Guild Wars 2

the game is a mix of RIDICULOUS CPU BOUND and random areas of extreme optimization issues. i found another one of those weird areas where the fps take an unnecessary massive hit. it was in dredgehaunt cliffs at the end of the jump puzzle(vista location) literally nothing there that should impact performance. yet when you walk two steps forward your fps drops by about 60fps. makes no sense at all and I believe its could be the issue for performance drops across the rest of the game.

as for the CPU bound issue yeah it is pretty bad. 99% of games my i72kittenas never bottlenecked my gtx670. to get an idea how weird it is in gw2 would nearly have to double my frequency to get the most out of my gtx670. considering the usage never seems to go much higher than 50%. i wish you could just force some cpu task onto your graphics card that way i would see some performance increase.

@Simon

It is weird. I’ve seen friends with older/less powerful builds than mine pulling way better fps than I am and it’s consistently good. But for me? Sub 25 doing nothing in a place with nothing in it and what feels like sub 1 fps in anything that has more than 10~15 characters/npcs running about.

On the overclocking, I’ve been looking into doing that, but that honestly shouldn’t even be an issue.

CptBadger.5918:

I love companies that treat their customers as morons.

You’ve never dealt with the general computing public.

For example, buying a new video card without checking to see if the GPU is actually the bottleneck or calling it CPU bound without first checking that either. :/

Well im running a amd fx990 mobo with a fx 6100 cpu 3.5 ghz with a gtx 670 i get 80-92 fps in pve then in wvwvw battles with 25+ people i get 10 fps the wierd thing is when im in the big wvw battles ill have all settings on high and be at 10 fps then i turn them all to low and it stays at 10 fps? please explain that to me

do try the overclocking. your i7-920 begs for it. you will see a huge difference in benchmarks too when you go above 3.2-3.4. this might turn some critic frequency block that might be whats disturbing your system. i cant promise it will give you more than 20fps in WvW but it surely will perform better than how it is now. and as you already can understand even the newest chips struggle with the WvW multi mass zerg processing. so even 18-20 there would be acceptable.
(the only place i feel huge fps drops in WvW is during Gate zerging, under the hot oil… but i never died there cause fps drop made me unresponsive)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-920-overclocking_11.html

anyway, good luck every fps you gain is worth it.

I’m not really asking for 120fps super high ultra realism (though it would be nice), just a playable fps like the 20 you said. Still pretty frustrated that I can barely play, but thank you for the help and the handy overclocking guide.

Oh neat, as an unintended side-effect of using the configurations ANet recommends Shogun 2 runs a lot better at least. Thanks, Anet.

wvw is pretty much unplayable for me, so i’m forced to stop playing the game. I’m aware that i don’t have a top notch pc, the processor is the bottleneck. But having 9 fps on low settings and everything turned off is pretty crap.

Amd athlon x4 @ 3.2ghz (biggest bottleneck, amd crap for mmo’s in general and even gaming), 8gig ddr3, ati hd 6870.

Lol i felt that this moment would have come.
GG @ArenaNet, people are leaving because they couldn’t play your game.
You know, playing WvW at 5 FPS while you’re getting killed by invisible people is NOT FUN.

thanx for first tip about setting high performance in panel and in-game options.getting from 25 to 50,though anet still need to fix this.i remember 80-90 fps and low gpu usage from day one i start playing.i bought gw2 on 3rd september and i had this performance until that infamious 9th september update.hope for fix in each patch

KillingFrenzy.7315:

Well im running a amd fx990 mobo with a fx 6100 cpu 3.5 ghz with a gtx 670 i get 80-92 fps in pve then in wvwvw battles with 25+ people i get 10 fps the wierd thing is when im in the big wvw battles ill have all settings on high and be at 10 fps then i turn them all to low and it stays at 10 fps? please explain that to me

The game moves its resources to the CPU during heavy loads, I don’t know why they coded it this way because most GPU’s these days are capable of the load.

anyone else have better performance at the moment?

I tried everything,including this power options→high performance trick.Nothing worked for me at all.I feel no difference even if there is any.

