Guild Wars 2

This is an update/rework of my previous thread, which is a couple of months old. It can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Predictable-FPS-drop-Nvidia-cards-fail/first#post914449

The issue:
Every ~1-10 minutes, my FPS tanks for no good reason. I’m running 50+ normally, and it drops to about 10-15. This is not correlative with activity going on; it’s the same in WvW, major cities, or just sitting around looking at wall. I’ve tested this EXTENSIVELY… as in, stopwatches, every diagnostic program out there, the works. It seems completely random.

Things it’s definitely not:
-Lag/latency
-Program running in background
-A rig issue (will list specs below)
-Graphics settings too high (they’re all on med-low)
-Drivers issue (I’ve tried everything from old drivers to beta drivers)

The rig:
-AMD FX-8120 Eight-core processor @ 3.10 GHz
-8 GB DDR3
-Win 7 x64
-NVIDIA 560ti

• * *
  Now for the updated part. I left off where the techie I’m talking to from A-net told me that my GPU/CPU clock speeds were variant from “factory default,” and that I should adjust them. I thought it was bunk. I tried it anyway. It didn’t work.

But here’s the interesting bit: Running MSI Afterburner while in-game, I noticed the following changes when “The Issue” occurs. The top list are the video card’s specs NORMALLY, while the bottom lists the specs WHILE THE PROBLEM OCCURS. Check this out:

Control (issue not occurring):
GPU Temperature: 49
GPU Usage (%): Varied, from 30-50
Fan speed %: 54
Fan Tachometer, RPM: ~2400
Core clock, MHz: 823
Shader clock, MHz: 1645
Memory clock, MHz: 1998
Memory Usage, MB: ~435

During Frame Dip:
GPU Temperature: 46
GPU Usage (%): 10-12
Fan speed %: 52
Fan Tachometer, RPM: No change.
Core clock, MHz: 405
Shader clock, MHz: 810
Memory clock, MHz: 324
Memory Usage, MB: No change.

As you can see, the card is actually underperforming when the issue occurs, rather than performing at peak efficiency as if trying to handle a huge load. (Note: CPU performance was sporadic from 20-50% workload across all cores at all times, with no change when the issue occurred). Please note that this ONLY occurs with GW2, and not any other games like League of Legends, Portal 2, Darkspore, and etc.

What do you guys think? This is crazy. I’m kinda wondering if my PSU is under-juicing my card. I’ve changed the card to an old 9800 GTX+ and the problem still occurs, so it’s not the card itself.

If anyone has any other ideas, let me know. It’s a brand new Thermaltake 650-watt PSU.

• Monitor the CPU and look at the graph when you notice the dip. HwINFO can monitor all the stuff in afterburner including cpu and other stuff and plot them on a graph.
• Try re-installing windows to rule out any software glitches.

I have similar configuration (AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, little worse CPU and little better GPU though) and i have the same problems with FPS drops down to 10-15 from 40-50, however they occur much more often, they can even be forced with shaking the camera actively and rapid use of different skills.
And i hugely suspect, that there is a problem with GW2 optimization under AMD CPU, as most FPS problems i have read about on this forum all occur on AMD configuration.
No idead what to do with it.

Goorman.7916:

And i hugely suspect, that there is a problem with GW2 optimization under AMD CPU, as most FPS problems i have read about on this forum all occur on AMD configuration.
No idead what to do with it.

See Part 4.8 here for explanation