing technical to say then dont say it, I don’t want to hear about “Upgrade Your CPU, Its Your CPU, Change Your CPU” OR its your Machine etc etc ITS NOT!

My PC is 3 months old I have a AMD FX-8320 Piledriver, 3.50GHz, 8x Cores and Sapphire Overclocked R9 270X 4GB DDR5, OS and GW2 are on separate Gaming SSD’s.

This PC can run most games on ultra at 70-90 FPS and runs WOW on Ultra at 105 FPS if I let it.

I purchased GW2 two days ago and noticed that not matter what I did i always get 35-40 FPS.

I can set the game graphics to everything LOW or everything HIGH and its always 30-40 FPS.

I have spent up 5 hours over the last few days researching this and it comes down to GW2 being CPU reliant and I have noticed that my CPU is only at 10-20% active when GW2 is running thus the low FPS.

I followed numerous video’s and forums, I have Unparked CPU’s ( only 2 were parked of 8 ) etc etc and I have been setting gw2.exe to Realtime CPU priority (even though nothing is running as CPU is at 90% idel) and turned off a few graphical settings and managed to get FPS 35-42 BUT come on . . . NOW here is a twist….

After All this and this has only happened once and was last night I had a good run for 30 minutes, I was in the same area, no where new, the same place i was getting 30-40 FPS but I noticed that the game had started running smoothly and noticed it was now using 40%+ CPU and I started to get 60-85 FPS… So i decided to restart the game to test to make sure this wasn’t an anomaly… Sadly it was and I cannot replicate it.

BUT there is your proof that My PC can handle High to Ultra settings in GW2 with Shadows on high and reflections on max and get 60+ FPS

BUT because of the game design it has issues with my CPU, this is Age of Conan all over again but that was with ATI cards.

SO anyone have any ideas? When will this be fixed? What can I do?

We shouldn’t be expected to fork-out another $4-600 for a i7 and new motherboard as this PC is well capable of running all games on ultra. I am starting to think i should demand a refund as its not playable at the moment and according to all forums I read this has been ongoing since release in 2012. SO clearly no fix coming soon?

All this Hype and recommendations form people to play put GW2 at 5 Stars with me but now that I am in…… clouds are covering these starts fast,

And for the grumpy readers defending this game I am not QQ or what ever this is, all the forum posts i read are 2012 or 2013 or very early 2014 so I am hoping someone out there as had luck with optimization with AMD CPU’s or some sort of background fix. Or perhaps I have missed a post from the GW team.

30-40 FPS is unplayable? I think that is a bit of an exaggeration

Ask for a refund if you want but the game is great and it still is 5-stars regardless of it not being optimized with your cpu

I run an i5 with an inferior video card to you and get about 30-40 fps… good enough for me

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FPS-Issue-with-the-9-9-patch-merged

You are not alone :/

You could buy a Bi Xeon with 32 threads with 4 GTX980 everything watercooled and overclocked at maximum you will always run at 10/15 FPS during massive WvW/WB.

That’s the point.

Narkodx.1472:

30-40 FPS is unplayable? I think that is a bit of an exaggeration

Ask for a refund if you want but the game is great and it still is 5-stars regardless of it not being optimized with your cpu

I run an i5 with an inferior video card to you and get about 30-40 fps… good enough for me

Everyone is different duded, 40 fps may be good enough for you but not for me. I know its capable of producing 60+fps on my machine and I have spent my hard earned cash on this game and I know its capable of producing it and this is what I should get. Developers need to address this. I am not the only one out there with the same issues.

VinceTueuR.2987:

You could buy a Bi Xeon with 32 threads with 4 GTX980 everything watercooled and overclocked at maximum you will always run at 10/15 FPS during massive WvW/WB.

That’s the point.

Game is flawed then if this is the case, other WvW or PVP games i have played with 20-30 characters I still get 50 FPS. As above I spent money on this game and My machine is capable of producing high fps, I have proven this even if it was a small window so developers need to address it as we are consumer not getting our moneys worth and the GW team have admitted there is an issues so not sure why people defend this.

What is the purpose of this thread? You just want to QQ?

