Guild Wars 2

Hello, I got some spare money to upgrade my rig. I wish to increase FPS in big WvW fights. WvW is the only issue now, I at least wish to get 40 FPS in blob fights on high settings.
My current rig setup:
CPU: Core i5-3570k @ 4.4GHz
MB: ASRock Z77-Extreme 4
RAM: 2×4 GB Corsair DDR3 1866 MHz
GPU: 2x EVGA GTX 660 Ti FTW Sig2 in SLI
HHD: 2x Intel SSD 330 Series 120 GB (RAID 0)
Monitor: HP Z27i (2560×1440@60Hz)

So my question shall I upgrade my CPU with Core i7-3770K or my GPU with GTX 780 Ti?
As I am reading forums here, I see I will not get much by upgrading GPU or nothing at all. How does i7-3770K perform in GW2 vs. i7-3570K (both on decent overclock)?

Thanks for helping me out sort this issue.

The i7-3770 isn’t going to help all that much. Are you currently maxing out your GPU? GPU-Z or similar utility could tell you how often the GPU is at 100%. If it’s not, a faster GPU isn’t going to help much either.

Well my GPUs is hitting around 70% without fights going on and 90%+ in huge fights.

If you’re going to upgrade one or the other, it would be your CPU. Running 2 660 TI’s in SLI is more then enough, you would have to go with a real high end card to notice a real improvement.

I’m running a 4770k OC’d to 4.2GHZ on a single 660Ti OC (2GB) and I get right around 35-45 FPS in WvW. Very playable even in huge zergs. Going up to a 3770k should put you at least where I am if not more due to you having more GPU Power.

Honestly though, looking at your current setup, I’m surprised you’re having any issue at all. Your system is more then capable, I don’t know if 40 FPS as a minimum in WvW Zerg is a reasonable expectation of any system. The game has limitations that aren’t on your end and honestly I think you’re probably running it about as good as it’s going to get. You might get a marginal improvement if you dropped some serious money, but I doubt it would be worth it. My i7 never goes above 40% load even in WvW. The power is there, the game just doesn’t use it.

honestly there is no real point in upgrading your system. As even bleeding edge hardware will not offer any major improvements. You will see few gains from a 780ti (mainly from the removal of sli overhead) and and small amount from changing your cpu. The cost for a few frames is very very high and for only gw2 is a but unjustifiable. Just lower a few settings and you should see very playable results in wvw.

There are a few things though.

1) the ivy bridge series has heat issues with its tim/heat spreader. So if you are up to the task you can attempt to delid the chip and fix that.

2) up your cooling (water maybe?) and crank the oc higher.

and a final point:

you are running a decently high res with 2gb vram cards in sli. In SLI vram is parallel not additive so you are essentailly running a 1440p on a 2gb frame buffer. While this usually wont be a problem in gw2, more modern games (at high settings) will indeed hit that vram limit and start limiting performance and stutter. So depending on your plans i would start to save for a set of 800 series cards with larger frame buffers.

Save ur money. Now is not the time to be upgrading from a system such as that.

Wait for top end Nvidia 800 series GPU’s to come out then get 1 of those (or AMD’s offering if its competitive). Expected release between Q4 of this year and Q2 of next year depending on delays and/or competition from AMD.

Wait for Skylake CPU’s from Intel (Not Broadwell, which is the next series to come out). Expected release date Q4 2015 – Q2 2016.

Unless other new games that come out suddenly start significantly using more than 4 threads on a CPU, and I5 is perfectly fine for gaming.
Ontop of that, there has not been any change in CPU performance since Generation 2 of Intel’s I series (Sandybridge- i.e i5 2500k), through 3rd generation (Ivybridge i.e i5 3570k), and the current 4th generation (Haswell i.e i5 4670k) when Overclocking is taken into consideration. A 2500k and a 4670k will perform the same when Overclocked to their respected thermal limit using the same cooler. I.e a 2500k at 5.0ghz vs a 4670k at 4.6ghz.

All that said however, since ur running at 1440p, u may want to consider changing to a 3-4gb GPU. But tbh I would not do that unless u specifically see your VRAM maxing out and causing performance drops.