Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I had a i3-2120 CPU and GTX 560 GPU until recently. The game ran at about 15-25 FPS in Lion’s Arch at the highest graphics settings. I’ve upgraded my PC with a i7-3770 CPU. Now, I have about 45 FPS. If I lower shadow details & reflections some, I get about 50 FPS. What could be the bottleneck? Is it possible for the CPU to be bottlenecking the GPU? How can I test it?

I have yet to try setting the lowest graphics details and then check the FPS. If having 50 FPS even after that, does that mean that CPU is definitely the bottleneck? That would really be disappointing.

If the GPU is the bottleneck, would a GTX 770 help in having a constant 60 FPS?

Windows 7 64 bit
Intel i7-3770
MSI GTX 560 1GB
Asus P8H61 MOBO
16GB RAM 1600 MHz

All at stock speed.

Thx!

No, upgrading GPU wont do anything in gw2. your GPU is bottleneck for sure IF you want play Crysis 3 or similar, but again gw2 dont utilise highend gpus at all therefore its wasted money IF you want GW run smoother.

Btw, your cpu is good its just GW which needs absurd amount of power and does not run smooth on any system.

GW2 has been a pain in the kitten for everyone. Ever since beta people have been complaining that low-mid range PCs were playing the game better than high-end PCs. It’s as said above, the game uses your CPU more since it is based on DX9 not DX11 apparently.

Remember that this game started production like 6 years ago, when DX9 was the norm and everyone had a DX9 card. This is where the dev team didnt think ahead, they wanted to make the game available to as many people as possible, so the used DX9. They didnt think that in 3-5 years time everyone would have DX10 card at the minimum.

Now you can get a low-mid range DX11 card for £30 every gamer should have one, if not a DX10 card. This has been a BIG hold-back for GW2, even though the dev promised DX11 support, here we are a year later and not a single word has been uttered by them about DX11

We’ve had Living Story every 2 weeks, A big WvW update which keep being pushed back, another big feature only update later coming soon, and now rumours of something else as well later this year.

Anet are making the classic mistake of shoving more and more PvE content into the game, temporary content at that, when improving the game is what people really want right now.

tl;dr Welcome to GW2, it’s based on DX9, what do you expect!

The easiest way to test if your CPU is bottlenecking (which it most likely is in this case) is to run the game in windowed fullscreen, open Task Manager and monitor it when you’re in LA. If any of the cores hit near 100% that’s the cause. If they aren’t however, there could be an issue with your GPU, which would do perfectly fine in a normal case. You can download a program called GPU-Z and monitor it’s usage there, if it’s getting near 100% there’s a problem. Let’s talk about how to fix that only if it happens to be the case.

@Omaris: yeah, GW2 is built on a modified version of GW1 engine, which was started to develop over 10 years ago. Bad decision for us indeed, however I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think), and doing that with a Dx11 game wouldn’t make sense. I don’t know all the facts here, this is just what I’ve heard, but I guess we just have to wait and see if there’s going to be some optimization updates along the way.

I’m posting a guide soon that may help. Keep an eye out for it.
If you cant wait, or dont want to… do some research on core parking and read over this:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=327922

@Omaris: yeah, GW2 is built on a modified version of GW1 engine, which was started to develop over 10 years ago. Bad decision for us indeed, however I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think), and doing that with a Dx11 game wouldn’t make sense. I don’t know all the facts here, this is just what I’ve heard, but I guess we just have to wait and see if there’s going to be some optimization updates along the way.

hmmm, i had no idea. Though the idea crossed my mind. Any thoughts as to if its Unity based?

NeedCoffee.1402:

I’m posting a guide soon that may help. Keep an eye out for it.
If you cant wait, or dont want to… do some research on core parking and read over this:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=327922

@Omaris: yeah, GW2 is built on a modified version of GW1 engine, which was started to develop over 10 years ago. Bad decision for us indeed, however I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think), and doing that with a Dx11 game wouldn’t make sense. I don’t know all the facts here, this is just what I’ve heard, but I guess we just have to wait and see if there’s going to be some optimization updates along the way.

hmmm, i had no idea. Though the idea crossed my mind. Any thoughts as to if its Unity based?

I heard it was completely made from the scratch just for Guild Wars. Also, according to Wikipedia, Unity was first released in 2005 for OS X while Guild Wars was started to develop in 2003 so I think it’s unlikely.

