Guild Wars 2

So one thing that’s been ruining my overall enjoyment of GW2 lately is my horrendous frame rate. I’ve tried many different “tips & tricks” to increasing frame rate in this game but it just refuses to give me any kind of decent results.

What I mean is these are my specs:

AMD 8350 8-core @ 4.5GHz
AMD Radeon 9750
8GB DDR3 RAM 1600MHz
Samsung 850 EVO SSD

And I see at most 25 FPS when in a very lowly populated, small zone such as Rata Sum (and only when inside and looking away form the center of the city)

For example I stood still just now and let Rata Sum load as much as possible and then snapped this:

http://i.imgur.com/8Tlkya2.png

I’ve tried turning everything down and no matter what settings I play with the FPS more or less stays the same (for example turning everything to absolute max might give me 11 fps, then if I go in and turn everything (besides render sampling because subsample makes the game look unplayable) down to minimum I get up to maybe 15 fps from the 11.

I love this game more than I’ve loved any other game I’ve played over the years but this horrendous frame rate is really making me reconsider getting Heart of Thorns.

If anyone has any info or ideas on how I could improve this please don’t hesitate to mention them as I’m getting quite desperate.

Put a screenshot with CPU-Z and GPU-Z while gaming.

Alright this is what CPU-Z and GPU-Z look like while sitting the that same spot (with around the 15 fps on those same settings). Only thing running in background is 2 tabs of chrome (this page and imgur)

http://i.imgur.com/bnxZyE5.png

pull down Coretemp or HWInfo and verify the CPU temps as well.

Your GPU is running at 50% utilization, so that would place fault on your CPU. Either you are running crap in the background that is using CPU I/O or you are over heating.

CPU sitting at ~39°C in almost every location I tried out (WvW, PvP match, sitting in town, etc.). GPU around ~60-65°C (According to CoreTemp and HWInfo)

What I have running in background: Skype and Razer Synapse. I have other stuff like “Java update available” but those are just notifications so I doubt they’re affecting things. I’m beginning to consider a fresh install to maybe fix anything I might have goofed up.

Any other info or tests you might need me to run I’d be happy to. I’ve obviously done something wrong to cause this as I’ve had some fps issues in other games and I don’t think my setup is weak enough to warrant it (my friend is running the exact same 9750 but with an i7 processor and he sits at 60+ fps everywhere but in large zergs) so if it’s something I’ve done wrong I’d be happy to find out and fix it.

with GW2 in a window we would need to see what is hitting your CPU and Disks. For an overview, the performance tab on Task manager will show us the CPU over all utilization per core.

In that same tab is resource monitor. That breaks out utilization based on CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network. And you can sort it down by process ID and read/write I/O against those 4 hardware sources.

For example, on the Disk tab if you see your highest active time sitting at 99% that is why you are not getting a decent FPS. That means something is running in the background and fully utilizing the HDD/SDD in your system. You can expand disk activity and validate what is running by clicking the read and then the write columns to organize by highest rate. Then see what Process and PID is listed at the top. If its not GW2 then you know something else is running against the disk. If GW2 is at the top then you probably have a HDD or NTFS Filesystem issue.

The same can be done for CPU and Memory.

After checking everything you mentioned, nothing seems to be out of the ordinary.

-GW2 using average CPU of ~45.00 while everything else is using <1.50
-GW2 Commit/Working Set for memory is around 2,100,000 while everything else is around 150,000 or less (skype sometimes hits 200,000 but that’s it)

The only thing that seemed wrong is when comparing to friend with a similar rig, I found this for read of disk:

http://i.imgur.com/b17YqTE.png

My friend is sitting around 40,000 B/sec while I’m at almost 300,000 B/sec so something seems VERY off with that. I don’t know if that is telling of an issue or not.

Did you try re-seating your graphics card?

Just did a re-seat of it and nothing has changed as far as I can tell

Sadly all of your image links are no longer available it says

Sirsquishy’s response stating that something might be utilizing your hard disk/SSD to its maximum capacity would definitely be causing a problem for framerate but I think you’d also notice some other problems in addition to that, so if it’s just GW2 framerate that’s causing you problems then I’m not sure that would be it.

Low framerate is usually gonna be caused by either too much going on in the background, a processor with slow clockspeed (yours is pretty good and shouldn’t have any problems at all) and insufficient RAM. You have sufficient RAM so that can’t be it either.

The only things I can think of off the top of my head would be either windows 10 problems or that you have some other program running that causes system instability somehow, and should this be the case and you find out what it is, it’ll immediately alleviate the problem. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing whether or not it’s true, but try ending as many processes as you can and run GW2 and see if you notice anything.

But yeah, there’s a ton of compatability issues with win10 right now so if you have that then it might be what the problem is. I’ve already known a few people who’ve upgraded and had driver errors with their graphics cards (mostly NVIDIA though) and seen a few posts around here where people had the exact same kind of issue you’re having, and as soon as they got rid of some program that they were used to using on windows 7 before they upgraded to 10 they were able to play again.

Well after being unable to find a solution I decided to reinstall Windows from scratch and see if I had something hiding in the background causing issues. Unfortunately I was not able to reinstall Windows 7 (long story for why, but in the end I just couldn’t get it without spending a couple days and I want to be ready for HoT) so I took the only option I had for a clean install:

Upgrade to windows 10 and then use its “reset to factory”-esque option that basically clean-slates the drive.

As I’m reinstalling some of my programs (Path of Exile, Skype, Chrome, etc.) I was noticing some severe freezing on my computer. Confused, I checked the performance tab of Windows 10’s Task Manager and notice something while installing GW2:

http://i.imgur.com/v60NbL0.jpg

The disk usage kept spiking up to 100% (with the read/write dropping to 0) for a period of time, during which my entire computer would freeze up (sans the mouse being able to move) and the download speed would drop to terrible speeds as seen in the screenshot (I normally download GW2 at around 12MB/s)

This leads me to believe that something might be up/wrong with my SSD, though since I’m now in Windows 10 I can’t be certain if it’s a problem with the SSD itself or Windows 10’s interaction with the SSD (840 EVO 128GB if it matters).

I’m going to let this now intensely-long download go overnight and then test GW2 out and see if any difference has been made and will reply here with the results.

So after letting the download run overnight and starting up, on roughly the same settings I’m now getting around 35-40 FPS in Rata Sum (25-30 when near the bank/TP) so a large improvement has been made, which I guess we can conclude had something to do with a background program/process I had running before the wipe. Thanks for all the help, I don’t think it’s going to get much better than this until I switch to an intel processor so I guess I’m satisfied with this for now.