Guild Wars 2

What is the main cause for sporadic FPS dropping?

Gw2 crappy engine from stone age.

Depends where you are and what you are doing tbh. If you are in wvw and there are a lot of people nearby you are gonna take a hit because of all the combat effects etc. It also depends on your system. For example I take a big it in enclosed areas like dungeons and mini dungeons. Pretty much anywhere where the camera is in tight areas and struggles to find a good angle and where there are a lot of light effects such as torches on walls and such.

It seems to me, the more players in one area the bigger the drop.

NeedCoffee.1402:

It seems to me, the more players in one area the bigger the drop.

Isnt that quite obvious? More things at screen=lower FPS, since it needs more horsepower.

But it really suffers with players over NPCs.

Behellagh.1468:

But it really suffers with players over NPCs.

I’m guessing its because player controlled gameobjects have things like rigidbodies and physics and NPCs are more like static objects with a path.

mrauls.6519:

What is the main cause for sporadic FPS dropping?

Anything that is random and not generated by the Game Engine’s API (such as NPCs, scripted Combat…ect)

If the game has to detect then draw (Players movement, attacking, or doing something the game doesn’t already predict) it slows down considerably.

I notice this much more when playing solo story Missions versus playing 5 player Dungeon Missions. I’ll take a much larger FPS hit on dungeon’s over Story (even when there are more ‘NPCs’ on my screen at any given time during ‘peak’ story events then in say, Arah.

THEN there is the rendering. such as Foliage, Particle effects, Armor Effects (Radiant stuff). The more of that you see the harsher your performance is. Since most of that stuff is done on the CPU and not GPU. And even more so if you enable Post Processing Effects, then its almost a 2:1 hit.