I’ve done some testing. If I set the lowest graphics settings, I still can’t get more than 50 FPS. I had VSync On and Frame Limiter to 60, with Frequency at 60 Hz. Once I set Frame Limit to Unlimited it went up to 60!!! Very weird, but that’s how I’ll play the game from no on! Of course, I still have about 40-50 FPS in LA. I guess I have to upgrade my GPU.

Some people have reported that having frame limiter at 60 actually caps it at 50. I don’t have this issue, but might’ve been your case.

Don’t upgrade your GPU, at least till you have run the GPU-Z monitoring. If you want to upgrade something, get an unlocked version of your CPU, 3770K, or the i5-3570K. Buy an aftermarket cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO at lowest, if you have more money to burn go for liquid cooling solutions) and overclock that bad boy to 4.5 GHz or above.

while it’s always fun to purchase and install new gpu , that 770 will only give you a small fps boost. @ 3 to 4 hundred $ it’s b hard to justify. lock’s idea would give you the most bang for your buck, but again costly and hard to justify.

@locx
I read a long time ago they bought a license for pathengine which isn’t a game engine but more of an AI engine. so I doubt it’s 100% home made.

To get 60 FPS, learn programming, create an overlay program that places a static message at the top left of the screen during games with “FPS: 60”.

Problem solved….

sobe.4157:

To get 60 FPS, learn programming, create an overlay program that places a static message at the top left of the screen during games with “FPS: 60”.

Problem solved….

LOL, that was super funny. Outta sight outta mind….kinda

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

@NeedCoffee Well I didn’t know about that in turn, guess you learn something new every day. Could be they’ve used some help outside, but AFAIK the complete engine can’t be found elsewhere.

@OP I don’t know what kind of fps you’re used to, but an average gamer doesn’t notice much of a difference between 50 and 60, it takes some skilled eye.

Just to give you an example (and because I’m so excited about this) I formerly had a Q6600 and in LA I typically stayed below 20 fps near Mystic Forge, maybe peaked at 22. I just got my new system set up, it has the same GPU (motherboard has PCIe 3.0 slots now tho instead of 2.0) but CPU is now 4670K and at stock speeds I ran around there with 40-60 fps! Granted it was quite empty at this hour, I have to test again later in the evening.

sobe.4157:

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

And what does that make you? Thanks, but I don’t need YOUR help.

OP: Have you verified all your hardware? Such as PCI-E speed Link, CStates, Clock/Temps,…ect?

I run a HD7790…well look at my sig for my specs, and While in LA Ill get 30-35~ FPS on high settings, everywhere else I get 100+. Zergs still drop between 20-25 though, Bottom at 15….But you should be getting similar performance.

locx.6412:

I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think).

And everything is Made in China, if they had a fake iphone mini available to sell before Apple were able to debunk the claim they were gonna make such a model, do you not think they have ripped off graphics cards as well?…

South Korea is a big gaming market, and guess what, they have the best internet connections in the world! Here in the UK we just got BT to roll out fibre to give up 76mb connections, whilst at the same time Korea had already started giving people 1 gigabit connetions; that’s more than 10 times faster!

We’ve just got 4G, they are already working on 5G: http://www.ebuyer.com/blog/2014/01/internet-speeds-around-the-world/
When it comes to technology, we in the West are increasingly lagging behind!

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

locx.6412:

I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think).

And everything is Made in China, if they had a fake iphone mini available to sell before Apple were able to debunk the claim they were gonna make such a model, do you not think they have ripped off graphics cards as well?…

South Korea is a big gaming market, and guess what, they have the best internet connections in the world! Here in the UK we just got BT to roll out fibre to give up 76mb connections, whilst at the same time Korea had already started giving people 1 gigabit connetions; that’s more than 10 times faster!

We’ve just got 4G, they are already working on 5G: http://www.ebuyer.com/blog/2014/01/internet-speeds-around-the-world/
When it comes to technology, we in the West are increasingly lagging behind!

Oh yes, but I do not believe a fake GTX Titan brings anywhere near the performance the real one would.

