Guild Wars 2

The game auto detects the graphics for me at High/Ultra for all the settings and I get ~50 fps in general but in towns and especially WvW fights I drop to ~20.

My current specs are:

AMD 8150 (OC to 4900 ghz)
NVIDIA GTX 660
Corsair 8 gb 1600 ram
900w power supply (So you know how much juice I have to work with)

So what is the weakest part of my rig and what is the minimum I need to get a solid 60 fps on all encounters in the game or at least pretty close? =)

Change mobo to support SLI, buy another video card that supports SLI… Put GW2 on SSD (not sure how much improvement though – I did notice some on mine)

What is SLI:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli

What are the supported GPU’s:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli/supported-gpus

Requirements:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli/system-requirements

So the weakest link is the gfx card? Does GW2 even support SLI?

Quickly looking at the specs, it should run GW2 fine on max settings.
Your GPU is almost the same as mine (I have 650TI) and we have the same issue on large fights.

If you really want the fps boost, go SLI…

And yes, it is supported:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Does-GW2-Support-SLI/first

Though you may want to check the temperatures first before embarking on SLI project.

Cbird.4198:

The game auto detects the graphics for me at High/Ultra for all the settings and I get ~50 fps in general but in towns and especially WvW fights I drop to ~20.

My current specs are:

AMD 8150 (OC to 4900 ghz)
NVIDIA GTX 660
Corsair 8 gb 1600 ram
900w power supply (So you know how much juice I have to work with)

So what is the weakest part of my rig and what is the minimum I need to get a solid 60 fps on all encounters in the game or at least pretty close? =)

Upgrade to an Intel based CPU. AMD has 50% of the IPC that Intel brings to the table, and that is why your town/WVW fights drop down in the 20~ range.

You could get an i5-4440 (haswell) and a H97-g43 motherboard and still continue to use your 660 and get 60FPS in most areas of the game.

WvW is going to suffer on any system you build though, as there is not a CPU fast enough to handle the data that GW2 pumps in through DX9. Even my i7 4790K clocked at 5ghz only gets 34FPS during Zerg content.

Thank you for the tip knives. Can you help me identify if tempature is an issue with my current rig by chance? My current GPU is sitting at 56 degrees C with the GPU fan at the lowest setting (This is while playing GW, mind you)

I also have 4 fans on my rig, 3 inlet, 1 top exhaust. If that good?

Do I need another EVGA 660, or will any brand 660 do? Just get the card, plug it in, link it up and go? My mobo, 990FXA-GD65, is good to go for SLI right?

Thanks for making this clear for me guys

Crap, I was afraid someone was gonna call my CPU out. When I was building this PC years ago I didn’t know a whole lot and I thought number of cores was all that mattered so I fell for the 8 core gimmick. Now I know it’s 4 cores physical, and 4 cores…imaginary i guess is the right word.

I’ll look into grabbing a i5 and new mobo, thank you for the tip!

I think 50C for CPU is normal. I have my CPU at 70C. omg.
Source: http://www.buildcomputers.net/cpu-temperature.html

Do note that dusts on the CPU fan drastically reduces it’s efficiency, so you may want to clean up every now and then.

Yes, your mobo supports SLI as per:
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/990FXAGD65.html#hero-specification

And I think you need the same type of card/gpu for SLI:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli/faq#c16

If you’re going to be changing mobo to support intel i5, grab something that supports SLI. It will be expensive, but you can do the SLI later (Christmas is coming anyways, so either bonus paycheck or bonus allowance).

And for the 4 “imaginary” cores – I think they’re called virtual cores. Or I could be mistaken too.)

I would recommend scaling down some settings, especially the ones related to effects (screen shake will pretty much kill any system in a big fight), and lower the Model LOD bias to high or med.

This is what I recommend based on Usefullness/Performance trade offs. Regardless of all else, ALWAYS have a the frame limiter running at 60. This is more of a heat management thing during periods of low activity to help keep the card happy.

- The highest yield, low impact settings are the 3 “Show all names”, as rendering all that text is major bog down on the system.

- Depth Blur off. Not really useful, and arguably good looking.

- Next You can get a lot of FPS by lowering the Character model limit and model quality. Note that the model limit does the most good for PvE, but since you need to see as much as possible in WvW you can lower the limit 1 level and lower the model quality 1 or 2 levels to make up some of the difference.

LOD Distance – Mess with this based on preference. This controls the detail transition thresholds for the terrain. This will help a lot by cutting down rendering cost for scenery.

- Reflections: Terrain and Sky. Off if you don’t care about that. Reflections in general have a high GPU cost, so this may work well with the low end GPU you’re using.

