Guild Wars 2

I was just wondering how optimized the game is for CPUs with hyperthreading. I know that most games (if not all) don’t get any performance increase from the extra threads, but Guild wars like most MMOs is CPU heavy game.

Can anyone with an i7 or similar AMD CPU share his core/thread usage while playing GW2 ? Or even better if you can benchmark with and without hyperthreading enabled?

Hyperthreading isn’t something one can really optimize for. Hyperthreading takes advantage of the over designed nature of Intel cores where assigning a 2nd thread per core can raise the overall IPC (instructions per cycle) of the core. The cost is having the two threads share the core’s L1 and L2 caches which may cause additional memory fetches from the L3 cache and thus lower the IPC. That’s why you don’t see a huge boost in a lot of applications.

Apps that stream a lot of data to process, like video compression/RT rendering apps don’t really care too much about the cache loss since the main block of code is duplicated across multiple threads and the data is accessed once for processing. That’s why you see a 30% or more boost with an i7 over a similarly clocked i5 in apps like Cinebench or file compression apps.

Now since this game isn’t threaded all that well to start with, with two-ish primary threads an a handful of threads that each run only for a fairly short time, HT boost should be minimal.

I’m just curious to see the fps difference between i5 and i7.

Aidaho.1857:

I’m just curious to see the fps difference between i5 and i7.

There is a decent difference. On my i5-4670K I was getting 80-110FPS when I upgraded to my i7-4790K I was getting 130-160FPS.

This was with performance settings (low CPU settings in game, high GPU settings, non crowded areas).

Both CPUs clocked at 4.2Ghz.

The thing with HT is you will spawn an additional worker thread per physical Core. GW2 primarily uses 1 core for the GPU engine, and will spawn 50+ smaller threads on the other cores. These smaller threads do not hit nearly as hard as the GPU worker thread, so thats where HT comes in. it will load the additional worker threads more evenly across the less used physical cores as the GPU thread starts to hit harder.

You can see this happen in Taskmanager by looking at the performance tab and watching your CPU graphs, per core. I constantly have 1 Core/Thread at 80-90% while the rest float between 12%-40%. If i disable HT, then those 12%-40% cores jump to 40%-60%.

But there is a draw back, GW2’s GPU thread is soo poorly coded, even an i7 will not help above an i5 for crowded areas. Its nice for general play areas, but if you are doing world boss trains, WvW, and the like for 60%+ of your game time, its not worth upgrading from an i5 to an i7.