I have the i7 920 currently clocked at 3.8Ghz (however it was 3.4Ghz for the majority of my playtime) and a GTX 570 and it is pretty darn smooth, bottoming out at 30-40fps but 60fps most of the time.

Only advice i can give is make sure you are running the 306.23 nvidia drivers (some have reported more fps with the 306.63 drivers which you can get from guru3d.com ) and make sure your shadows are set to high (not ultra), sampling is set to “native” and reflections are set to Terrain & Sky, not Reflect All. The latter here caused the biggest fps drops for me, especially in lions arch.

Turn down your reflections in the graphics settings, this has a huge impact in lions arch

How about using the search function and seeing that there are about 10000000000000000000000 Threads about this topic,and regarding the fps in lions arch and other major cities.

try that after you set high performance in control panel-power options

Grim did you also disabled core packing?

Refraction.1892:

Turn down your reflections in the graphics settings, this has a huge impact in lions arch

I can vouch for this. I can’t explain it though. You can look at the ground, turn off reflections, and see a big jump in framerate.

Wha…? There wasn’t even anything reflective on the screen, and it didn’t change the visual quality at all in that scene.

Seems like the way reflections are handled is just majorly inefficient.

Its the coast, the canals and the fountain in the middle, as there is lots around to reflect, these things it alive when reflections are on full ;p

If it’s off-screen, it shouldn’t matter. As I said….looking at the ground.

Also, HL2 came out in 2004, and had full scene reflections that hardly cost any performance at all. I was able to run it just fine on a mid-range system, with ample framerate overhead.

There’s definitely something wrong with the reflection handling. Reflections are just not typically this costly.

I don’t see how full scene reflections can “hardly cost any performance at all”. You’re rendering your scene another time; even if it’s done at lower quality with no post processing it’s bound to cause a noticeable performance hit.
As for reflections affecting performance when you’re looking at the ground, that’s perfectly normal. It’s hard to determine if there will be water drawn on-screen, so the reflections pass is most likely done anyway.

I still got very poor fps… I followed all the steps from the sticky part (but it was set properly). driver is the latest. it is still unplayable… my card is in the right slot (i got 1 pciex slot anyway), but hey… if i can play battlefield 3 on fullhd / medium graphics, i doubt, that i would have serious problem with my pc nor my settings & drivers…

Athlon X4 635 2.9GHZ + 6GB DDR2 800 + HD7750 1GB… latest driver with CAP3, 40megabit broadband, 2 monitor (but i tried after I disconnected the secondary too)
Battlefield 3 @ 1920×1080 medium/high: stable 30+ fps
Guild Wars 2, Lornar’s pass, fullHD windowed fullscreen (or fullscreen or windowed, does not matter), Autodetect + downgrade:
animation MED, AA: none, Environment Med, LOD: Low, reflection: none, texture med, render sampling native, shadow med, shader med, post process low, no depth blur, only vsync… 12-20 fps…

I even tried this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Get-rid-of-your-low-FPS-AMD-only-Advanced-Method

and
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Working-boost-to-your-FPS-if-you-don-t-know-the-trick-you-will-be-surprised

no result…

@ Rolo
There are no “recommended requirements”. All they gave us are minimum requirements, which are actually inadequate requirements.
And no, a 2ghz dual core is not just as good as a 3ghz dual core just because they’re in the same generation.

HOW I FIXED MY ISSUE

I just got the game about a week ago and was struggling with low fps the entire time until yesterday.

System was:

i5-2500k OC’d to 4.3 w/LC
10GB Ram
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT

Thinking I was well over the min requirements I was very disapointed when I first logged in and saw this horribly choppy game right in front of me.
I made various tweaks but could never get above 20fps.

I figured it was my dated GPU so I ran over to Fry’s and picked up a shiny new Radeon HD 7950 2GB. Got home installed it and BOOM…same thing. I over/underclocked both my GPU and CPU, tried 4 different ATI drivers including beta drivers…nothing.

