Guild Wars 2

Really wish we could get a dev response to this…or any of the other issues they continue to ignore…

the best way to get a dev response is to continue to bring attention to this performance issue.

Once they’ve seen that its not an isolated event and that is actually very much wide spread, hopefully they will bump it up in the q of things to fix.

Large translucent sprites is a problem for any game, on any card, since the dawn of time.

For normal opaque geometry, it’s drawn once and the distance from the observer is recorded into the Z buffer. If some other opaque geometry is drawn later, it can be classified as either farther or closer to the observer. If it’s farther, it’s not drawn. If it’s closer, it replaces the previous color cheaply.

With translucent surfaces like effects, it’s a completely different story… it’s done by sorting all the sprites farthest-to-closest. Then for each surface, draw it and combine it with the previous color in the image, based on how translucent it is.

This means that for each layer of smoke, there’s a read of the previous color and a write of the combination of the previous and current color.

The amount of these kinds of pixel operations are limited, and is what is typically referred to as the “fill rate” of a card. The ways that you as a layman can help combat such things is to lower settings (to get fewer layers of smoke and stuff) and to lower your resolution.

There’s 2.25 times more pixels on a 1080p screen than a 720p screen. That means that there if your main bottleneck is fill rate, you could achieve close to a doubling of effective frame rate in the worst-case scenarios.

On the developer side of things, there’s not much one can do. If you disable smoke effects, you give advantages to the people who disable it. You could try to make the same effects with fewer layers, but that doesn’t help when there’s multiple stacks of effects going on. There’s techniques to avoid excessive overdraw when a fragment is considered fully opaque or has enough layers that drawing more to it wouldn’t matter.

I would have some faith in the rendering engineers of ANet, that they most certainly have evaluated most things possible, and some things impossible.

And of course, it doesn’t help when driver bugs ruin the day, no matter what you try.

So, this JUST started happening to me… 3570k with a 560ti and 8GB ram…

I pretty much only spvp and the game has been running perfectly smoothly up until about a week ago. Now I get bad video lag/fps drops whenever there explosions or smoke.

This JUST started happening… I was on the 314.07 driver when it started happening and upgraded to the 314.22 driver today but its still happening.

Is this a problem with the game or my computer? Why would performance degrade suddenly? I do have my video card overclocked slightly but I stress tested it quite a bit and was stable and also I have had it OC’d for a very long time with no problems until just now.

Thanks for any advice.

Well the real problem is that there were no such problems few patches ago (at least for me ). I run and 4.1 i7-3770, ssd ocz agility 3,16 gb ram and 7850 oced to 1050, 1350 from sapphire. My card gets pretty hot (but i have 1 bad fan and the card is being raplaced in 2-3 weeks at most) and goes over to 73-74 in normal play and when there is heavy load like smoke for quite a bit of time it can jump to 77-78 (note that i have no problems with it like crashes etc anymore). Camp fire test dont cut my fps by a high margin ( about 10 fps while i use the same settings as were post). Fire ele cuts me from around 60 fps to 35-25 so its a massive one… same goes when a treb hits me i can get a drop of 15-20 fps for a second there. They messed something up as my friends from the guild the the same behavior on dozen of diffrent cpus.

Megido.9456:

Well the real problem is that there were no such problems few patches ago (at least for me ). I run and 4.1 i7-3770, ssd ocz agility 3,16 gb ram and 7850 oced to 1050, 1350 from sapphire. My card gets pretty hot (but i have 1 bad fan and the card is being raplaced in 2-3 weeks at most) and goes over to 73-74 in normal play and when there is heavy load like smoke for quite a bit of time it can jump to 77-78 (note that i have no problems with it like crashes etc anymore). Camp fire test dont cut my fps by a high margin ( about 10 fps while i use the same settings as were post). Fire ele cuts me from around 60 fps to 35-25 so its a massive one… same goes when a treb hits me i can get a drop of 15-20 fps for a second there. They messed something up as my friends from the guild the the same behavior on dozen of diffrent cpus.

Thanks for that info – so it sounds like a problem recently introduced into the game?

I was just about ready to spend some of my tax return on a graphics card update!! kitten I think I might just do that anyways

Thanks for all the updates guys. Hopefully they add some kind of slider for this…

I really don’t care too much about the actual smoke visual effect, I just want to have consistent frame rate when I’m playing the game.

IMO, just let me get rid of all the smoke in the game and I’ll be happy haha

@Zao: great explaination, thanks for that!

