Guild Wars 2

Ok, so i recently bought a new graphics card, the VTX3D Radeon HD 7850 X-Edition. And so far it’s running Guild Wars 2 awfully, worse than my older card, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4870… My CPU is an Intel C2Q Q9400 @2.66 GHz. “Sigh” Is my CPU really bottlenecking that card so much? And was my “upgrade” a waste of money?.. I’d also like to mention that there are no problems running other games like the new Tomb Raider or GRID 2. In those games the improvement is massive with this new card in contrast to my old one. I’m playing the game on 1680×1050 resolution and pretty much maxed out (except shadows on high and samplis is native) and i get about 20 – 40 fps outdoor (in Lornar’s Pass right now to be exact) and 10 – 20 in Lion’s Arch. And even if i lower down my settings to the absolute minimum, i don’t get those steady 60 fps not even outdoors, they range from 40 – 60.

If anyone got maybe some advice for me, i would appreciate it very much.. Thanks in advance.

Have you tried unparking your CPU’s cores?
Have you overclocked that sucker yet?

You should be getting better frames when no one else is around, like close to 60 constantly with normal settings (not ultra low).

It could be the CPU, though you have a quad core at a decent clock speed. But it came out in 2008 and your GPU in 2012. I don’t like to overclock things, but that could improve things.

Turn off reflections and uncheck best texture filtering and vsync and you will see a good improvement.

What do you mean with “unparking”? and yes, i tried myself with overclocking, but my system just isn’t stable afterwards.. my cpu struggles already at 3.0 GHz and i can’t stabilize it no matter how much i’m tweaking the voltages (that’s atleast what prime95 and IBT are saying).. I guess i dont have the motherboard and RAM to do it ( ASUS P5QL-E & 4 GB Kingston DDR2 667 MHz).

turning down reflections (which i love btw) and best texture filtering doesn’t really improve the case that much. as i said, i’m not even getting steady 60 fps outside cities with everything turned down.

Miha.2109:

What do you mean with “unparking”? and yes, i tried myself with overclocking, but my system just isn’t stable afterwards.. my cpu struggles already at 3.0 GHz and i can’t stabilize it no matter how much i’m tweaking the voltages (that’s atleast what prime95 and IBT are saying).. I guess i dont have the motherboard and RAM to do it ( ASUS P5QL-E & 4 GB Kingston DDR2 667 MHz).

turning down reflections (which i love btw) and best texture filtering doesn’t really improve the case that much. as i said, i’m not even getting steady 60 fps outside cities with everything turned down.

I don’t intend to be mean, but there is so much information out there by simply just searching:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=unparking+your+CPU+cores

Perhaps your CPU is overheating? Maybe its throttling itself down due to heat, though since you know how to overclock you probably have already checked the temperatures :/

Perhaps there are some other processes that are using most of your CPU while try to play Guild Wars 2, thus Guild Wars 2 does not have all the resources it needs to run well.

Yes, i looked after it and my cores are unparked. And no, the CPU is nowhere near overheating, it’s about ~55-60 °C MAX under load, also there are no other processes running in the background using resources (i keep my PC “clean” regularily, with disk defrags, checks, virus scans, registry cleans aaaand so on…).

Well, i guess i’ll be running the game as it is.. after all it is more than playable, i’m just annoyed that i didn’t benefit a bit in the performance department even though i bought a graphics card for 150€ which is on paper twice as fast as my old one.. I can only hope that there will be some fixes for the game engine (which i think are badly needed) or something else.. maybe something from AMD’s side… We’ll see.

Anyways, thanks to everybody for your quick replies.

Put that proc at like 3.2 GHz. It should do a lot better.

Avelos.6798:

Put that proc at like 3.2 GHz. It should do a lot better.

D= Please read the thread first, overclocking was already discussed.

Ilithis Mithilander.3265:

Avelos.6798:

Put that proc at like 3.2 GHz. It should do a lot better.

D= Please read the thread first, overclocking was already discussed.

