Guild Wars 2

Shorter version below

After a reboot of my system today, GW2 has become unplayable.
I’m not getting more than 10-11fps. When I choose best performance it sets everything to low and I still only get like 13 fps.

My system can handle much more, I used to play with high settings smoothly:
i5 processor
ATI 6870

Now first I thought it had to do with my processor dropping down, because I did get temperature warnings from the ASUS software after long play sessions, and I know I have to do something about it now that it gets hotter outside as well.

But I disabled all that Intel stuff which controls this throttling, and I get confirmation in CPU-Z where it shows a steady 3.4GHZ CPU core speed (so no throttling)

Still same result in GW2.

I rebooted the computer because I removed my Creative sound card cause I wanted to start using the onboard sound controller.
I removed all unused drivers with drivercleaner.

In CPU-Z, on the memory tab it says that the memory is running at 668mhz. Shouldn’t that be higher?

Anyway I’m not here to get my PC fixed, honestly I’m not sure it needs fixing at all. The processor is running at full capacity. Why isn’t GW2 using it?

Performance literally changed overnight. I played GW2 just fine yesterday and this dramatic performance drop never happened.
Strange thing is, it ran smooth even with temperature warnings. Now I’m not even getting in higher temperatures zones and it runs crappy :-)

Any help is appreciated.

Short version:
Sudden performance drop. Worked fine yesterday.
Throttling disabled. Temperatures are decent (game starts at lowest temperature). Still same problem.
Best performance setting sets everything to lowest settings and I still get like 13fps.
System:
CPU: i5
GPU: ATI 6870

Simple question?

Did you clean the heatsink of your cpu and is your thermal paste is dry?

loseridoit.2756:

Simple question?

Did you clean the heatsink of your cpu and is your thermal paste is dry?

No, as I said I know I’ll have to do something about the CPU temperature.
But the game runs crappy even when the temperature is low. And when I say low I mean 55C-60C.
I just tried again, and temperature was 50-55.

So it’s not really relevant anymore.

Those temps are fine if they stay at that.
How much are your CPU and GPU being used while playing? Play for 5-10 minutes and take an average usage percentage of the CPU and do the same for the GPU. Report back with those numbers and we can go from there.

ALPSquid.3752:

Those temps are fine if they stay at that.
How much are your CPU and GPU being used while playing? Play for 5-10 minutes and take an average usage percentage of the CPU and do the same for the GPU. Report back with those numbers and we can go from there.

The game is unplayable but I ran around a bit for 5 minutes and…:
CPU: average 16%
GPU: 99% activity

CPU load is rather on the low side isn’t it

The CPU is fine as long as the GPU is running as much as it can be, which it is. From those numbers it’s very odd to get such low FPS. When was the last time you updated your graphics drivers?
If an update does nothing, you might try re-seating the graphics card; it may have some dust in it or just not be sitting right. Also have look at memory usage while the game is running, both video and system memory.

I installed latest GPU drivers a few weeks ago but that’s not even important cause I reïnstalled them today. I accidentally removed the drivers when I wanted to remove the Creative drivers :-)

Well it would make sense if the card isn’t sitting right, I did move the computer so that I can take out the Creative card. But it’s well seated.

I’ll try to completely re-seat the card. But I have not many hopes.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I think I had the exact same issue during BETA. I was very hesitant whether or not to buy the game because of this performance issue and no helpful answers from Anet.
But somehow it worked very well when I bought it, until today.

The only thing I did was remove the creative card. Remove the driver. Remove the GPU driver. Install the GPU driver and enable the CPU visualization setting in the BIOS (but I already removed it to test).

This made the game unplayable somehow.

I think I’ll reinstall the game now, you never know. Perhaps that’s what made the difference between the BETA problem and launch for me.

Thanks ALPSquid for bringing up that simple and obvious, yet very important idea of re-seathing the card. I’m back in business. FPS is back like before.

I unplugged the additional power cables from the card, removed the card. Placed the card back and plugged the power cables back.

I also did a quick vacuum cleaning everywhere. Temperature is much better now (staying below 60!), but I don’t think that was an issue right?

So I think I touched something when I removed the Creative card. So stupid…

Cheers

Excellent, glad I could help and that you got it sorted! You’re temperatures were fine, yeah, but removing the dust every so often is always a good idea

I’ll share some additional experiences.

The quality and fps wasn’t really EXACTLY like it was, but very close (much better than 10fps at low settings for sure!).
But I thought it just needs some tweaking. While doing that I was getting very upset by the sound quality of the onboard controller. It was aweful.

So I installed back the Creative card, and for some reason the quality/performance went back up and now it’s exactly like before. CPU temp is not as good as first attempt when it was sitting below 60C, but much better than yesterday. But that’s probably because the CPU is doing more work now for some reason, which I find to be a good thing. It’s more leaning towards 65% (in WvW though), hence probably the small increase of temp compared to first attempt. But the game runs very well at higher quality.

Perhaps the onboard sound was taking to much resources or something. I don’t know.

Overall, compared to yesterday, I won temp by cleaning the fans and found out that I will probably never use onboard sound. Furthermore I found out that this game has a strange way of dealing with resources.

Anyway, thanks for the assistance :-)