Lediath.7593:

Thanks for all the updates guys. Hopefully they add some kind of slider for this…

I really don’t care too much about the actual smoke visual effect, I just want to have consistent frame rate when I’m playing the game.

IMO, just let me get rid of all the smoke in the game and I’ll be happy haha

@Zao: great explaination, thanks for that!

I guess I have a different perspective since it seems to me that this problem was recently introduced and therefore they should be able to identify what particular change caused it and then correct it properly!! I had no problems with smoke before – the game ran perfectly smoothly – so what got broken? PLEASE FIX!!!

I am still uncertain as to whether you guys feel that this is a recently introduced issue like I do – I mean I play a good 3-4 days a week for at least a couple hours per day and have really only noticed this just over the past week or so! It has me concerned that it could be a problem on my end although this thread does seem to fit the symptoms I am seeing.

I’m not sure if this is a recent problem. This seems to vary from person to person actually.

As you can see from my early posts as well as few other threads that were linked, this issue has been around since beta, however other reports are that it hasn’t occured since very recently. From the evidence being presented though, I just don’t know…

All I know is that this is a problem with the game right now, and I would very much like to see this addressed.

Dev response would be great! *hint hint

@Leadfoot

Looking at your specs you have a fairly powerful machine, further you mostly just sPVP, unless you are rolling consistently with grenade engis or playing center for Khylo, there are virtually no smoke effects that are large enough to really dent your system.

That may explain why you haven’t noticed it since recently.

Another explaination would be that you have your settings tuned to be at a particular level, but Anet decided to push smoke effects to a certain tier that was included in your tuned settings.

Also, if you look at rentalcaps multitude of screenshots, you’ll see that because his card is so powerful, sometimes this issue can go completely unnoticed. But, for an average machine well within the recommended specs of the game, playing at “auto detect” level will tank your FPS in certain scenarios.

???

Some specific examples:
1) Raid on Capricorn near the beach point big fight including a lot of area effects —> serious lag dipping my FPS to probably below 20 while within the effects – I can’t say for certain whether there was actually smoke effect in there
2) Also RotC fighting on dock point – pretty much same scenario as #1
3) Center of Khylo with friendly treb shots landing near by – major drop in fps for a brief second when the treb shot hits

All of this is very new – my computer was handling this stuff perfectly just a week ago… I’m not sure I understand what you mean by:

That may explain why you haven’t noticed it since recently.

What may explain that specifically??

I have been primarily playing an engi but my own grenade effects when i throw them separately by myself do not cause the problem.

My settings are all at the max level and I have not changed them. The only time I ever got any kind of performance issues on this set up were encountering huge zergs in wvw (not something I play often) and then it would be a very quick dip in performance but then quickly stabilized back up to acceptable levels.

I should also mention that I loaded up Borderlands2 and tried to get myself into some situations with a lot of stuff going on including grenade effects, etc… and it ran perfectly. However, comparing BL2 to GW2 is really apples to oranges and probably not a good comparison at all. I’m thinking I may run some benchmark GPU tests later tonight and see how my GPU fairs – perhaps I have pushed the 560ti too hard with the slight OC and it is failing?

I should also open up the case and clean out any dust build up although I feel like I did that only a few months ago. Worth a shot!

It’s so hard to tell if its due to a change to the game or a hardware related issue.

Well there might be a prob with smoke etc from the begining but it was not as bad as it is now. I was never droping lower then 40-45 fps on fire ele when they game started now its pretty bad. My friend owns a titan card with hihgly oced i7-3770 (4.8 ghz) and even he notes high fps drops on smoke,particle effects ( even thought it dosent affect him as much cuz of the high fps rate but still -40-45 fps just from particle effect is bad) .

Ps. Im pretty sure its not hardwere related in any case as for graphic cards they either work or dont same for the cpu. You would get constant low fps if the card or any other piece was failing.

Could this be related to the other “network lag” thread? I played a bunch of spvp tonight and it was nearly unplayable – this time it wasn’t just spikes of “lag” around explosions/etc. but also really bad lag just casting skills.

This is absolutely not related to network lag, that’s a seperate issue all together.

I guess for some (leadfoot) this is a brand new issue, but it has been occuring in game for a long while now for a decent portion of the player base (since beta). I’m wondering if a clean install of gw2 will fix this, if that’s the case then we can assume that it’s a problem w/ the patching process.

I will give that a shot tonight.

