Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, quick rundown.

Phenom ii x4 955 @3.6ghz
HD 7950

Getting around 50-60% usage on both gpu and cpu with only around 50fps sitting and 30 moving. WvWvW is aorund 15-25. Anyone know why it wouldnt use 100%? or anyone have/ fixed the same problem?

Well let’s go over some basic stuff first.

Video drivers up to date? I heard there was an ATI/AMD beta driver that fixed some issues with newer cards.

Motherboard drivers (including BIOS firmware) up to date?

To be honest, I think it’s got something to do with the 955. I had one myself during the beta weekends and had ‘ahem’kitten poor performance with a combination of a 5850.

I’d also suggest getting rid of any overclocks (like your CPU). I’ve seen instances in certain games where performance suffers when you start pushing your equipment. City of Heroes is one instance off the top of my head.

Edit: Other then that, we have to realize that this game is probably going to continue to get enhancements to make the game engine more efficient. I never bothered to check what my new stuff is producing (i5-3570k and GTX 680) so I may do so when I get home just to get an idea of performance since you mentioning your 7950 (which definitely should be doing well) only 50% give or take GPU utilization.

Edit dos: Looking back on this now, typically when you see your GPU % throttling it’s because something else in the system can’t keep up. I’m beginning to think it’s your 955 again.

Tried all of this. Motherboard, bios, and vid card drivers are all good. Tried removing oc’s and even under clocking. CPU should be no issue as others with my build are experiencing 80+ fps and 60+ in WvWvW.

Nobody is experiencing 60 to 80+ fps in WvW unless they play at a really low resolution or play with everything on low, or they never see combat

The game doesn’t seem to be architected for keeping more than 2 cores completely busy in many situations. It does spawn a lot of threads, but as in many games one of them does much more work than the others, so the engine’s running speed is largely limited by that. The other threads’ tasks are not heavy enough to completely occupy other cores, so the CPU doesn’t look very busy overall.

And when that one thread is running slowly enough on the CPU, the GPU becomes starved for instructions and ends up idling part of the time.

I think this is what’s happening in your screenshot; your FPS is similar to what others have been reporting as well.

teistiz.3298:

The game doesn’t seem to be architected for keeping more than 2 cores completely busy in many situations. It does spawn a lot of threads, but as in many games one of them does much more work than the others, so the engine’s running speed is largely limited by that. The other threads’ tasks are not heavy enough to completely occupy other cores, so the CPU doesn’t look very busy overall.

And when that one thread is running slowly enough on the CPU, the GPU becomes starved for instructions and ends up idling part of the time.

I think this is what’s happening in your screenshot; your FPS is similar to what others have been reporting as well.

Speaking of this. Someone posted earlier an application that would go out and look for any “parked” cores. Website below. I’ll probably try it myself later.

http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/Disable-CPU-Core-Parking-Utility

As for the WvWvW, can’t say I get the same FPS even with my setup. Only thing I can think of (I say this because I’ve set the graphics slider to performance with no FPS gain) is to turn off High-Res textures on players.

@OP

Since you mention others with similar setups but worse performance (compared to theirs).

Have you tried doing a clean uninstall of the video drivers and then reinstalling them? (i.e. uninstall drivers, reboot then reinstall with one more reboot afterwords) Could be a software bug somewhere in there.

teistiz.3298:

The game doesn’t seem to be architected for keeping more than 2 cores completely busy in many situations. It does spawn a lot of threads, but as in many games one of them does much more work than the others, so the engine’s running speed is largely limited by that. The other threads’ tasks are not heavy enough to completely occupy other cores, so the CPU doesn’t look very busy overall.

And when that one thread is running slowly enough on the CPU, the GPU becomes starved for instructions and ends up idling part of the time.

I think this is what’s happening in your screenshot; your FPS is similar to what others have been reporting as well.

This man knows what he’s talking about. What we’re looking at is a waiting game – waiting for A.Net to optimize the game/load across more CPU cores, ways to offload CPU tasks to the GPU, etc. Plain and simple – it just isn’t optimized. And that’s unfortunate. Hopefully A.Net will take the time to really optimize this game soon, as MANY people (even with very high end systems) are suffering from lackluster performance right now.

Idolicious.6091:

teistiz.3298:

The game doesn’t seem to be architected for keeping more than 2 cores completely busy in many situations. It does spawn a lot of threads, but as in many games one of them does much more work than the others, so the engine’s running speed is largely limited by that. The other threads’ tasks are not heavy enough to completely occupy other cores, so the CPU doesn’t look very busy overall.

And when that one thread is running slowly enough on the CPU, the GPU becomes starved for instructions and ends up idling part of the time.

I think this is what’s happening in your screenshot; your FPS is similar to what others have been reporting as well.

This man knows what he’s talking about. What we’re looking at is a waiting game – waiting for A.Net to optimize the game/load across more CPU cores, ways to offload CPU tasks to the GPU, etc. Plain and simple – it just isn’t optimized. And that’s unfortunate. Hopefully A.Net will take the time to really optimize this game soon, as MANY people (even with very high end systems) are suffering from lackluster performance right now.

I guess it could be worse, we could be back to the days of the beta weekends when the GPU wasn’t used at all. Haha. GoGo raw CPU horsepower.

GlockworK.2954:

I guess it could be worse, we could be back to the days of the beta weekends when the GPU wasn’t used at all. Haha. GoGo raw CPU horsepower.