Then I read something that I hadn’t tried and didn’t even think of. I know it has been mentioned here before but I feel the need to mention it again since I spent so much time troubleshooting this. Open your case up and make sure your card is plugged into the high bandwith PCI-e slot. When I read that I checked min and sure enough it was in the low bandwith slot. I moved it over to the correct slot, installed beta drivers and logged in.

I almost kitten myself when I looked at and the fps was sitting around 110. Moved everything to “Best Appearance” and it still stayed around 50-70 fps.

Just something to try for the people not wanting to read through the entire thread.

TL:DR: Move your GPU to another PCI-e slot.

PCI x16 didn’t work for me. Game is so weird i don’t even know what to think anymore. Today i was playing with a stable 30 FPS even at Cursed Shore. Than out of nowhere it drops back to 15 and even further below with alot of people…

The funny part is my CPU isn’t even working properly at big events, dungeons and cities. When i move to a random place on the word map it sounds like a washing machine working correctly.

forgot to mention that my max gpu load was 32%, so my gpu doesn’t get used to it’s capacity. Looks like it’s deffo cpu related, which is bottlenecking.

I never expected to run anything at max, but having less than 9fps in WvW is something i would not expect, esp when everything is set to low/off. Shame that they advertised with certain minimum specifications, when in reality, having better than the minimum, the game is pretty much unplayable (wvw).

Since i bought the game just for that, and i’m not able to play that, it’s just a waste of money and unacceptable.

I am getting low fps with my computer too.

i7 @ 4.0
gtx 670 FTW
6GB Ram

Should be getting better fps. I think the problem is the gpu usage.

abhorash.2915:

it seems like ANet made this game in order to help cpu/gpu manufacturers sell their high end products. If that was their plan, they succeeded.

+1

Possible and mean lol.

And people complaining: i quit playing. Anet know they come back ones they increase fps. Because people already paid for the game and there’s no subscription.

It’s only strange that this game runs crap on the best hardware possible today, if that was there plan.

OMG… cant belive it…

it IS because the bad pci-e multiplier… i checked with gpu-z, it said it is supporing x16, but running on x1… i said, its a false read, i can run the bf3 just fine… i started screwing around with bios update, chipset driver update (i have the latest ati gpu driver)… somehow i managed to raise this value up to x4 (i know, its still sucks, its not x16, but i tried the gw2… and its 40 fps from 15!…

But now, im kinda confused… i have only one pci-e slot, which is x16, and a pcie 3.0 x16 card in it, but it still runs only on x4…
anyway, im at least seeing the problem…

^ Magnificat, do you know what brand motherboard you’re using? ASRock is known for that issue and occasionally Biostar.

As for the links further up, disabling Aero and desktop themes DOES help, I do it on my laptop which helps GW2 run better and I did it on my PC when playing SWTOR.

And yes it is quite odd how this game runs like crap on cutting edge hardware, I’m still using a motherboard that has PCI-e x16 1.1 (note 3.0 is out on the market now) and using DDR2 800MHz ram when there’s 1866MHz DDR3. The game runs like a champ for me, how strange. Under normal circumstances I’d keep up with cutting edge hardware like I have been since the mid 90’s but money issues has kept me from upgrading this almost 2 year old PC- maybe it’s a good thing this time.

Teknobug.3782:

^ Magnificat, do you know what brand motherboard you’re using? ASRock is known for that issue and occasionally Biostar.

As for the links further up, disabling Aero and desktop themes DOES help, I do it on my laptop which helps GW2 run better and I did it on my PC when playing SWTOR.

And yes it is quite odd how this game runs like crap on cutting edge hardware, I’m still using a motherboard that has PCI-e x16 1.1 (note 3.0 is out on the market now) and using DDR2 800MHz ram when there’s 1866MHz DDR3. The game runs like a champ for me, how strange. Under normal circumstances I’d keep up with cutting edge hardware like I have been since the mid 90’s but money issues has kept me from upgrading this almost 2 year old PC- maybe it’s a good thing this time.