Also while most things are good in South Korea, you have to remember it’s population is 50 million. The population of Asia is over 4 billion, a whopping 80 times more. You can’t really make conclusions of Asian markets based on Koreans’ 10 times faster internet speed. Also UK’s GDP is over 4 times higher per capita than that of China. There are some ridiculously rich people there which tells you about the state of the rest. Sure you break into Korean markets by just translating and possibly new voice acting but that’s not the same as Asian markets.

locx.6412:

The easiest way to test if your CPU is bottlenecking (which it most likely is in this case) is to run the game in windowed fullscreen, open Task Manager and monitor it when you’re in LA. If any of the cores hit near 100% that’s the cause. If they aren’t however, there could be an issue with your GPU, which would do perfectly fine in a normal case. You can download a program called GPU-Z and monitor it’s usage there, if it’s getting near 100% there’s a problem. Let’s talk about how to fix that only if it happens to be the case.

@Omaris: yeah, GW2 is built on a modified version of GW1 engine, which was started to develop over 10 years ago. Bad decision for us indeed, however I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think), and doing that with a Dx11 game wouldn’t make sense. I don’t know all the facts here, this is just what I’ve heard, but I guess we just have to wait and see if there’s going to be some optimization updates along the way.

I’m not Chinese, i’m VietNamese from “other Asian market”. Even a small country like us , but i and all my gaming friends use at least Hd6000/GTX500 graphic cards ( mine is HD7750); and for now, all of us use Win7/8/8.1. So i don’t think that we are the reason for Arenanet still uses Dx9, we’re not outdated. Futhermore, when a new PC hardware is released , we have it after US several weeks in black market.
Sorry for my english.

The reason for dx9 is because it’s an older game engine, and to be honest most games today are still dx9.
further more I’ve tried dx11 in other games (smite) and I get worse performance.

Raphael.8271:

locx.6412:

The easiest way to test if your CPU is bottlenecking (which it most likely is in this case) is to run the game in windowed fullscreen, open Task Manager and monitor it when you’re in LA. If any of the cores hit near 100% that’s the cause. If they aren’t however, there could be an issue with your GPU, which would do perfectly fine in a normal case. You can download a program called GPU-Z and monitor it’s usage there, if it’s getting near 100% there’s a problem. Let’s talk about how to fix that only if it happens to be the case.

@Omaris: yeah, GW2 is built on a modified version of GW1 engine, which was started to develop over 10 years ago. Bad decision for us indeed, however I’ve heard ANet is trying to break into Chinese and other Asian markets as well, where most of the hardware is noticeably older than in EU/US (In China the most used OS is still Win XP I think), and doing that with a Dx11 game wouldn’t make sense. I don’t know all the facts here, this is just what I’ve heard, but I guess we just have to wait and see if there’s going to be some optimization updates along the way.

I’m not Chinese, i’m VietNamese from “other Asian market”. Even a small country like us , but i and all my gaming friends use at least Hd6000/GTX500 graphic cards ( mine is HD7750); and for now, all of us use Win7/8/8.1. So i don’t think that we are the reason for Arenanet still uses Dx9, we’re not outdated. Futhermore, when a new PC hardware is released , we have it after US several weeks in black market.
Sorry for my english.

Thank you for clarification. I don’t live there or really don’t know too much about how things are there, my knowledge is just based on what I’ve read and what I can conclude. It might be that those that are looking for games like GW2 are wealthy enough to afford what US/EU and others can, but of course it might be that there are still multi millions in China or India or where ever with XP and GeForce 8800 GT as the best available, I don’t really know. And no, no one there is the reason ANet made the game Dx9, that’s due to the fact it was made back in 2003. What’s causing them not to hurry with Dx11 implementation is, based on my knowledge, those that can’t access Dx11.

We also have to realize that even in the EU/US (and AUS, Japan, Korea, don’t want to list them all, that’s why I use that) the actual gamer population with intel i5-7 desktops and brand new gfx cards is a relatively small minority, from what I understand most use a mainstream low-cost laptops/tablets nowadays.

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

And what does that make you? Thanks, but I don’t need YOUR help.

LOL, calm down child, your question was already answered many posts ago. Enjoy a little levity in life instead of complaining.

sobe.4157:

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

And what does that make you? Thanks, but I don’t need YOUR help.

LOL, calm down child, your question was already answered many posts ago. Enjoy a little levity in life instead of complaining.

