Guild Wars 2

For the past week and a half I’ve been having some pretty noticeable FPS issues. Normally I run the game at medium-high settings with around 50fps. Lately it’s been more like 20-30fps at best.

Today, in an instance staring at a corner at the lowest possible settings I get a max of 22fps, and normal gameplay is 8-12fps, 4-6fps during combat. Here are my system specs:

i5-4670K @ 3.4 GHz (haven’t gotten around to overclocking it, it’s still pretty new)
AMD 6990 @ 910 MHz / 1500 MHz
Samsung 840 Pro SSD
Windows 8.1 64-bit

I haven’t done the hours of testing yet, but at first glance my card didn’t seem to go above 60% and my cpu was around 30-40% max usage, not running other programs.

I get that there are a lot of players on, though I would assume the low fps is some graphic issue and not lag/connectivity issues. Has anyone else with similar specs had issues in the past few weeks with their fps?

That, or maybe I’ve missed some common knowledge optimizations that I’ve been looking for?

That is indeed strange. I have a friend with a Radeon HD 6990 and an Intel Ivybridge i3 clocked at 4.2 GHz and plays this game just fine at max I think.

What you’re experiencing is indeed local on your computer and nothing to do with your connection.

Judging by saying that your CPU is hitting around 30-40% max use and the graphics card about 60%, I’d wager that your CPU is being down-clocked by something either in a software setting or it is hardware related. I got a few things however you can try to be sure, however.

Have you checked that your CPU is not throttling when it shouldn’t be?
Have you checked to make sure there’s no dust restricting airflow?
Have you checked that the 6990 is not throttling from overheating or dust in fan (same thing) ?
Have you tried using GPU-Z to check and see that the card is operating at X16 lanes on PCIe 2.0? It should be operating at X16 lanes given that that’s a dual chip graphics card. Though I’m not sure how it’d do on X8. Can’t imagine it being too much of a difference.
Did you check to see that maybe the machine had switched spontaneously switched to a power plan that reduced processing and or graphics performance?

There is also giving the -repair function command on the GW2.exe I think. I’m not entirely sure how you do that but it seems to have worked for people previously.

Thanks for the reply!

I noticed that in CPU-Z my cpu clock is fluctuating rapidly between 3400-3800 MHz, so there may be some optimization or turbo boost issues there. I’m looking for a cpu monitoring program to run in game so I can check its usage.

Dust isn’t an issue in any of the case fans, but I cleaned them just to be sure.

While doing more monitoring from my card though, I found something strange. It’s got two gpus and the first one is maxed out at 99% (stable temps) but the second one is only doing 10-18% load. I don’t know if this is something that AMD does with Crossfire, or if Guild Wars 2 isn’t using it correctly.

And… well look at that. It’s running at x8 though it should be x16. I’m 90% sure it’s in the x16 slot on my motherboard, I’ll have to figure out what’s going on there.

Edit: By the way, my motherboard is an ASUS Maximus VI Formula

Well hey there buddy! We both have the same motherboard!

And as for crossfire, Crossfire supports Guild Wars 2, but Guild Wars 2 at times may not support crossfire. If you’re running the game windowed then it’ll only use 1 chip out of the two and a little bit of the second one at times. Though for me, it uses both of my R9 290Xs about the same with the 5760×1080 resolution I’m driving and with maximum settings.

I don’t expect it to be a turbo boost issue. My 4770K sometimes bounces between 3.5 GHz and 3.9 Ghz and I don’t see an issue. It may be your PCIe bus. A simple thing I know of that can work is to re-seat the graphics card or even re-seat it multiple times to ‘clean the connectors’ so they connect 100%. Beyond that I’m not sure how to get it into X16. Both of my R9 290Xs run in X8 but that’s because the i7 of mine only has 16 lanes. I think that’s it? Not sure. But X8 lane is the best most graphics cards can use. Not very often does a single chip graphics card benefit from being in X16 mode.

Yea, I knew about the fullscreen issue with Crossfire, I’m running at 1920×1080 fullscreen. I just got done with re-seating and cleaning the graphics card (and making sure it was in the 16x top slot). No change.

In GPU-Z, when I toggle through the two gpus, one says it is running at x8 2.0 and the other says it is running at x1 2.0. Doing the gpu-z render test doesn’t change their state.

Even if there’s not a huge difference from x8 to x16, if that second gpu is running at x1, that’s got to be a pretty noticeable difference. It would also explain why my card is running as well in performance tests and other games. I thought it was just getting old…

Edit: Updated my drivers from 13.12 to 14.4 with no change. I also went into the BIOS and it says all three channels are x16? That doesn’t match the manual, but it confirms that the card is running at x8. Changing it from Auto to Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 doesn’t move the speed, and I also tried disabling a power save feature for PCIe in the BIOS

Well I know from top to bottom the three PCIe slots on the Formula 6 are 16, 8, and 4. Beyond this I’m unsure what you can do.