Its Gigabyte MA770-US3 with X4 635… And I found the problem… My vga was simply pressed too deeply into the pci-e slot! pulled back about a mm, and it started to act as x16 2.0 So i got back my 30+ fps! cant imagine the bf3 now

well, to be honest, its not far over 30 (33-40) but still way playable than 12-15

So its time to open a glass of vine, and enjoy the rest of the day ingame :P

LOL how strange, pressed too deep?

I’m also using a Gigabyte MB (MA785G-US2H), I like them.

Im a software developer, a hc geek in the last 18-20 year… I put a lot of pc together… never happened me this before :P possibly its just some form of loose connection in the slot, or whatever

and yes, my last 2 or 3 mb was gigabyte too… i like them, i trust them And not so expensive I choose 770-us3 because i had to use my 6 gigs of ddr2, didnt had money to complete ram change too (and ddr3 was quite expensive then)

anyway, its a huge relief, that nor my MB, nor my VGA broke…

Magnificat, what exactly is VGA? I also tryed changing PCI slot to x16 without any FPS increase.

Lani: I have a Sapphire Radeon HD7750 1GB DDR5 graphics card. Since i have only one pci-e x16 slot (my motherboard doesn’t support crossfire) i thought the GPU-Z’s detection (the x16 card is running @x1) is a false one, but no… The card WAS running on x1… i tried to fiddle with motherboard chipset driver, bios, etc… once i could increase it to x4, but that was it… i reinstalled the whole windows, but still everything was running on x1… i thought the motherboard or the vga broke… started to mildly push left-right the card, but nothing happened… then i started to pull a little bit out, like i wanted to get it out… when i pulled back like a millimeter, and started the pc (ofc it was switched off during the squeezing time), it was running on x16… started the game, and had the 30+ fps (33-45).

since you have two pci-e slot, start gpu-z, and check, what speed is it running…
as here:
http://tpucdn.com/gpuz/screen1.gif
you can see the bus interface: PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x16 2.0…
in my case it was PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x1 2.0… or PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x1 1.1…

Magnificat, cpu-z says it run x16 even if i change it in the bios. PCI, PCIx1 or PCIx16 it doesn’t make any difference. The first time i changed, it was on “PCI” in the bios. I’m gonne try do the same you did. Thanks for the explanation.

well i notice fps only seem to drop heavily in tight spaces like caves, areas of lion’s arch with alot of things, areas where you can look very far and there are many things in the distance.

if you turn around and face the exit to your area your fps will be high. if you go right up to a wall your fps will lift and if you zoom in it will lift more

my fps is really ridiculous right now. no other game old or new performs this poorly.

to get 50+ fps i need to put the lowest setting which make age of empires 1 look great. seriously?

this is so frustrating.

is it possible for arena net to confirm what they think is the problem or if they dont know what it is yet? They say they need to reproduce the problem, can they specify what system spec they have tested and in what areas.

have anyone tried completely remove gw2 and reinstall? is it possible for that to work?

I can confirm that the bus pci-e multiplier bug is the cause for me too.
To check if is the same problem for you, download the utility gpu-z (google it) and check the field “bus interface”. If it shows something like PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x1 1.1 then that’s your problem right there.

I found this link that proposes a number of solutions: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=522

Most common solution seems to be to pull the video card out and put it back in again. That seems to reset it. Sadly for some of us with laptops, that simply cannot be done. Also your BIOS might not have the options discussed in that article.

I still think that GW2 somehow messes with this (maybe with power profiles?). I played on my laptop countless games (more demanding that this) and never had this issue. And it only occurs after playing GW2. So far i haven’t found a reliable way of resetting it. sometimes just resetting the computer works, sometimes i have to play with the power profiles/nvidia settings/change drivers/pray to the gaming gods/etc and it still does not reset.

Rising Vengeance.2768:

have anyone tried completely remove gw2 and reinstall? is it possible for that to work?

Tried that a couple of times, does not work at all.

I noticed that both my cards are 8×. Apparently this is a limitation of my motherboard. No idea if that has any effect on fps due to lower bandwidth.

Everyone that run GPU-Z and see their card running at PCIE x1 this is normal your card is getting downclocked for desktop application if you run a game and windows mode your game and look at the GPU-Z your PCIE slot will go to his full speed.