Thx for the advice on life, grampa

Ok let’s keep it on topic here. So in conclusion, once again, you do not benefit much from a GPU upgrade. If you still feel like you want to and have some dollars burning in your pocket (let’s face it, who doesn’t like a hardware upgrade?) I’d suggest a Radeon R9 270X or GeForce GTX 760, seems to be the best bang for the buck in the two hundreds. Only an unlocked and overclocked CPU will bring you better framerate. There’s pretty much nothing else to add here, so yeah. Only some optimization like core unparking can be done besides that.

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

And what does that make you? Thanks, but I don’t need YOUR help.

LOL, calm down child, your question was already answered many posts ago. Enjoy a little levity in life instead of complaining.

Thx for the advice on life, grampa

No problem kiddo.

If the 3770 is simply a 3770 and not a k-series, have you tried overclocking on the base multi?

sobe.4157:

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

Meehael.8240:

sobe.4157:

He’s just a squirrel trying to get a nut, I’m just trying to help push the nut in his direction…. lol

And what does that make you? Thanks, but I don’t need YOUR help.

LOL, calm down child, your question was already answered many posts ago. Enjoy a little levity in life instead of complaining.

Thx for the advice on life, grampa

No problem kiddo.

If the 3770 is simply a 3770 and not a k-series, have you tried overclocking on the base multi?

you mean the base clock?

Upping the bus with the fixed multi, see what he can do, or maybe even tinker with the blck. He wont be able to do too much obviously, but upgrading cpu sounds stupid for one so capable already since a new cpu wont do much for him.

@OP. Get new CPU and mobo, break out that piggy bank :

@Sobe, what is your vcore and ViD @5ghz on liquid?

That’s actually no longer correct, 4.9GHz for now until I find a more comfortable tweak of voltage to sit at 5.0. The VID of this chip is 1.2460. I went through a few of these 3770k chips binning to find a good one lol.

Sounds like you got lucky. I am sitting at 1.33 VID with full LLC just to get to 4.5 on my h100i.
You didn’t delid did you?

No! Delidding has it’s advantages, but I wanted to avoid that, which is why I purchased 10+ 3770k chips to find one that clocked to my liking with low voltage, then sold the rest of the chips off.

Your VID is an identifier which does not change, each chip has a different VID. I think you meant to ask me what vcore I was using for 5.0, in which case my voltage for 4.5GHz I believe was 1.22v, past that I had to pump more voltage into it and at 4.9 I’m looking at 1.34v, I have to bump further for 5.0 but unless I’m doing a liquid nitrogen run with my Little Devil cpu pot, going past 1.40v is a no-no for me as that is where the chip will start degrading over time having it past 1.4. Will it kill the chip? No, but it will become more unstable with time. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I run 75% LLC (Ultra High).

Calling up the hardware survey stats on PC cafes in Korea, about 19% of the machines are XP, 65% are running CPUs older than Sandy Bridge and of the 72% of the video cards broken out, none are newer than 2 generations old (nVidia 5xx and older, no AMD). 93% of the machines are running with 4GB or less.

There’s been a shift with XP over the last year. When I looked then over 30% of the cafe machines were using XP.

Ya I had just woke up and wasn’t thinking. Vcore is what I meant. 1.34v is good for that clock. 10+chips! Wow.
I hit the wall at 4.5ghz and my Vcore is 1.36 with Ultra LLC as well.
I should buy that intel oc insurance next time I upgrade.

I think that MANTLE would give you a massive FPS boost! WHY? Because it use 8 cores.

100% usage on i7? that would be good

+ They would only need to give support to MANTLE – no need to rewrite game engine

PS: I ran my FX 6300 at 1.68V for benchmarks on air

I too think that they should support Mantle, based on what i’ve seen what Mantle can do it should give GW2 a big performance boost considering how cpu itensive GW2 is. Even if they won’t support it, they could at least use DX10 or DX11 and make an option in the graphics settings to turn it on so you can still switch between them.

For sure. It’s just gonna take quite a while to see anything that big implemented in GW2 so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Especially since Mantle would in fact need to be written within the game engine, though Mantle doesn’t force a cpu to use all cores…. Current Mantle benchmarks show a 7% – 8% increase in FPS on an 4960X in Battlefield 4.

Mantle show massive improvements if the game’s performance is CPU bound. Very little when it’s not.

Translation, helps slower CPUs a lot more than faster ones with a high end video card. And this is in a game where FPS performance is a major feature.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7728/battlefield-4-mantle-preview

^ That’s where I got the 7% – 8% from