Guild Wars 2

Hey,

Short break down of my gear,

Gen 2 i7 1.9ghz
6GB of ram
GTX 295

Latest Nvidia Drivers, Service pack 1 Win 7 Pro 64 bit

Not sure what else i can do here, i followed the instructions to adjust the Nvidia Control settings and as well as the in game settings. I noticed a slight improvement by about 4 FPS. The odd thing that i just cant seem to understand is that if i turn my in game video settings completely to the lowest possible i get about 13-16 FPS in town. If i MAX all of them out i get about 15-20 FPS in town. DaF@k?

I know its something to do with the settings i just cant put my finger on it. Maybe you guys might have a suggestion that i could try.

Also what do you think is better GTX295 or AMD Radeon HD 7770 2GB

Thanks
Slip

I’m using a 280, butter smooth gameplay overall. A 295 is much better than a 7770. Is it a heat issue? Is your fan clean on the 295? Something funky there.

CPU & Optimization issue. There’s no way a card that has:

999MHzMemory Clock
1792MBStandard Memory Config
GDDR3Memory Interface
896-bitMemory Interface Width
223.8Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)

is not capable of running a game over 60fps if it is using the hardware resources properly.

It is actually most likely your Gen 2 i7 1.9ghz, because this game uses more CPU resources than any other hardware resources on your computer; that 1.9GHZ clock speed is definitely the reason that you’re bottlenecking.

Try to get a new CPU, it should improve the FPS by around 10-20FPS max, depending on what CPU you get. I know a lot of Intel users get around 80FPS while AMD CPU users struggle to get over 60FPS… but that’s by no means the AMD CPUs’ fault, rather it’s because AMD has their own unique CPU architectures different from Intel (so some optimization on Intel CPUs won’t work on AMD CPUs).

http://www.techspot.com/review/139-geforce-gtx-295/page4.html
Anyways, the bottom line is that (@ OP) a GTX295 is more than capable of delivering constant 30FPS+ at max settings. My GTX260 only dips to around the 20s in certain areas, but mostly it’s good 30+FPS (and I use the Faildozer – AMD FX 6100 3.3GHZ Hex-Cores + 8Gig Ram).

Here is the main problem Gen 2 i7 1.9ghz

10 – 4. Getting new mobo with Gen 3 Intel Core i7-3770 today. Will re-install windows too just in case. If this doesnt work im gona punch my cat in the face and i don’t even have a cat.

I checked out the dust yesterday actually the GTX was clean, CPU was a bit dusty but nothing visible that would cause any blockage.

Thanks for your advise.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65714

From the specs you posted I’m guessing this is your processor?

If so, your low performance in GW2 isn’t that surprising. The processor model number is i7-3517U and that U at the end indicates it’s a cut-down version that will yield much lower performance than a regular i7 desktop chip. This is because U chips are not just heavily downclocked, but usually have about half their cores disabled as well, so most of them are pretty poor compared to their high end counterparts.

Looking at the bare specs, the 3517U has 2 physical cores, 4 threads and a base speed of 1.9ghz with turbo upto 2.8 or 3.0 ghz (with respectively 1 or 2 cores in use).

Hyperthreading has very little impact on game performance, so the 4 threads are irrelevant in GW2 and the performance of the 3517U will be at the level of a dual core CPU. Since GW2 is very CPU heavy it will easily max out the 2 physical cores or near enough, which means the CPU will be maxed at 2.8ghz on turbo.

This means under ideal circumstances it should be able to perform similar to the cheaper Sandy Bridge i3’s or at worst somewhere in between the SB Pentiums and i3’s, which means you should be able to get around 20-30fps I would have thought, but from the FPS numbers you quoted it seems you’re a bit on the low side of that. One explanation for that might be that your processor isn’t able to get upto 2.8ghz with turbo (which is usually heat-related, since turbo will only overclock the CPU if the temperature allows it) or that turbo isn’t kicking in at all (could be heat-related, but could also be a defect of some sort or a misconfiguration in the BIOS). It certainly sounds like you’re getting performance closer to a 2.0-2.4ghz dual core rather than a 2.8ghz one.

One thing I would suggest doing to find out more is to install a program (or 2 seperate programs) that allow you to check your CPU clockspeeds (to see if the turbo boost is working and how high it’s going while playing GW2) and your CPU temperature (to make sure your CPU isn’t getting too hot for turbo to work). I personally like Realtemp, since it’s a nice and simply utility, it’s free and it shows both of these things in one window, but other seperate alternatives (which I used in the past) are CPU-Z (for clockspeeds) and HWmonitor (for temps).

I dont know of any gen2 i7 that runs at a non turbo stock speed of 1.9ghz. What i7 is it exactly and what does it turbo up to ?

If your playing GW2 with the cpu runnign at 1.9ghz you will deffiantly have poor performance due ot the cpu. If this isnt intential its possible that ether you have a software/bios issue or a faulty cpu. Get more specific info on the cpu and let us know.

I would agree that the processor is most likely the cause of the low FPS, however it could be a combination of the CPU and GPU.

