Guild Wars 2

My basic set up is this (for more info, see my DXdiag attachment).

OS: Win 7 64 pro
CPU: AMD 1090t, water cooled
GPU: MSI 6970 reference, xfire. Current Beta Driver 12.9. Very lightly overclocked. Core @ 900 (Up from 880) and memory @ 1400 (Up from 1375). Using MSI Afterburner.
RAM: Corsair Vengence, 16 gig @ 1600
Mobo: MSI 790fx-gd65
SSD (x2): Corsair GT (game drive), and Corsair force 3 (OS)
AV: Norton online

I tried many of the fixes that were posted early on. None really worked until I tried something that wasn’t posted. I would get the locked screen then the stuttering sound. Sometimes black/blue screens, system dumps, etc., and would have to completely reboot to play again.

The fixes:

• This first fix made the single biggest change in play-ability of all the following. I had my front side bus overclocked a wee bit. the multiplier increased from the default of 18x to 20×. I returned the multiplier to 18x and no more crashes, even with the AV running running in the background.

• I changed the pagefile system from my OS drive to my third ROM drive which is a regular 300g HD. Then doubled the size of the pagefile, I wanted to eliminate the possibility running out of VM.

• For the Xfire I turned off the EnableULPS and EnableULPS_NA, and turned on the EnableCrossFireAutoLink in the registry.

• I turned on the HPET in Win 7 and on the Mobo

• The file system is set to AHCI.

• The router has QOS set to optimize for throughput

• All drivers current and up-to-date

• Regular registry cleaning and optimization

Google these for clarification and how toos:

• HPET
• DisableULPS crossfire
• AHCI
• Changing pagefile location windows 7
• Optimizing ssd
• QOS

The game now runs for me until I turn it off, YES! I have decent frame rates (30-50 in Lions Arch) with all at high and ultra, but excellent frame rates (50-90 in Lions Arch)with shadows down to med, sampling @ native and reflection @ sky and terrain only.
As a side effect of all this awesome tweaking, my box is now running better than ever as well.

Hope this helps someone out there.
GL.

Pagefile with 16GB of ram, huh? You don’t even need a pagefile with 8GB. Also, having an SSD doesn’t matter except for load times, and whether that SSD is in AHCI or IDE barely matters with that.

I listed that as it was one of the things I did because it was. Even if it was done as a just-in-case scenario. It certainly doesn’t/didn’t harm anything. Also see below @VirtualBS about AHCI.

symbiont.5417:

Pagefile with 16GB of ram, huh? You don’t even need a pagefile with 8GB. Also, having an SSD doesn’t matter except for load times, and whether that SSD is in AHCI or IDE barely matters with that.

An SSD has to be in AHCI mode to enable NCQ and TRIM.

Lets clear one thing about pagefiles.

First, there is no penalty in having one, but there is a benefit — when windows runs out of VM space, it’s there to stop it from mindlessly closing programs at will.

Second, there is a benefit of having a pagefile in different drives (not partitions, drives), since windows will always use the one in the idlest drive of all, as a strategy to minimize any performance impact.

“AHCI mode is not required for TRIM to exist or function, and an AHCI driver does not enable or add TRIM to a PC. TRIM is a SATA protocol command, specifically an ATA Data Set Management command. What is needed is a program to send the TRIM command, and Windows 7 does just that, as well as Windows Server 2008 R2.”

I ran SSDs in IDE mode with Trim enabled for months before I reformatted and switched to AHCI – and that has NOTHING to do with framerate.

If you have enough things running while you’re gaming including the games memory to go over 8GB – let alone 16 GB, then you shouldn’t be gaming period. If you do have the Pagefile on for some strange reason, the benefit to having it on a different drive ended with WinXP/2000. Try again.

There is no guarantee that all SATA controller drivers will transmit trim when working in legacy mode (IDE), or even that all SSDs accept trim in legacy mode. For example:
http://thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/new-sandisk-extreme-ssd-firmware-fixes-trim/
Also, the default MS SATA driver in Windows 7 only transmits trim when in AHCI mode (msahci.sys), unless you specifically update your SATA controller drivers.

Running SSDs in legacy mode is horrible, as you are missing the most important AHCI feature for SSDs: NCQ
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911-2.html

You want AHCI turned on because it is the specification by which Native Command Queuing (a SATA-specific technology) is enabled. SSDs boast incredibly fast response times. So, they realize their best performance when fielding multiple commands simultaneously, consequently benefiting from the parallelism the defines most SSD architectures. This is precisely the reason we see better benchmark performance when we use queue depths of up to 32 versus a queue depth of one.

The benefit of having the pagefile split by several drives did not end with XP/2000. Do your research before you post.

To clarify my original post: The single fix that made the game playable was to return my FSB to its default multiplier. This is a verifiable and repeatable fix on my system.

The other items listed were things that I found/did in my search for a fix that improved the performance on my box, so I kept them in place. (They work for me, your experience may be different!)

Unlike other recommendations, from this forum and other places, which I tried that I found made negative/little/no difference.
Some of the ones that made negative/little/no difference for me were:

• Underclocking my GPU.
• Going straight through my modem.
• Putting my game box in the DMZ.
• Removing the drivers and turning off my on board sound.
• Running in GW2 in window mode
• Disabling xfire
• Disabling desktop composition, and so on.

These were said to help others, but they did not work for me.

Like any info on the web, do some research, use your own discretion, keep what works and discard what doesn’t.

jannock.4758:

To clarify my original post: The single fix that made the game playable was to return my FSB to its default multiplier. This is a verifiable and repeatable fix on my system.

You now have HPET turned on in Windows (the useplatformclock trick) and in the BIOS, correct?

Try to change the FSB again and see if the effects return. In theory, those effects should be because of TSC-related issues, so you should be immune to them now.

First off, I did not say say running in legacy mode wasn’t horrible – nor did I recommend it. You made a blanket statement that was untrue. Why you bother posting one article about a manufacturer screwing up and having to release new firmware to fix their screw up is beyond me. The fact is, TRIM works in legacy mode.

Pagefile, show me some benefits or even logical reasons why you’d need it on in a 64bit high memory system? I’ve done plenty of research and benching.

We could go back and forth all day about this nonsense, that doesn’t change my original point -neither of these things has anything to do with how well or crappy GW2 runs.

Sadness. I tried it with the FSB multiplier back at 20x, but got a crash and computer lock.

symbiont.5417:

First off, I did not say say running in legacy mode wasn’t horrible – nor did I recommend it. You made a blanket statement that was untrue. Why you bother posting one article about a manufacturer screwing up and having to release new firmware to fix their screw up is beyond me. The fact is, TRIM works in legacy mode.

To show the fact that “supposed to work” is very different than it actually working 100% as intented in all scenarios.

My statement was “An SSD has to be in AHCI mode to enable NCQ and TRIM”. I’m so sorry then for making a blanket 50% innacurate statement!

symbiont.5417:

Pagefile, show me some benefits or even logical reasons why you’d need it on in a 64bit high memory system? I’ve done plenty of research and benching.

There are several important reasons for keeping a pagefile. You can start reading about them here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx

symbiont.5417:

We could go back and forth all day about this nonsense, that doesn’t change my original point -neither of these things has anything to do with how well or crappy GW2 runs.

They did for the op, and he wanted to share his experience to help others.