You admit in your original post that you know the issue is over two years old yet somehow you think it should change right now just for you…?

Is there anything else to say? Get a refund or enjoy the game at 40fps

Just close yours eyes and imagine you are playing with all graphics at max :p

Narkodx.1472:

What is the purpose of this thread? You just want to QQ?

You admit in your original post that you know the issue is over two years old yet somehow you think it should change right now just for you…?

Is there anything else to say? Get a refund or enjoy the game at 40fps

No i don’t think it has changed just for me as I am not the only one out there still having difficulty. The purpose of this post is that all the forum posts i read are 2012 or 2013 or very early 2014 so I am hoping someone out there as had luck with optimization with AMD CPU’s or some sort of background fix. Or perhaps I have missed a post from the GW team.

The analogy I think of when talking about the game engine in GW2 along with player’s rigs is uneven gravel roads and you have a Ferrari. Sure your car can do 140 MPH with ease on a well maintained modern road but not on these roads.

There are issues and decisions made during design where FPS wasn’t the number one goal. The game was in development for quite a while before it was released in 2012. Scuttlebutt says the core engine is a modified version of the one found in Guild Wars which came out in 2005, no idea when that engine was developed but it did go from Dx8 to Dx9 and single core to dual core required for GW2.

The selling point of Umbra Occlusion Culling software, which is used in game, is to not burdened the artists with making culling easier by baking in hints or placing hard limits on the map. Dx9 is not a thread safe API meaning all rendering calls must be done by a single thread. Dx11 is thread safe so a rendering engine could divide the work across multiple cores/threads.

The WoW engine was redesigned several times over the years to incorporate Dx11 support, 64-bit memory support and this latest expansion, improved textures and models for characters. WoW in the beginning had very low requirements because of the low polygon count of their characters and objects in the game world.

FPS games are built on game engines where maximizing FPS is job one. This is due to the somewhat incestuous relationship between GPU manufacturers and FPS game engine developers where performance of the game Vs various GPUs are often a feature in a FPS game’s review and those games are then used as benchmarks to review GPUs as well as being a selling point for the game engine. Because of that those game engines are optimized in such a way that at very high or maximum game settings it’s entirely limited by the GPU and choice of CPU doesn’t matter as much. In these cases I’m sure your FX-8320 is more than enough to do the job. But in this game, a lot of slow cores is trumped by fewer faster ones. And unlike an eight-thread Intel i7, the FX-8xxx thread execution speed doesn’t significantly improve when you have only a few active threads.

Your FX-8320 is certainly less expensive that Intel’s least expensive Haswell i5 or i7 but it’s strength is when a program can properly use it’s plethora of cores but when it’s running software that only has a few active threads, it’s not even a competition, Intel just crushes it. It’s the nature of the two very different CPU architectures.

In short there isn’t some magic “AMD optimization” that can be done. It’s not an issue with the compiled code running slower on an AMD other than AMD CPUs are inherently slower than Intel’s. To improve this the game engine would need to be totally redesigned to support a thread safe version of APIs so the engine can take advantage of additional cores.

Markal.7041:

Ok to start, Please if you have nothing technical to say then dont say it, I don’t want to hear about “Upgrade Your CPU, Its Your CPU, Change Your CPU” OR its your Machine etc etc ITS NOT!

My PC is 3 months old I have a AMD FX-8320 Piledriver, 3.50GHz, 8x Cores and Sapphire Overclocked R9 270X 4GB DDR5, OS and GW2 are on separate Gaming SSD’s.

This PC can run most games on ultra at 70-90 FPS and runs WOW on Ultra at 105 FPS if I let it.

I purchased GW2 two days ago and noticed that not matter what I did i always get 35-40 FPS.

I can set the game graphics to everything LOW or everything HIGH and its always 30-40 FPS.

I have spent up 5 hours over the last few days researching this and it comes down to GW2 being CPU reliant and I have noticed that my CPU is only at 10-20% active when GW2 is running thus the low FPS.