Yeah true.. I’m not sure I can tell the difference so much… a lot of the lag I was experiencing last night – which was definitely server lag becuase my skills would go off a good second or two after I pressed the key (horrible for pvp as an engineer throwing grenades around lol) – was accompanied by the video lag/stutter I described in this thread – so I was thinking maybe they were related but I’m not sure.

I did turn on a bunch of OSD/overlay last night and while in the mists I would go stand on this fire emmitting smoke and would see my FPS drop from 60 (limited vsync) to 40ish. I also zoomed in and walked aroudn throwing grenades and especially near other players would notice a bit of that video stutter and see my GPU jump to 100% momentarily.

Note that the effect, the video stutter, is pretty much identical to the type of experience I would get on my old rig in wvwvw when encountering a massive zerg. I upgraded my computer since then and tried it out in wvwvw to see the difference and while I would still get a small quick video stutter in those situations it smoothed out quickly and ended up at a reasonable FPS (lower than usual but understandable considering all that is going on). In those situations, I’m pretty sure, iirc, that my GPU usage would not spike but my CPU would. I find it interesting that in this scenario it appears to be my GPU spiking.

I will ad my own experience to the fray with this issue.

While doing the lions arch test I got the same results with the large fps drop when zooming in to the smoke fire. I had my cpu monitoring software going at the time and indeed my cpu usage jumps from around 15% on all 4 cores to around 50-60%.

However I also had supersampling on at the time. When I switched off supersampling the fps no longer dropped when zooming in to the fire at all.

Windows 8 64 bit
phenom 2 x4 545
AMD 6870
8 gb ddr3

@dandamanno

curious about the “no longer dropped when zooming in”
I think your system is powerful enough that you won’t notice the drop, unless your settings are high enough.

don’t limit your frame rate and try checking again, see rentalcaps screens as an example.

He has settings the same as mine and got 110FPS down to 80FPS which means if you have vsync and/or frame limiter turned on with a powerful enough system you will remain at 60FPS

thanks for the report!

i can confirm what dandamanno said; without supersampling, there’s no noticeable performance loss near fire/smoke when zooming in or walking by, unless it’s already a stress-situation. (i.e. alot players around, bad optimized area, etc.)

but again, that’s only for ppl with decent~powerful systems…

Lediath.7593:

@dandamanno

curious about the “no longer dropped when zooming in”
I think your system is powerful enough that you won’t notice the drop, unless your settings are high enough.

don’t limit your frame rate and try checking again, see rentalcaps screens as an example.

He has settings the same as mine and got 110FPS down to 80FPS which means if you have vsync and/or frame limiter turned on with a powerful enough system you will remain at 60FPS

thanks for the report!

Well you are correct. After turning off the frame limiter the results are different.

Limiter off:
native sample 55fps→38fps
supersample 39fps→20

limiter on
native sample 39→35
supersample 39→20

So you can see with the limiter on it somehow “masks” the drop in fps in the native sample.

Silly me, I thought the limiter would actually limit my frames close to the 60 fps mark. Instead it drops it all the way down to 30-40, almost like v-sync were on (which I did not have turned on)

And yah my settings are on high/ultra for most things, with post processing left off as it kind of looks terrible (imo) in this game, and WvW character settings at lowest to keep frames as high as possible on 50 vs 50 vs 50 craziness of T1 servers.

Hopefully some of this info can point to solutions for Anet.

So I returned to play this game and first issue I notice is this lol. Anyways I experience this as well and my fps drops to single digits if zoomed in and using grenades on my engineer – any greanade causes it . 60-70 fps without smoke, drops to 20 when not zoomed in and under 10 when close up

Thanks for the reports guys!

Okay…. soooooo I did a FULL reinstall of gw2. Deleted the old GW2 dat file all 16 gigs and redownloaded the whole game again. Problem still persists…

So we know it’s probably not linked to the patcher :-P

I get the same drops on both my systems (i5 4.8Ghz GTX670 @ 1920×1080 / i7 5Ghz SLI GTX 680 @ 2560×1440) I’ve found lowering animation quality from high to low had the biggest impact all around in the game, be it large events and areas with a lot of sprite based effects. Super sampling is less demanding even… These sprites scale with resolution output so higher resolutions will see bigger drops. Although lowering animation quality does reduce these drops in some instances, they still occur in others. For now I’ve found it to be the best compromise. COF Is one of the worst offenders for this drop. It can go from a steady 60fps to 30 at the drop of a hat. Also in areas with a lot of player models the reduction in cloth simulation quality by using low animation helps a lot.

