Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’ve searched the forums for answers to this but I couldn’t find anything so here goes.

I have a medium spec pc and guild wars 2 runs very well on it, typically 60fps out in the wild and around 30 in LA or when things get crowded in DE’s etc. However there is one thing that absolutely tanks my framerate down to single digits in an otherwise 60fps environment: when spell effects are close to the camera.

let me give an example that is 100% repeatable. As an engineer I can throw grenades and lay bombs and as the explosions go off my framerate will drop to single digits then shoot straight back to 60 when the effect ends. The closer the effects are to the camera the worse the framerate gets.

During standard play (I have camera zoomed out fully all the time) this still effects me a lot as ALL particle effects seem to have this effect to my performance, and even at max camera distance my own spell effects can still cause slowdowns as I am moving around the environments and spinning my camera around etc.

This never used to happen and I can’t work out what causes it, I’ve tried removing and reinstalling graphics drivers, rolling back to older graphics drivers and trying beta drivers but the problem persists. I’ve attached a dxdiag report maybe that will help?

If anyone knows of any solution to this I would be very grateful!

You have a pretty recent driver for your video card, but I’m not familiar with the nVidia numbering scheme. Do you know what version you have? One of the latest versions seems to have issues that affect its performance in GW2. You might want to do a search on the driver version to see if the problem version is the one you’re using.

If it is, then you probably want to do a full uninstall of the driver (and clean up any remaining files) and then install an older version that’s known to be good.

9.18.001(3.1064)

310.64

the very latest available.

I’ve always noticed this, especially on my Engineer when lobbing grenades. its fine unless the particles take up the majority of my screen space, then it lowers my FPS by about 10-20 while the particles are displayed. I have a gtx 580, Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 4.0ghz, 8 gb ram, and game is on a seperate HDD then windows. It probably has to do with how particles are drawn, and maybe transparency? like the poor CPU utilization, i just figured it was part of how the game engine worked and had to look past it.

Thanks for the replies, seems I’m not the only one with this problem

Mathisk, as mentioned in my OP I have tried many different driver versions with proper uninstall and cleaning between versions.

JERRIX, that sounds exactly the same as my problem. I did wonder if it was just my graphics card (gtx 460) getting a bit old but a 580 should be more than enough to run Guild Wars 2. Hmmm… I do believe you are right in that the problem is something to do with how the engine renders transparent particles.

Sadly there is no “particle detail” quality option in the graphics settings, which makes testing this theory basically impossible