Guild Wars 2

So, I bought a new PC with:
GTX1060
I5-6500
16 GB RAM
I thought it will be enought to run GW2 with ultra settings but… no.
I run GW2 with mixed medium/high settings (autodetect option) and I have around 20-40 FPS. When I swich to ultra, I have something like 30 FPS. There are big FPS drops too.
My question to GTX1060 users: do you have this issue too? Is this my PC or crappy drivers? Or something else?
Geez, it’s frustrating, only GW2 seems to “ignore” my GTX… Any ides how to fix it?

You’re probably not really having a problem per say. What was your old card for one? The xx60 cards are an above average gaming card, xx70 is much better, xx80 is really heavy. The thing is if you moved up from say an 860 to a 1060, there’s a good chance you won’t be seeing much of a difference, or if you went from say 970 to 1060 you’d probably see a loss. Also, in general, Nvidia’s had a lot of people complaining of issues in their drivers the last month including myself, I ended up rolling back to August because of huge FPS dips and various glitching.

Either way, MMOs in general are extremely CPU sensitive and just don’t use GPU as often as they should for most people. Oftentimes this is to get more players in that have crappier computers such as casuals so more people are capable of playing. Unfortunately, when the games don’t offset a LOT more weight to the GPU, GPU users tend to get shafted, and unfortunately for 90% of MMORPGs out there this has always been the thing. Even people with an up to date i7 CPU and a GTX 1080 are not going to get perfect FPS in a lot of things even. A sad state of affairs, but it tends to be how MMOs are. It also doesn’t help that most video cards are designed around software specifications for certain versions of DirectX for what it supports and what it runs the best on. In Guild Wars 2’s case it runs on DirectX 9, which has been a go to standard for entirely too long. DX10 was out in the Windows Vista era, DX11 was out in the Windows 7 era (and was the current DX version when GW2 came out but was ignored during development.) DX12 is out now, almost nothing uses it… yet, but most of the newer cards out are going to be optimized towards newer versions of DirectX also which isn’t helping any but not sure how much of an impact that really would have. Personally I have a GTX970, I can run photo realistic graphics non stop at 60 fps on Witcher 3, but throw nearly any mmo at me and I’ll still crumble under CPU bottleneck.

In any case, to get your FPS up I’d recommend nixing some of the more annoying fps killers: Namely, Shadows, they’ve always been notorious for burning fps in the ground in most (but not all!) game engines, the Ambient Occlusion checkbox way at the bottom, is also a type of shadowing that generates shadows realistically around geometry joints, this also can be a big FPS killer.

As far as GW2 in general goes though, and especially in raidy type things and heavily populated cities, the model limit is going to be your friend. You’d have to tweak it to see how you like it though, the lesser amount of players there are the better it’s going to run, period. You could have it super low, but make the few people you do see look great, or balance it out some, up to you.

Shaders and Post Processing can also eat a lot of fps but will also generate a lot of your eye candy so that’s up to you. As for the reflection setting, should you choose to keep it on, if it’s on All I’d recommend turning it down, it’s my understanding that the game engine has a huge table of water near the bottom of many maps you never see that can actively be reflecting things off screen to kill your fps, or so I’ve heard.

Artair.1687:

You’re probably not really having a problem per say. What was your old card for one? The xx60 cards are an above average gaming card, xx70 is much better, xx80 is really heavy. The thing is if you moved up from say an 860 to a 1060, there’s a good chance you won’t be seeing much of a difference, or if you went from say 970 to 1060 you’d probably see a loss.

Not so much the case in this generation. A 1060 6GB is 980 level.

TC, are you getting bad framerates everywhere or just in cities/demanding locations? If it’s in cities, getting bad framerates is to be expected in this game. 30 FPS in Lion’s Arch sounds about right for an i5-6500, especially with cranked settings

You have no issue,do NOT use gw2 as a benchmark,use singleplayer games for that like the witcher 3.

Turn character model quality/limit to Low,turn reflections to terrain only,turn shadows to either medium or high,This game is Not optimized to run it all full out no matter what system you have.

I have about 40fps in lions archs with an oc’d 970gtx- and fx 8120 to 4.6 ghz.WIth the above setting modified.