Guild Wars 2

Hello;

So first of all I would like to let you know what my system consists of:
CPU: AMD FX-8350 Piledriver
GPU: EVGA GTX 680 SuperClocked
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (1600)
and a load of other stuff which nobody cares about

So today I decided to play a bit of that there Guild Wars 2… And BAM! Framerate bursting and immense slow-mo/speed up moments (yet, this actually still runs better than a certain game about rifts…. and storm legions… which by the way dropped my frames down as low as 8… and as high as 30… Yes… 30 was the high…But I digress).

So I did some experimentation….
As you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efRZe7ZFeKo (no need to fullscreen it ^^ bad quality, ripped it straight from my stream)

The culprit: Ultra – Shadow Quality is going to slay any piece of hardware you have. Even if you take EVERYTHING out of the game and just turn the shadows to ultra… Doom is what awaits.

So there you are. I am very happy to help you.

P.S. And oddly enough, even though the streaming software had its own 4 cores (as did guild wars 2) the FPS in GW2 halved… XD
Normally these fps spikes/bursts bring me from 70 to 11 FPS in a single camera sweep… Whereas on high shadows its hovering at 50-80 constantly.

So I upgraded to a GTX770.

And BAM! Same as above.

i7 2600K @ 4000
Asus GTX770 2GB
8 GB 1600

I would really like to see some shadow optimizations.
I feel only a slight upgrade from my old GTX460. It’s not even funny.

GW2 is CPU bound and horribly optimized. Unless you are running at 5GHz you do not need a graphics card above a 460.

The biggest or rather the only noticeable frame rate impacting settings for the CPU are as said shadows (above medium) and reflections.

“Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games.”
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

- back in the day, we use to farm laurels, daily, for months at a time just to get ascended gear at 1-5fps, we’d overheat our cpu’s and crash our computers ….barefoot….and we loved it!! -cough-

well i run 8150,7970 and on high settings max fps in LA is 34 when i lower shadows from high to none max im getting is 45(lower 35) stil crap

Yeah, ultra shadows in this game are a pretty big hit. The sad thing is, they don’t even look great. The render distance/view distance in which they fade from static shadows to dynamic shadows is horrible, even on ultra. Such a jarring effect seeing this line move across all shadows a few hundred feet in front of your character.

SonicTHI.3217:

GW2 is CPU bound and horribly optimized. Unless you are running at 5GHz you do not need a graphics card above a 460.

The biggest or rather the only noticeable frame rate impacting settings for the CPU are as said shadows (above medium) and reflections.

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree upon the 5GHz point…. GW2 is indeed CPU bound, but not in a PVE/superlow graphics situation.

In my video I demonstrated this by turning all the settings to Low and leaving shadows alone on Ultra in an area where I’m alone with a few NPCs…. and a goat.

No matter how bad you wish to make any modern day processor look; this issue is not related to hardware. It has to relate to the recent optimization hotfix (thread allocation) where there’s a possibility that ultra shadows have not been threaded correctly.

I say this because I’m more than 95% sure that Cattlefield 3/Frysis 3 runs far better shadows/shading than GW2.

But thank you for your input

P.S. I’d take back the optimization accusation if I were you; my GW2 spreads itself across all 8 cores quite neatly.

fuzzout.8652:

SonicTHI.3217:

GW2 is CPU bound and horribly optimized. Unless you are running at 5GHz you do not need a graphics card above a 460.

The biggest or rather the only noticeable frame rate impacting settings for the CPU are as said shadows (above medium) and reflections.

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree upon the 5GHz point…. GW2 is indeed CPU bound, but not in a PVE/superlow graphics situation.

In my video I demonstrated this by turning all the settings to Low and leaving shadows alone on Ultra in an area where I’m alone with a few NPCs…. and a goat.

No matter how bad you wish to make any modern day processor look; this issue is not related to hardware. It has to relate to the recent optimization hotfix (thread allocation) where there’s a possibility that ultra shadows have not been threaded correctly.

I say this because I’m more than 95% sure that Cattlefield 3/Frysis 3 runs far better shadows/shading than GW2.

But thank you for your input

P.S. I’d take back the optimization accusation if I were you; my GW2 spreads itself across all 8 cores quite neatly.

I m sorry but you are utterly wrong. Your CPU spreads GW2 over multiple cores so to you (in task manager) it looks like all your cores are being evenly used and in a sense (thermals) they are but one thread is actually only running on one core at a time and there is one thread that your CPU would need 5GHz to actually complete all the instructions in it. It does not so your framerate takes a hit. Only if your CPU would be used 100% you could say the game is properly optimized for it.
Educate yourself better before you call people liars.

Sadly I have to agree with SonicTHI here. You need to use something like Process Explorer to see that while GW2 has 40 or more threads, the bulk of CPU usage is on 3 with 2 of them essentially synced with each other thus effectively splitting a single core while the third is occupying a core’s worth of CPU cycles.

What I disagree with SonicTHI is whether or not the game could be structured any better in regard the ability to scale to total available cores. I don’t. Thus when push comes to shove it’s single core performance that is the limiting factor. In which case his OCing suggestion makes sense as a way to boost performance.

SonicTHI.3217:

fuzzout.8652:

SonicTHI.3217:

GW2 is CPU bound and horribly optimized. Unless you are running at 5GHz you do not need a graphics card above a 460.

The biggest or rather the only noticeable frame rate impacting settings for the CPU are as said shadows (above medium) and reflections.

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree upon the 5GHz point…. GW2 is indeed CPU bound, but not in a PVE/superlow graphics situation.

In my video I demonstrated this by turning all the settings to Low and leaving shadows alone on Ultra in an area where I’m alone with a few NPCs…. and a goat.

No matter how bad you wish to make any modern day processor look; this issue is not related to hardware. It has to relate to the recent optimization hotfix (thread allocation) where there’s a possibility that ultra shadows have not been threaded correctly.

I say this because I’m more than 95% sure that Cattlefield 3/Frysis 3 runs far better shadows/shading than GW2.

But thank you for your input

P.S. I’d take back the optimization accusation if I were you; my GW2 spreads itself across all 8 cores quite neatly.

I m sorry but you are utterly wrong. Your CPU spreads GW2 over multiple cores so to you (in task manager) it looks like all your cores are being evenly used and in a sense (thermals) they are but one thread is actually only running on one core at a time and there is one thread that your CPU would need 5GHz to actually complete all the instructions in it. It does not so your framerate takes a hit. Only if your CPU would be used 100% you could say the game is properly optimized for it.
Educate yourself better before you call people liars.

Jeez save the cannon shells XD
But in any way; ok you won me over, then… single-core; this game is.

Anyhow I was initially writing about what I had experienced with ultra shadows but I WILL tell you that I had this game running on a Q6600 (with GTX550ti) at 2.4 GHz at 18-40 FPS at launch (obvious GPU limitations; as I was noticing those on a grand scheme of things) and I’m 70% sure I had ultra shadows enabled at the time; so let’s agree to disagree. However I will admit that I never did wvw but this is not the topic; the topic is ultra shadows; and I can’t see them alone being the destroyer of framerates, and if they are clearly this topic is in the right place then.

Hopefully anet does some testing/fixing in regards to that.