Guild Wars 2

Good Evening

I’ve played GW2 on and off since release, mostly stopping due to hardware limits, recently built a new desktop specs as follows

CPU: AMD FX6300 stock 3.5 clock (Will clock to around 3.8-4.2 as this the best the MB can handle)
MB: Gigabyte 970A-D3P (Was meant to be UD3P but mistakes were made.)
Graphics: Sapphire vapor-x 280x
Ram: Ballistix 1866mhz DDR3 8GB
Harddrive: Seagate 1TB 64MB cache
PSU: Antec 620w High current gamer
Standard fans and case

CPU temps don’t exceed 54 while gaming, watching multiple hardware monitors the CPU usually maxes out at 100% while GPU barely goes above 60%. THIS IS EXPECTED as it is a CPU bound game, the problem is other players are commenting how they get solid 60-70 frames with my setup, yet regardless if my graphic settings are all low, or all high/ultra the frames do not change, I’ve tested this in several open world locations. Major cities are fine – I expect a drop in these, but in the open world… with no-one around but trees, how am I only getting 30 SOMETIMES 40 frames?

Latest drivers even used a sweeper for older drivers, tried unparking CPUS, perhaps I need some software to do it? as I did it manually.

So either something is wrong with my system (unlikely as FC3, BF4, Metro: LL, Batman Arkham city and origins all run at a solid 50-80 frames) or we have a poorly optimized game, which quite frankly shouldn’t be, especially after all these years a small team could have easily optimized it by now.

So if anyone who has the same setup and claims to be getting 60+ frames as I’ve seen in other posts, please enlighten me to your bios setup, windows 8 setup and any OC you’ve done that’s made a difference. Else anyone who can make take the time to make legitimate suggestions please do, as I do enjoy this game but I don’t consider it playable at 30 frames, especially PVP or WvWvW.

For you the fps is limited by the cpu, your 280x is powerful enough to handle the game at ultra which is why the fps is not changing from low to ultra settings. Though you should check your pcie bus speeds via gpuz.

fx cpus and the way dx9 based gw2 engine is implemented in this game do not mix well. All those other games use more modern engines based on more recent api’s that can take advantage of the unique architecture of amd fx cpus.

But for gw2, atm is pretty much intel i5/i7 or just deal with the lower fps. No changes are announced/expected from anet in the near future

Also lower shadows to low/character model limit to low/reflections to none

Game is CPU limited not GPU limited in large events. It also uses a fairly old version of Direct X API, Dx9, which limits leveraging additional cores for rendering purposes.

Your saying that PvP 10vs10 you dont get over 30FPS? What are your settings?

This game runs bette ron win7 than win8 actually that win7 fixes make FX CPu really great against INTEL (not faster but comparable)

Many people dont realize that dual core at 4.5Ghz wont beat a quad core at 2.0Ghz on DX11. Look at MANTLE API (DX12 should be even better or same lvl) suddenly FX 6300 becomes a monster against i5…

Anyway, if you want better performance right now then wait and get i5 4690K with good MB and good cooler and try to OC it. If you dont have money for that kinda CPU then get i5 4690 with cheap MB.

I did few benchmarks and i5 3*** vs FX 6300 and i5 at 3.9Ghz was only about 19% faster than FX at 4.4GHz. Intel is faster by 36% clock per clock in this DX9 games.

Before some fixes and all other things intel was like 80% faster clock per clock.
Then if you think how much money did you spend on MB/cooler/CPU… and that FX cannot get any worse

dodgycookies.4562:

Also lower shadows to low/character model limit to low/reflections to none

I did this on my machine (all amd) and I can finally enjoy the game. Thank you. For anyone experiencing problems with fps do this, itll boost by 30 or 40 fps.

It is unoptimized, despite how long it’s been out, due to limitations as well as the horribly poor per core performance of the FX line which collide into a kittenfest. A “small team” cannot improve on something that is already being pushed to it’s limits without rewriting the entire game.

An i5 would greatly improve your experience, but even so… You still have to keep in mind, this game runs poorly on even the highest end of machines, so there’s only so much you can do and if it’s worth it to you making the switch to Intel.

also if you dont mind playing without sound

-nosound in the command line will disable all ingame sounds/music.

Audio processing takes quite a bit of cpu processing and can give you a bit more fps.