I followed numerous video’s and forums, I have Unparked CPU’s ( only 2 were parked of 8 ) etc etc and I have been setting gw2.exe to Realtime CPU priority (even though nothing is running as CPU is at 90% idel) and turned off a few graphical settings and managed to get FPS 35-42 BUT come on . . . NOW here is a twist….

After All this and this has only happened once and was last night I had a good run for 30 minutes, I was in the same area, no where new, the same place i was getting 30-40 FPS but I noticed that the game had started running smoothly and noticed it was now using 40%+ CPU and I started to get 60-85 FPS… So i decided to restart the game to test to make sure this wasn’t an anomaly… Sadly it was and I cannot replicate it.

BUT there is your proof that My PC can handle High to Ultra settings in GW2 with Shadows on high and reflections on max and get 60+ FPS

BUT because of the game design it has issues with my CPU, this is Age of Conan all over again but that was with ATI cards.

SO anyone have any ideas? When will this be fixed? What can I do?

We shouldn’t be expected to fork-out another $4-600 for a i7 and new motherboard as this PC is well capable of running all games on ultra. I am starting to think i should demand a refund as its not playable at the moment and according to all forums I read this has been ongoing since release in 2012. SO clearly no fix coming soon?

All this Hype and recommendations form people to play put GW2 at 5 Stars with me but now that I am in…… clouds are covering these starts fast,

And for the grumpy readers defending this game I am not QQ or what ever this is, all the forum posts i read are 2012 or 2013 or very early 2014 so I am hoping someone out there as had luck with optimization with AMD CPU’s or some sort of background fix. Or perhaps I have missed a post from the GW team.

The biggest issue IS going to be your CPU. AMD CPU’s are rather weak in the single threading department, and you should not be expecting more then 60FPS in this game with pretty much any AMD cpu unless you start to sacrifice on ingame options.

That being said, getting 35-40FPS with ANY setting tells me that its probably a Link issue with your GPU. I suggest downloading GPU-Z and verify that your GPU is linked at 16x and not 1×.

OP’s options:

1. Accept the FPS you are getting (and potentially get some tweaking advice to improve it some).
2. Alter the system design to use the CPU that will run GW2 better (Intel vs AMD).
3. Request a refund and move on.

I get 2 and 3 are not likely nor what you want to hear, but getting Anet to optimize for AMD or re-write the Engine for better than DX9 is not going to happen….so….1 is your only option to actually play the game with your existing hardware..

Money might be the reason they’re not optimizing for AMD. It’s either that or they’re bias towards Intel. I’m hoping that they just don’t have the money to do so. Maybe they should do a donation drive or something to get the funds for the optimization.

@Kagusaki Please define “optimizing for AMD”.

If you mean using more cores then Intel CPUs will gain as well. Now maybe that would mean the game wouldl more likely be GPU bound rather than CPU so CPU brand becomes mostly immaterial. But the game isn’t “optimized” to run better on Intel (unless we’re talking about some a 3rd party library) over AMD.

The game’s limitations is due to only a few CPU intensive threads which means it’s maximum performance is set by a core’s performance running that thread. Which in turn means faster cores do better. And right now AMD’s approach is many slow cores while Intel’s is fewer faster cores which are underutilized so doubling up threads can actually gain overall performance.

Hm, lots of crap to read.

Unpark your CPU-cores with this tool:
http://www.coderbag.com/programming-c/disable-cpu-core-parking-utility

My rig:
i5-3570k 3,4 GHz clocked @ 4,2 GHz
8 GB 1600 MHz Corsair memory
GIGABYTE GTX 970 Gaming G1 Graphicscard

- i5 with parked cores results in a framelock at 40fps, ingame framecap 30/60 does not apply

- i5 with unparked cores (use tool) results in a unlocked framerate (or locked when using VSync), ingame framecap 30/60 does apply

Right now I run GW2 at maxed out settings and FXAA in a resolution of 3360×2100 (DSR with 20% smoothness). Framerate is dancing betweeen 60fps (vsync) and 40fps.

What does coreparking do?
Windows puts cores to sleep to save energy. The cores are unparked if high demand is present. But the switching of the parking mode does not work pretty well sometimes…. So just disable the feature.