The GTX295 is a Dual-GPU graphics card which requires SLI to be enabled.
SLI and Guild Wars 2 are still a bit flaky judging from report from other members of the forums with similar dual-GPU cards.

P.S. nice gpu, its an awesome card, I traded mines over to a friend (I had 2 of them). They gave me fun times

I know that certain newer CPUs also doesn’t work very well with GW2’s engine. My hunch is that the optimization they did on GW2 were mostly resourced based, because every brand/chipset of CPU has unique resource codings (like the athlons, bulldozer; these AMD drivers have totally different archetectures. The i3s, i5s, i7s, etc. – Intel CPUs have more of a similar coding methods cuz they’re all i-based).

I did a test on my FX 6100 (some guy suggested this), where I set my GW2’s Affinity to CPU0 instead of All CPUs; my frame kitten dropped to 4 FPS. Then turning back on CPU1 gave me 8FPS, then CPU2 gave me 16, then finally I turned back on all of them and it gave me back to my normal 20ish FPS (because I’m at lions arch where that’s usual for my FPS).

I think this game is definitely still CPU bond, but I’m assuming some CPUs are coping with it better than others. Again, this is just all the hunch from watching CPU loadings, and whether it is an issue with the resource distribution or not – I don’t know for certain. But I hope Anet would take a look at their resources, just to check that its engine is effeciently using the CPU & GPU resources (my GPU only runs about 50-60% in-game, most other games I have 99% of GPU loads at all times).

p.s. I tried the same process for TF2, and my frames were lowest around 35 FPS, and I had multicore rendering disabled.

Thanks for the additional advise. I will check the temp and clock speeds today. Then ill still replace the mobo and the CPU with the new stuff i bought. I’ll also post what my CPU model actually is. There is a good chance that i’m off by a few Ghz. However it’s not the one that was linked i know for a fact i have 8 MB Smart cache and 4 physical cores.

If replacing the to a new CPU makes all the difference that at least we would know for a fact that it was in fact a CPU bottle neck.

Slip

Also just to add for comparison, which btw really grinds my gears. This is my laptop

http://ca.asus.com/en/Notebooks/Versatile_Performance/K55VD/#specifications

Its i7
8 Gb or ram
NVIDIA® GeForce® 610M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM

On Mid/High settings im getting 60+ FPS
In Lians Arch im getting 45+ FPS and every single player loads fast and i get no lag at all. I guess it’s some what safe to say that between my desktop and laptop the biggest difference is the CPU since GW2 is CPU intensive. I hope you guys are right.

I fixed it, was a heating issue with CPU. My heat sink wasn’t properly set because of that my CPU wouldnt go into turbo mode. Getting solid 60+ FPS. Thanks for all the advise.

FYI i have a i7 920. So it’s 2.3Ghz

FluffyDoe.7539:

CPU & Optimization issue. There’s no way a card that has:

999MHzMemory Clock
1792MBStandard Memory Config
GDDR3Memory Interface
896-bitMemory Interface Width
223.8Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)

is not capable of running a game over 60fps if it is using the hardware resources properly.

It is actually most likely your Gen 2 i7 1.9ghz, because this game uses more CPU resources than any other hardware resources on your computer; that 1.9GHZ clock speed is definitely the reason that you’re bottlenecking.

Try to get a new CPU, it should improve the FPS by around 10-20FPS max, depending on what CPU you get. I know a lot of Intel users get around 80FPS while AMD CPU users struggle to get over 60FPS… but that’s by no means the AMD CPUs’ fault, rather it’s because AMD has their own unique CPU architectures different from Intel (so some optimization on Intel CPUs won’t work on AMD CPUs).

http://www.techspot.com/review/139-geforce-gtx-295/page4.html
Anyways, the bottom line is that (@ OP) a GTX295 is more than capable of delivering constant 30FPS+ at max settings. My GTX260 only dips to around the 20s in certain areas, but mostly it’s good 30+FPS (and I use the Faildozer – AMD FX 6100 3.3GHZ Hex-Cores + 8Gig Ram).

Just for the record,i have FX8120 with watercooling H60 at 4.3Ghz,solid 80+fps,and in an empty map i have 120fps solid,GTX 660!!! Its not about intel or amd,its about how the components bound together,mainboard,cpu,ram and vga.
But i will give you an advise about the FX series,they are working perfectly on windows 8,i used to have Win 7 64Bit and my cpu didnt worked right,the fault was on windows because the build didnt support FX series very well,and microsoft have fixed this issue with win 8,i brought the upgrade pack and then i saw the light xD xD,very good managened with FX series.

Slip.1507:

I fixed it, was a heating issue with CPU. My heat sink wasn’t properly set because of that my CPU wouldnt go into turbo mode. Getting solid 60+ FPS. Thanks for all the advise.

FYI i have a i7 920. So it’s 2.3Ghz

This would make sense then since the CPU was probably being throttled back to 1.9GHz to lower the voltage to help lower temperatures. Its always a wise choice to check your PC over once a month for a quick dust out and make sure everything is still seated properly.

I have quite a few fans in my computer and the amount of dust it gathers is unbelievable sometimes. I have filters in front of the fans so every fortnight I clean them and check the rest of the internals once a month just to keep on top of things.