There are a lot of different fixes for this. The one that i found helped me a lot was to just turn off Shadows and Reflections. from 20 to 60

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/forum/does-search-button-actually-work

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For AMD cards:

1. Right-click on your desktop and select “Catalyst Control Center.”
2. Select “Preferences” and left-click “Advanced mode.”
3. Click the “Gaming” tab on left.
4. Select “3D Application Settings.”
5. Under the heading “Anti-Aliasing” checkmark “Use application settings” but do not check “Morphological filtering.”
6. Under the heading “Anisotropic filter” checkmark “Use application settings.”
7. Under the heading “Tessellation” checkmark “AMD Optimized.”
8. Under the heading “Catalyst A.I.” move the slider to “Performance.”
9. Under the heading “Wait for vertical sync” move the slider to “On, unless application specifies.”
10. Under the heading “Anti-Aliasing Mode” move the slider to “Performance.”
11. Click “Apply” to save these changes.
12. Start Guild Wars 2.

Once loaded, access the “Graphic Options” window and make the following changes:

1. Change “Refresh Rate” to “60 Hz”
2. Change “Frame Limiter” to “60.”
3. Change “Reflections” to “None.”
4. Change “Render Sampling” to “Native.”
5. Enable “Vertical Sync” at the bottom.

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KelKatar.6541:

Yea, I knew about the fullscreen issue with Crossfire, I’m running at 1920×1080 fullscreen. I just got done with re-seating and cleaning the graphics card (and making sure it was in the 16x top slot). No change.

In GPU-Z, when I toggle through the two gpus, one says it is running at x8 2.0 and the other says it is running at x1 2.0. Doing the gpu-z render test doesn’t change their state.

Even if there’s not a huge difference from x8 to x16, if that second gpu is running at x1, that’s got to be a pretty noticeable difference. It would also explain why my card is running as well in performance tests and other games. I thought it was just getting old…

Edit: Updated my drivers from 13.12 to 14.4 with no change. I also went into the BIOS and it says all three channels are x16? That doesn’t match the manual, but it confirms that the card is running at x8. Changing it from Auto to Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 doesn’t move the speed, and I also tried disabling a power save feature for PCIe in the BIOS

Your Link speeds should be 8x/8x/0x on the Haswell Platform, as Haswell only has 16x PCi-E lanes. So supported configs are 16x/0x/0x, 8x/8x/0x, 8x/4x/4×.

Version 2 is due to your 6990, being PCI-E v2.

You need to also make sure you are using the top 2 PCI-E slots and not the Top (near the CPU) and the Bottom, skipping the middle.

I had similar problems. I got a new graphics card and it helped a little bit. I read on the internet that GW2 uses system RAM even when it would make more sense to use graphics card RAM and for that reason it’s important to have as much system RAM as possible. I noticed that when GW2 was running that my system reported roughly 2 GB of RAM in use, give or take.

I upgraded my system RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB. I would have gone to 16 GB, (the theoretical max for my motherboard and operating system), but some sources advised against going past 8 GB with my setup. It made a HUGE difference. I had been running with all my graphics settings at their bare minimum. I’ve sense turned several graphics settings to their maximum. With current settings, in a WvW zerg vs an opposing zerg, my system uses roughly 4 GB out of the 8 GB. It’s very smooth, but all the details are kind of distracting. I may turn down some settings for WvW for that reason.

Thanks for the advice guys.

@Brutality

I’ve already tried messing with shadows and reflections after reading up on them, it was the first thing I tried. Granted, I did see a performance gain of 5-8fps, but that was a gain from 15-20fps to begin with. I’ve also done all those CCC optimizations.

@sirsquishy

That makes sense, and the card should be running at x16 2.0. It’s in the top slot and I’ve verified in my mobo manual that that is the x16 lane.

It would make sense to me if both GPUs on the card were running at x8 2.0, but they’re running at x8 and x1 respectively. Plus the GPU-Z screenshots I’ve seen around the web for the 6990 have displayed x16 2.0.

@Nutjob

While granted I haven’t monitored memory usage, I’ve got 8gigs of Corsair Dominator Platinum, and they’re beautiful. Plus I’m still encountering fps issues outside of GW2 in Furmark, which I’m using to run gpu tests.

KelKatar.6541:

Thanks for the advice guys.

@Brutality

I’ve already tried messing with shadows and reflections after reading up on them, it was the first thing I tried. Granted, I did see a performance gain of 5-8fps, but that was a gain from 15-20fps to begin with. I’ve also done all those CCC optimizations.

@sirsquishy

That makes sense, and the card should be running at x16 2.0. It’s in the top slot and I’ve verified in my mobo manual that that is the x16 lane.

It would make sense to me if both GPUs on the card were running at x8 2.0, but they’re running at x8 and x1 respectively. Plus the GPU-Z screenshots I’ve seen around the web for the 6990 have displayed x16 2.0.

@Nutjob

While granted I haven’t monitored memory usage, I’ve got 8gigs of Corsair Dominator Platinum, and they’re beautiful. Plus I’m still encountering fps issues outside of GW2 in Furmark, which I’m using to run gpu tests.

do you have ANY other PCI-E slots populated?!

sirsquishy.8531:

do you have ANY other PCI-E slots populated?!