After some days gathering data, I found that the game doesn’t use everything the hardware can offer. I’m playing on a laptop with a Nvidia GT540m overclocked to GT550m speeds and an i3 Sandy Bridge. It seems weak but I can play Crysis 2 on high easily, as well as BF3 on high/med.

I’ve used Realtemp to log temperatures and load on my CPU and GPU and GPUtemp to get the GPU load. On a game like Grid, both my CPU and GPU get high loads, peaking 100% sometimes. The temperatures go to ~80C on the CPU and ~75C on GPU, and the processor scales to its full 2Ghz. When playing GW2, strangely my processor only scales to 1,3Ghz, and with a 70% max load. The GPU get even less load, peaking 70% on really effect heavy situations.

I don’t know if latency can affect FPS at all, but sometimes I play with a ping over 400ms, which is high. I’m sure that my processor and my graphic card aren’t throttling. I’m not sure of what to do anymore. I get 25~30fps normally with almost any config ingame, except maybe reflections, but it gets down to 10fps when there’s a lot of players nearby.

More good insight here. Again while I’m playing fine (60 or so FPS) most of the time, there is that camera stuttering on turns and a couple areas where FPS does dip randomly it seems.

Now the odd thing is that while my frequency isn’t as high as others’ here, I’m having no problems pushing 30-40 FPS in WvW (GTX 680). Granted the biggest battle I’ve seen is probably a 25v25 or 30v30 but it runs acceptable enough on my Xeons.

All chips should process similar instructions but if it was a case of that, we’d see solely AMD or solely Intel people claim that it’s an optimization issue. Here, we see both.

Getting a solid 70-99% GPU use now finally, though my CPU usage is barely touched. Would have to look at a WvW fight to see what it’d pull there, though. Still running 306.23 drivers for what it’s worth.

There are pretty important differences in CPU implementation, TheRealLink

Been a LONG time since I studied that area, and it’s so sophisticated now. But I recall that they used to optimize execution in various ways. They can reorder instructions for efficiency. They have various ways of getting data from memory into the CPU cache and such which effects performance. They have these “pipelines” which try to increase efficiency. Anyway, lame explanation, but it’s not simply about instruction sets.

michaeljhuman.3940:

There are pretty important differences in CPU implementation, TheRealLink

Been a LONG time since I studied that area, and it’s so sophisticated now. But I recall that they used to optimize execution in various ways. They can reorder instructions for efficiency. They have various ways of getting data from memory into the CPU cache and such which effects performance. They have these “pipelines” which try to increase efficiency. Anyway, lame explanation, but it’s not simply about instruction sets.

Oh true. Wasn’t saying it was purely that as tons of people are setting lackluster performance given the full range of systems on this thread. I certainly don’t pretend to know anything about internal thread optimizations but just saying it seems to be hit or miss (or is that mostly miss) for people. If this thread has such the count it does, I’m curious how many hundreds of thousands are playing the game since I’d imagine most users aren’t on the forums until they need some help.

I noticed that the Shader setting has an enormous impact on Kepler (GK104) cards, more than it should in my opinion. If this uses compute capabilites, maybe have a look at the blocksize. I doubt it should cause a performance impact comparable to 1920×1200 vs 2880×1800 downsampling.

Magnificat.5439:

OMG… cant belive it…

it IS because the bad pci-e multiplier… i checked with gpu-z, it said it is supporing x16, but running on x1… i said, its a false read, i can run the bf3 just fine… i started screwing around with bios update, chipset driver update (i have the latest ati gpu driver)… somehow i managed to raise this value up to x4 (i know, its still sucks, its not x16, but i tried the gw2… and its 40 fps from 15!…

But now, im kinda confused… i have only one pci-e slot, which is x16, and a pcie 3.0 x16 card in it, but it still runs only on x4…
anyway, im at least seeing the problem…

Try taking out the GPU and putting it back in (when the computer is shutdown of course). As silly as that may sound, sometimes doing this can actually fix low-speed PCI-E speeds (it did for me a few times, and was reported a few other times by other people)