Guild Wars 2

Why do I still only get 30fps in some areas with my setup at max settings? Shouldn’t my Intel I7-3820 at 4.3ghz with 16 gigs of 2133 ram and AMD R9 290 tear through the game no problem? If it needs more CPU power then why doesn’t it use more than 30% of any of my cores? Is there any way to force this to use more? Is it poorly optimized for CPUs as well as GPUs?

DX9 doesn’t care what your machine can run. It’s optimized for machines build for XP, so to an extent (obviously on a software level) you’re locked into similar performance.

You will understand a lot better if you started playing the game and then changed to an Intel processor like I did. My in game performance pretty much doubled from an AMD FX-8350 to an i7 4770K.

I am using an intel CPU….

I can clearly see that. You’re getting about as good as performance can get. There’s not much difference between the Haswells, Ivies, and Sandies right now. Unless you could maybe push that 3820K to like 4.8 GHz, you could possibly see better.

Decado.1726:

Why do I still only get 30fps in some areas with my setup at max settings? Shouldn’t my Intel I7-3820 at 4.3ghz with 16 gigs of 2133 ram and AMD R9 290 tear through the game no problem? If it needs more CPU power then why doesn’t it use more than 30% of any of my cores? Is there any way to force this to use more? Is it poorly optimized for CPUs as well as GPUs?

With your setup, and I’m assuming with settings on high or ultra, you are getting as good as you can get. Just remember, most players have much worse rigs with much lower frame rates where you are getting a measly 30fps.

In that case then what the heck is going on at Arena Net? Why aren’t they getting this game to run better even after 2 years?

Decado.1726:

Why do I still only get 30fps in some areas with my setup at max settings? Shouldn’t my Intel I7-3820 at 4.3ghz with 16 gigs of 2133 ram and AMD R9 290 tear through the game no problem? If it needs more CPU power then why doesn’t it use more than 30% of any of my cores? Is there any way to force this to use more? Is it poorly optimized for CPUs as well as GPUs?

what tools are you using to see that your Cores are only getting used 30%?

Unless your 290 wasnt configured correctly, or your Drivers installed correctly, your CPU should be between 75% and 89% (as it is with my 4670K clocked at 4.9ghz), and your GPU should be 70%+ (not pegged).

the game’s Dx9 Rendering thread is singled threaded, meaning it will only ever spawn on one core at a time. That is the limiting factor here and it affects EVERY SYSTEM.

You should be running GPU-Z, CPU-Z and Coretemp at the very least. Ideally you would have also setup hwinfo and MSI Afterburner with riva tuner display server so you can verify real time system stats while you fine tune your system for ‘whatever game/application’ on the fly.

I highly doubt you are being truthful on the 30% part of your statements. So you should start there and make 100% sure that your CPU is infact only being utilized at 30%, because that would lead me to believe your GPU is not configured/running properly (such as the GPU being stuck at 1x or 4x on the PCI-E slot due to power management).

I’m using core temp to watch my usage. They average about 30% sometimes dipping to 15 and sometimes spiking to 45 (all cores). I’m not sure about gpu usage because for some reason msi afterburner is only reporting temp to my keyboard. Pcie is definitely on 16x, there’s no power limiting factor there or a power limiting factor on the CPU in the power settings.

I can say however that looking at the temps for the gpu that it’s probably in the 90%+ range.

unless you’re playing in Windowed Fullscreen you won’t see the actual usage. I saw the same numbers but then had the game up and checked and it was at higher numbers.

Core temp reports it to my keyboard so I can see it while it’s full screen and the game is open.