Nope, though I know what you’re talking about. Sadly there aren’t any other cards that would affect its performance, just the 6990.

On a (I have no clue but possibly) related note, when I try to flip the 6990 BIOS switch, I don’t get any monitor output from the card. It’s currently sitting at BIOS 1 (830MHz), and I don’t get anything from BIOS 2 (880MHz).

My motherboard freezes at code 62 “Installation of the PCH Runtime Services” when BIOS 2 is set on the 6990.

it really sounds like your HD6990 might be dying then….

Well, small update that I don’t think changed anything.

I updated my BIOS drivers, since a later version had come out that added support to 4th gen Intel processors, so makes sense that I need that since I’ve got a 4670k.

While thinking of BIOS drivers, I took a look at my GPU drivers and used atiflash to examine them. The master gpu looked fine, but the slave gpu had unknown spi and other not too good looking messages.

Thinking ok, that’s got to be the problem, I spent a long time trying to flash the 880MHz version of the 6990 BIOS. I had lots of failures, no boots, and a success-ish (gpu-z said it was at 880, but when testing the card wouldn’t go above 250).

Finally I got both the master and the slave gpus showing proper BIOS in atiflash using the default 830MHz BIOS I downloaded from techpowerup.

Possibly Important Update!

After looking at the gpus’ BIOS, I realized that my main/master and secondary/slave readings I posted before were backwards. The master is running at PCI-E x1 2.0 and the slave is running at x8.

There’s also some wierd number differences in the shaders property of GPU-Z. Here are the screenshots of the two gpus:

Master: http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/14/07/03/70k.png
Slave: http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/14/07/03/e0k.png

I’m feeling confident that if I can somehow get the master to run at x8 or x16, I’ll see the proper performance for my card.

Thanks again to everyone for your advice!

The latest BIOS revision of the Maximus 6 allows it to support the Devil’s Canyon iteration, the real tock in the Intel ‘Tick-Tock’ chain. Haswell to Broadwell is more of a “Tick-ety-Tock” with the ety being Devil’s Canyon.

Same problem here.

I haven’t played GW2 for ~1 year and just returned to check out season 2 – and now my FPS are 5-10 on high/auto-detected settings and 10-20 on the lowest settings possible. The game’s just frigging unplayable.

A year ago, I got ~30 fps in most areas with medium settings.

Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 955, 4×3.2 Ghz
AMD Radeon HD 7870
4GB ram

Oddly enough, CPU usage is ~25% each core while the GPU is maxed at 100%

Verify your GPU link speeds are 8x or 16×.

Turn down Character Limit, Reflections, and shadows.

Dry Top has a lot of reflection data in the sand. I had to disable reflections while in dry top to get my normal frame rate. Not sure whats going on there, but with reflections on my FPS drops from 170~ down to 50 while there.

sirsquishy.8531:

Dry Top has a lot of reflection data in the sand. I had to disable reflections while in dry top to get my normal frame rate. Not sure whats going on there, but with reflections on my FPS drops from 170~ down to 50 while there.

Happens on my system too. It’s probably drawing a large part of the zone upside down for the (invisible) water plane’s reflection texture :/

tota.4893:

sirsquishy.8531:

Dry Top has a lot of reflection data in the sand. I had to disable reflections while in dry top to get my normal frame rate. Not sure whats going on there, but with reflections on my FPS drops from 170~ down to 50 while there.

Happens on my system too. It’s probably drawing a large part of the zone upside down for the (invisible) water plane’s reflection texture :/

If you have ever been under the ground, you know there is a GIANT body of water down there, and it reflects even with only sky/terrain enabled.

Im sure the same is with Dry top. But I also have a feeling that there is more reflection data in the sand that is floating in the air, during storms, and on the ground, to give it that dry desert feeling.

All reflections at dry top KILLS my system…28FPS max. Sky/Terrain, 45-55FPS on average, and no reflections, 170FPS.

Well guys, I think I’ve reached the end of what I can do.

I pulled my 6990 and plugged it into a second computer, still getting the x1 / x8 speeds. Cleaned it thoroughly and plugged it back into my computer, same speeds.

However, I took a 6570 that was in the second computer (which read at x16 2.0) and plugged it into the slot my 6990 was in. Voila! x16 speeds according at GPU-Z.

Both were using the same drivers, it’s got to be a hardware problem. I’ll look into my options for either getting it repaired (it’s way out of warranty by now) or look into new cards. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to try Nvidia?

Thanks again to everyone for your help and advice!

derLoko.2185:

Same problem here.

I haven’t played GW2 for ~1 year and just returned to check out season 2 – and now my FPS are 5-10 on high/auto-detected settings and 10-20 on the lowest settings possible. The game’s just frigging unplayable.

A year ago, I got ~30 fps in most areas with medium settings.

Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 955, 4×3.2 Ghz
AMD Radeon HD 7870
4GB ram

Oddly enough, CPU usage is ~25% each core while the GPU is maxed at 100%

THIS IS EXACTLY MY PROBLEM. 30% CPU usage and 100% GPU wtf?