Serry, I usually read the first post and just make a direct response to it.
now that I read stability and plausible heat issues all I can really say now is perhaps fetching something like a Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooler (really cheap but really good) can help dissipate some heat. And yeah overclocking is a bit tricky but get it right and there you have an effective boost.

Also to OP: I will say that your Core 2 Quad is bottle necking your new 7850 (which is unfortunate)

I had a Phenom II 3.6 GHz quad bottlenecking my 7970 until I upgraded ._.

Yea i know it would do a lot better at like 3.2 GHz, but like i said, i have incredible problems keeping my PC stable when overclocking. And the problem is not the heat, it’s just that i can’t get it stable. I went for 3.0 GHz the last time (that would be a meager 344 MHz increase) but i was crashing in Prime95 stresstest and IBT after a few minutes (IBT always after the 2nd pass and Prime95 sometimes would run and run and run, but sometimes it crashed after a minute..).
I tried tweaking my voltages of course, to no effect. My stock CPU voltage is 1.15V at load and i pushed it all the way up to 1.25V to get it stable (at only 3.0 GHz as i said) and it wasn’t. That seems to me a bit too much voltage increase for such a low overclock or no?..
Anyways, i also played with the NB voltage, RAM voltage, different bios settings, but nothing proved effective.
I’d also like to add that i can overclock only by FSB since i have no unlocked multiplier, which means that my ram freq. is raised to 751 MHz from the stock 677 (that is at 3.0 GHz). At first i thought maybe that is the problem, but under Memtest i didn’t show any errors, at least not after an hour (even though my RAM is getting pretty hot on touch).

Sooo, if anyone can make something out of that, i’d be very glad. Any tipps/suggestions would be very welcome.

Miha.2109:

Ok, so i recently bought a new graphics card, the VTX3D Radeon HD 7850 X-Edition. And so far it’s running Guild Wars 2 awfully, worse than my older card, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4870…

What about the Power Supply? It could be possible the new GPU is drawing more power than your PSU can handle, and overall power output is dropping too, and it may also be possible your CPU, RAM, or other devices are downclocking because of such.

Does the 7850 have proper drivers (proper being at least 13.5; go directly to AMD and not the actual OEM)? I might also suggest trying out beta drivers if willing, but the latest WHQL version is fine. The reason I advise against OEM drivers are because they’re usually outdated, pretty far in most cases…

Does the card reach the max speed of the PCI-E slot (can check with GPU-Z and hitting the ?)? I had some weird issue long ago where my card wouldn’t leave 1.1 speeds, until I took it out and put it back in the slot. Then it went up to 2.0 speeds on-load.

Nah, i think it’s not the power supply. The old HD 4870 is actually much more power hungry than the new HD 7850. I also checked all clock speeds in-game and everything was as it should be.

I’m currently using the 13.6 beta drivers and yes, i always download my drivers directly from AMD’s site. Tested the game also with the 13.4 drivers but it was the same.

The card does reach the max speed of the PCI-E slot. It’s on 1.1 on idle, but it jumps correctly to 2.0 on load yes.

Yup as you have noted you are entirely bottlenecked by the CPU especially at that clock rate. Its easy to test this as you should get more or less the same fps at a higher res/max graphics (minus SS) as on low graphics settings.

Apart from the fact you have a locked multi CPU, the p43 mobo isn’t ideal for overclocking either and anything more than ~410fsb tends to push things on those boards. Did you try slacking the ram timings some, or alternatively ratio the ram to stock just to get the cpu/fsb stable first.

Either way though it will make a minimal difference and you really need a upgrade to a newer architecture to take advantage of a newer card

Yeah.. Well, i guess i’ll live with it for now. Don’t have currently the money to upgrade anything. Maybe in a few months, we’ll see. Then i’ll buy all new components, except the graphics card.

As is said, the game is playable and i can enjoy it, it’s just annoying that i didn’t benefit form the new graphics card, at least not in Guild Wars 2, which i’m playing by far the most right now.

Anyways, thanks to everybody for your help.