I’m sure the GPU’s been used from the start; if the game was actually doing any meaningful drawing on the CPU (like some did suggest) people would not be getting 15 FPS, they’d be getting 1.5 FPS. And the CPU would certainly look very busy

If I recall correctly, during the betas someone from ArenaNet said the engine was stalling on its occlusion queries (the part where the engine determines what actually needs to be drawn). On each frame, the engine would halt for a moment on that part and before it got back to calling Direct3D the GPU would have idled for a (relatively) long time since the previous frame. This probably got fixed in the later betas since they ran much faster.

Let’s just wait for ArenaNet to stabilize the game-as-a-service a bit first, I’m sure they’ll get around to performance tweaks later. I know I’d be itching to get the code running faster after making sure it was stable first.

It’s possible GPU manufacturers can also tweak their drivers to deal better with the game’s particular way of calling Direct3D, but I wouldn’t expect miracles from that front.

Smawell.5092:

Hey guys, quick rundown.

Phenom ii x4 955 @3.6ghz
HD 7950

Getting around 50-60% usage on both gpu and cpu with only around 50fps sitting and 30 moving. WvWvW is aorund 15-25. Anyone know why it wouldnt use 100%? or anyone have/ fixed the same problem?

Answer: Your CPU is bottleneck.

I also have 7950, but my CPU is i5-3570k.
My GPU is constantly at 100% usage.

gosu.8153:

Smawell.5092:

Hey guys, quick rundown.

Phenom ii x4 955 @3.6ghz
HD 7950

Getting around 50-60% usage on both gpu and cpu with only around 50fps sitting and 30 moving. WvWvW is aorund 15-25. Anyone know why it wouldnt use 100%? or anyone have/ fixed the same problem?

Answer: Your CPU is bottleneck.

I also have 7950, but my CPU is i5-3570k.
My GPU is constantly at 100% usage.

No, its not… 100% gpu usage in all other games and cpu looks fine. Not sure how you managed 100%, but yippee for you.

its the game engine
when i run stock my CPU is 50% ish average and my gpu is 100% steady
This is normal

when i OC my GPU the CPU is the same but now its only using 75-80% GPU
and i get the same performance.

It seems the game engine doesn’t scale based on the power of your hardware. most other games like BF3 i see increase of 10 FPS average. This game i see 0 gain.

i5 3570
gtx 680

Idk what happened. I have a fx8350/7950 vapo-x combo. o.c. 23% running at 99%gpu usage. was getting 60fps on avergae in wvw, oh yeah and thats with ultra settings and supersampling ticked, 0 culling. 1 day it crashed, i got alot of errors/repair gw2. I ended up having to reinstall gw2 completely, and now im getting low gpu usage stock/boost bios, and o.c. runs about 60% sometimes it might spike up to 100%, but rarely. Works fine in other games.

Smawell.5092:

gosu.8153:

Smawell.5092:

Hey guys, quick rundown.

Phenom ii x4 955 @3.6ghz
HD 7950

Getting around 50-60% usage on both gpu and cpu with only around 50fps sitting and 30 moving. WvWvW is aorund 15-25. Anyone know why it wouldnt use 100%? or anyone have/ fixed the same problem?

Answer: Your CPU is bottleneck.

I also have 7950, but my CPU is i5-3570k.
My GPU is constantly at 100% usage.

No, its not… 100% gpu usage in all other games and cpu looks fine. Not sure how you managed 100%, but yippee for you.

GW2 isn’t all other games. All other games run fine for me, GW2 still is CPU limited. And the task manager simply doesn’t show the real load.

It’s not something new the game engine does not utilize the hardware properly only thing there is to do wait for them to fix it if they ever will.. In the mean time you can lower some settings and try to get used to the kittenty look of the game.

Necroposting since this was my first google result for “Guild Wars 2 not using 100% of GPU”.

I have a similar problem. Running 2x GTX 680s in SLI, in certain scenes both GPUs sit around 54%-57% utilization each, none of my CPU cores (physical or logical) go anywhere near 100%, and the framerate still dives into the low 40s. Unless it is memory space/speed limits, the problem is not hardware.

I found that in those slow scenes, I can bring the framerate back up to 60fps (I am using adaptive vsync) by DISABLING REFLECTIONS.

I notice that when I do this, GW2.exe’s memory usage goes from 1.9xGB down to 1.4xGB.

I have 8GB DDR3-1866, not even 50% used. However I am aware that 32-bit Windows applications (even if you’re running Windows x64) are limited to a 2GB RAM cap, unless the application is written to be Large-Address-Aware in which case the cap is raise to 4GB.

I inspected the GW2.exe and found that it has the LAA flag already set, so either it’s not working, or the fact that it’s sitting at 1.9xGB during slowdowns is pure coincidence.

I have 2GB of video RAM on each card and GW2 is topping out around 800MB so VRAM can’t be the issue.

tl;dr
Turn off reflections if your framerate is low and your card still has cycles to spare.

First you have four cores. That doesn’t mean that a program will use all of them fully at 100%. I normally see 50-75% on a quad core with GW2.

As for GPU being used at 100% that’s up to the game feeding the GPU enough data to keep it constantly busy. This game doesn’t do that all that well.

Looking at your pick of task manager this looks normal to me if you look at the first CPU core it very close to maxed out and the rest are lower thus the 55% being used, it gives the percent of the total processor. For the video card why would it be higher if the CPU is doing all it can pretty much. It will only use as much power as it needs to process what it’s receiving.

Funny how they’ve fixed nothing after two years.

R9 290 in crossfire, 2500k at 4.5 ghz… GW2 uses neither to their full capacity. Garbage coding.