@OwnusMaximus

Yup, dropping animation quality to low fixes some instances of this drop because it removes the smoke effect all together. However this also affects other parts of the game. I have resorted to playing the game on low animations and just dealing with the lower quality visual detail as a trade off for performance. One of the most noticeable areas where this is affect are the portal animations… go to Lion’s Arch at the Asuran gate hub and try switching from low to high animations, the change is … a bit jarring.

FYI: framedrops for fire/smoke effects are as old and as deep into the game as stuttering when shadows are at “ultra”.
it’s there ever since.

if they’d fix that, before all those unnecessary reflections, textures and shadows that you can’t even see (unless the floor ingame glitches up when running with nvidias AO), i’d be mad.

@wauwi

Although some people have been having this issue since beta, I acknowledge that this is not an issue that happens to everyone.

Specifically, NCSoft/Anet tech support said that they don’t see this performance problem on any of their systems for some odd reasons, and that the # of reports of this issue are not numerous. Also, if you look in page 1 you’ll see that there is at least one person for which the campfire test actually had increase in FPS. Although, that person has not responded to my post back to him, so I’m not sure about the accuracy of his post. Since he is the decenting opinion here, a few screenshots should be useful.

I still maintain that this problem affects a very significant portion of the player base.

Lediath.7593:

@wauwi

Although some people have been having this issue since beta, I acknowledge that this is not an issue that happens to everyone.

Specifically, NCSoft/Anet tech support said that they don’t see this performance problem on any of their systems for some odd reasons, and that the # of reports of this issue are not numerous. Also, if you look in page 1 you’ll see that there is at least one person for which the campfire test actually had increase in FPS. Although, that person has not responded to my post back to him, so I’m not sure about the accuracy of his post. Since he is the decenting opinion here, a few screenshots should be useful.

I still maintain that this problem affects a very significant portion of the player base.

Why should you consider my reply as not accurate only for the fact that i did not supply a screenshot ?Also,i totally forget about this thread. Anyway…i just made these now.When i had different Nvida drivers,my fps in that spot rose to about 80 when zoomed in,now they hover at 70.Simply not changing back since other games i play tend to do better with these drivers.

@Caedmon

Thanks for the screenshots. I questioned the accuracy of your post simply because it was the only decenting post as I stated above. Clearly, you have demonstrated that you system has no issues of the sort.

And as you can see from other posters, a plethora of graphics cards and systems are affected by this issue. If you could provide system specs and your driver version, perhaps it will help solve this issue for others as well.

Anet log would be most helpful.

I never really have any drops with smoke/fire no matter what driver i use btw,but now i’m using 314.21.

System specs

Mobo:Crosshair V Formula
Mem:Corsair Vengance 16gb-1600mhz
Cpu:Amd Fx-8120 @ 4.6ghz
GPu:GTX560ti – SLI
PSU: Corsair gold 1000watt

Thanks for the report Caedmon, I’m truly baffled by the performance decrease on all these systems… :-P

The only thing that I see that is remarkable about your system is the SLI system, the rest of it is pretty standard high end gaming PC stuff.

Perhaps others can chime in on their system specs?

Lediath.7593:

Thanks for the report Caedmon, I’m truly baffled by the performance decrease on all these systems… :-P

The only thing that I see that is remarkable about your system is the SLI system, the rest of it is pretty standard high end gaming PC stuff.

Perhaps others can chime in on their system specs?

Yeah…that’s just it,your System is making you drop.Its not anet,and im betting it isn’t your drivers aswell.Might want to Oc’ your cpu,or borrow the same gpu from someone and see what SLI does to your system.

Okay so you are stating that the problem is with my system. That’s fair enough, however the two points which you’ve provided to support that statment are:
1) my CPU clock isn’t high enough
2) I don’t have SLI

I don’t think either of these two arguments are very convincing because
1) I shouldn’t have to OC my CPU to prevent a ~66% drop in FPS for just one situation in one game.
2) I shouldn’t have to have SLI to prevent a 66% drop in FPS for just one situation in one game.

My system is well within appropriate guidelines for the system requirements of GW2, and this performance issue happens in such specific instances that it makes me believe that it’s a problem w/ the code rather than with any given system.

Would you give the same advice to all of the people that have reported this problem? I think not…

I don’t mean it like that,i just mean Gw2 is Very cpu intensive and this counts for all systems inluding mine.I just don’t know if you have oc’d yor cpu yet,i think if doing so it will give you a huge boost in performance,as it does with my system.And the SLI was just a suggestion to see if it offers that boost i’m talking about.Guild wars 2 is just heavy on the system,no matter if you can play crysis 3 maxed out.