- Best texture filtering off.

- Hi Res character textures off.

- Post processing off for WvW. This setting controls a lot of the ambiance effects, like lighting. I recommend keeping on in PvE for the pretties, but you’ll never notice it in WvW.

- Effect LOD: I haven’t quite figured out how this works, but you can experiment with it.

- Shadows and Shaders to Med or low. This will make the effects less pretty, but helps a lot in zerg storms.

- Render sampling to Sub-sample. This will cause the game to render at half res, but display in full res. It does yield decent performance, but between the upscaling and visual quality loss some people can’t handle it.

GW2 is much more cpu intensive than it is gpu intensive. If you’re suffering performance hits in populated areas, your cpu is probably throttling back to stop overheating.

Download a program like speccy from piriform (it’s what gw2 tech support had me download). Run it, then launch gw2 and go somewhere where you see performance problems, then tab out and see what your temps look like.

If your temps are outside the range for your chipset…well, there’s your problem.

There is something in the last patch, most likely the Coherent ui processes, that is spiking temps because it’s so very cpu intensive. Example; my cpu temp shoots up 40 degrees celcius when I load the current version of gw2. There is no other game or app on my system that does that.

Cbird.4198:

Crap, I was afraid someone was gonna call my CPU out. When I was building this PC years ago I didn’t know a whole lot and I thought number of cores was all that mattered so I fell for the 8 core gimmick. Now I know it’s 4 cores physical, and 4 cores…imaginary i guess is the right word.

I’ll look into grabbing a i5 and new mobo, thank you for the tip!

AMD has 4,6,8 real cores. the issue is with the modules the cores are built into. They share resources between the 2 cores per module. And because of that each core is weaker then when compared to Intel.

You can increase over all performance on bulldozer/piledriver CPUs by disabling the 2nd core per module in the bios, as that will free up the ‘bottleneck’ on the shared L2 L3 cache, IPC and other whatnot’s built into/against the Modules of this CPU architecture. But these AM3+ CPUs still do not compare to Intel’s offerings.

But…a G3220 (Dual core Haswell CPU) beats an FX8350 (one of the best AM3+ CPUs) when it comes down to THIS game. And that is because a single Haswell Core is 50%-65% faster then a single core in the Bulldozer/PileDriver architecture.

FX8350 that I had setup was locked at/near 65FPS on high/medium settings at 1600×900, and would have drops down to 8-12FPS in heavy zerg content.

G3220 that I swapped to for that system was getting 90FPS on the same settings at 1600×900. Drops were 18-20FPS in zerg content.

i5-4670K at 4.0Ghz – High settings across the board, 109FPS down to 24FPS in zergs

i7-4790K at 4.8ghz – High settings across the board, 135FPS down to 32FPS in zergs.

The above samples were ran from a single r7-260x/HD7790 1G GPU and Same install (switching MBs on Win7 is not hard at all if you know how). The only parts that were changed was the Motherboard and CPU. GPU, HDD/SSD, RAM were all recycled.

The 2 systems i ended with are the 4670K + R9-270X(Wifes), and a i7-4790K+R9-280x(mine), which is why I was able to test performance as I was doing ‘musical’ computers.

What’s interesting though, AMD switching single Core performance in favor of multi core performance. And this can be seen when you compare the older PhenomII X4 (965BE for example) compared to a FX8350 clock at the same performance. The 965BE performs better in single threaded applications (like GW2) then the FX8350 does. Its still leaps and bounds behind the lastest and previous gen Intel cpus (Haswell and Ivy), but its faster then the Bulldozer/Piledriver CPUs.

Just something to consider IF/when building for GW2 in mind.

But it comes down to what FPS you expect out of your system when buying your components.

I would totally baseline a CPU based on the G3258 clocked at 4.6ghz(its K series CPU from Intel), as the CPU is only 70 bucks and is largely faster then every AMD cpu for the price point, even in lighly threaded tasks.

You may be reaching a bit too high if you expect 60 FPS in a WvW Zerg blob…..not gonna happen (too much CPU overhead and too much Server / Client data being passed back and forth). Certainly nothing wrong with trying to improve your FPS, but you should realize what is possible and what may not be.

Changing GPU simply will not solve anything. 60fps in crowded place is not possible with the current coding.

CBird don’t expect much from an upgrade. Like the above poster said, the real issue is with the coding. ANet has basically abandoned this game, and refuses to acknowledge the need for proper multi-core support.

I have 2500k @4.5ghz, believe me… upgrading won’t help. They don’t even have adequate antialiasing modes after two years.