Of that we can agree!

GW2 is indeed very much a system hog. But my system is again well within the bounds of the recommended system requirements which is why I believe this is an issue that should be resolved through either an settings option (to remove all smoke effects) or an optimization of the code.

Besides my system I would have you check some of the other system specs in here. There is a system MUCH more powerful than mine (GTX680) that was going from 75FPS to 35FPS from zooming in on the smoke. I don’t consider this acceptable.

I’ve seen this happen before and it seems to be related to anti-aliasing and alpha blending the transparent textures for the smoke.

Try setting your AA mode to performance rather than quality and see ifthat has any impact.

Tried performance, tried quality, tried turning AA completely off :-P

None of it worked, but thanks for the suggestion.
If you are using nV control center could you detail some more of your settings (if you were able to fix this bug)?

i5 2500k @4.3Ghz 1.26v prime95 16h test stable
msi gtx570 Twinfrozer III factory clocks
16gb 1333mhz ram kingston
ocz vertex 3 60gb ssd
gigabyte z68xp-ud3
superflower 650w psu

similar problem here my fps drop from 60>45-30 (vsync on) when i throw some granades on the ground with my engi and zoom in the effekt. vsync off = 100 -200fps on medium/low settings also with drops to 45fps in LA near WvWvW gates .

I have tried evry performance setting but it even apears on low settings while my system is powerfull enough to handle high.

my GPU usage goes up to 70-80% at that moment normal is 40%. max temp 45-50°C.
my CPU normaly 95%/30%/30%/30% gets a huge drop in usage wierdly it jumps down to 20% on all cores when it happens max temp 58°c.

changing nativ rendering to subsample helps to keep the fps at 60 but still my cpu usage drops . But that cant be a solution to ugly to play .

some screens with vsync on/off (campfire/max fps/ granades)

+1 to the group of people suffering from this.

Thanks for the additional reports guys!
Lets drum up more attention for this issue!

I’ve been getting it really badly in sPVP of late, espeically when playing against/with engineers and on Kyhlo during the treb shots.

no info from Anet on this issue?

An official response as to whether or not they can reproduce this in house would be greatly appreciated

more reports of this is being spread out on the forums, if a mod could step in and merge some of the smaller threads, that’d be great

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Fighting-Engineers-Brings-Heavy-Lag/first#post1946594

This problem is highlighted during the dynamic events of the Living Story as well.

Specifically when you are in close proximity to the explosions during the personnel carrier events [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Drive_out_the_invaders,_and_destroy_their_personnel_carrier]

Lediath.7593:

I’ve been getting it really badly in sPVP of late, espeically when playing against/with engineers and on Kyhlo during the treb shots.

Exactly the same here … it also happens for me in Spirit Watch if I’m in the area when someone caps the orb and that big frosty explosion thing happens. Like I’ve said before… I never had much of an issue with this before and all I do is spvp so I’m constantly in these scenarios – it seems that it only started happening for me in the last few months.

Quadeyes.1047:

+1 to the group of people suffering from this.

thanks for the additional reports guys

hope anet resolves this soon fingers crossed

Hm, my problem (that I have since 4 days, since I’ve downloaded the patch that was released that day) probably is to some degree related to what you are talking about… From the explanation it’s probably not exactly the same, but it’s for sure… It’s annoying like hell!

My problem if interested in reading through it:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Since-last-patch-99-GPU-load-FPS-lags

Lediath.7593:

thanks for the additional reports guys

hope anet resolves this soon fingers crossed

Of course they won’t. The engine is a piece of crap. It’s a freaking DirectX9 engine, that cannot utilize modern hardware in any efficient manner.

Once a game is live with a horrible engine – it stays that way until it dies.

Just look at SWTOR.

@replect: yep, seems very very similar although I think you might been coming across several different issues all at the same time

@cptbadger: I agree that the game is not well optimized, but that doesn’t mean it can’t improve. I will still hold out hope hehe. BUt my play time has dropped significantly, in part due to performance issues…

I saw that there were optimizations for the latest patch…

hopefully that means that Anet is working on this issue also
plz?

this is still a problem in the latest patch, confirmed with another guild member

usually getting 110FPS zoomed in on smoke at campfire 35-40FPS

This is on a 460GTX and a 650Ti

This issue is still present in the current build.