Guild Wars 2

I looked everywhere for a solution as to why my Nvidia GTX 670 was running the game so poorly, and I may have found it in the most unlikely place.

A couple of days ago I noticed that my RAM was running at DDR3 1333 (1333 Mhz), so I went into BIOS and used the XMP profile to increase it to the advertised 1600 Mhz frequency.

Afterwards GW2 ran perfectly, as in no lagfest in combat, as a bonus, no random crashing anymore. I even did this on my friend’s computer which was also having framerate issues and it also made everything run smooth as butter again. (He has a GTX 570)

It seems that the newer Nvidia cards (Fermi and Kepler architectures) can power through the data it receives from main memory (your RAM) faster than main memory can deliver the data, so the GPU sits there waiting for more data to crunch, leading to framerate drops and possibly system crashes.

The fix is to obviously increase the speed of main memory, incidentally many motherboards will downclock RAM to 1333 Mhz despite the RAM sticks being advertised as capable of 1600 Mhz, 2100 Mhz, etc. It not uncommon for crazy overpowered gaming rigs to have their RAM running at DDR3 1333.

For those of you with overpowered systems having framerate issues, check your memory frequencies, GW2 won’t run very well if you have a GTX 5xx or 6xx and your memory is running at 1333 Mhz.

What chipsets are the two motherboards you tested using and what cpu? Sandy and Ivy bridge have integrated memory controllers, would seem odd that that 1333 would be a bottleneck on these two cpus. I have a 670 and 2×4gb 1333 haven’t noticed any real problems but if I could get a performance boost, be a good excuse to get 16mb of 1600mhz ram since it’s pretty cheap these days.

Addy.3751:

What chipsets are the two motherboards you tested using and what cpu? Sandy and Ivy bridge have integrated memory controllers, would seem odd that that 1333 would be a bottleneck on these two cpus. I have a 670 and 2×4gb 1333 haven’t noticed any real problems but if I could get a performance boost, be a good excuse to get 16mb of 1600mhz ram since it’s pretty cheap these days.

I have a Ivy Bridge i5-3570K, Z77 chipset

My friend has a Lynnfield (Nehalem based) i7-820, with a P55 chipset.

I would not have guessed that 1333 Mhz would be a bottleneck since it ran fine with every other game, but with GW2 specifically it simply fixed all our issues related to framerates by increasing RAM frequency to 1600 Mhz.

What is really odd about all this is that it ran just fine in the beta, and suddenly did all this mess after release.

Going from DDR1333 to DDR1600 will net you basically ZERO fps increase. The speed increase is so negligible you will not notice any difference. Your issues are elsewhere & not in the memory speed.

In fact, going from DDR1333 to DDR2600Mhz will net you around 1-5FPS MAX in gaming.

In tweaking your RAM in BIOS, it probably affected another part of the system that gave you your boost, although I can’t fathom what. The reason why a 670 lags is because of the drivers, cos there is currently an issue that SSAO is being implemented even when forced off.

Might be some compatibility issues with that ram speed on the mobo or something. You don’t get any more crashes or fps issues, so whatever works.

I noticed that with many 1600MHz ram, most motherboards seem to set whatever DDR3 1600 you throw in as 1333 and you have to manually set it to 1600 (or 800).

I was doing some overclocking tests so I set my ram to 1333 so I can change the CPU-NB which adjusts the ram speed at the same time, I played a few games @ 1333 and didn’t notice any difference from 1600. you’re either seeing a placebo effect or changed something ELSE.

My other system with has a Phenom II X6 1090T and 800MHz DDR2 played GW2 at almost the same FPS as I’m getting on my current system now, same video card.

Cbuzz.5083:

Going from DDR1333 to DDR1600 will net you basically ZERO fps increase. The speed increase is so negligible you will not notice any difference. Your issues are elsewhere & not in the memory speed.

In fact, going from DDR1333 to DDR2600Mhz will net you around 1-5FPS MAX in gaming.

I don’t know whether you read the post thoroughly or I didn’t write it well enough.

It wasn’t a post on how to increase FPS, it was on how to fix the terrible performance issues I and many others have had with our Nvidia cards that should run this game without breaking a sweat.

I am aware that memory speed doesn’t make a noticible difference (with discrete gpus, iGPUs are a different story) but after making this change my performance was back to normal. So if it is the RAM something weird is going on to cause such bottlenecking.

If it wasn’t specifically the RAM, it may have been the XMP profile settings. I’ll have to look further into it. It may have also changed CPU settings in additions to RAM frequencies.

EDIT: Looking into XMP a bit more, it only overclocks the RAM and doesn’t deal with the CPU at all.

My other system with has a Phenom II X6 1090T and 800MHz DDR2 played GW2 at almost the same FPS as I’m getting on my current system now, same video card.

Perhaps specific to Intel, perhaps even more specifically to ASUS motherboards with intel chipsets. I really couldn’t tell you why it worked, but the only setting I have changed in BIOS are to overclock the RAM and RAM only.

Might be some compatibility issues with that ram speed on the mobo or something. You don’t get any more crashes or fps issues, so whatever works.

Only thing is that it would imply that somehow a compatibility issue from a P55 motherboard managed to remain on a Z77 motherboard. A defect that went undetected by intel for several generations is highly unlikely, but still a possibility.

In tweaking your RAM in BIOS, it probably affected another part of the system that gave you your boost, although I can’t fathom what. The reason why a 670 lags is because of the drivers, cos there is currently an issue that SSAO is being implemented even when forced off.

That’s what I’m thinking, the RAM isn’t the main cause I think, but it might have been affecting another component, perhaps due to GW2 being very CPU bound the CPU was being bottlenecked by the RAM, though it doesn’t explain why it is specific to this game only, every other game i play ran fine at DDR 1333.

The reason why a 670 lags is because of the drivers, cos there is currently an issue that SSAO is being implemented even when forced off.

Perhaps this is causing some weird gumming of the works in the hardware, it would explain why it is GW2 specific and doesn’t affect other games. Its an assumption from far off in left field though.

EDITED to address various posters.

Milo-
Can you be more specific on the performance increase you’ve seen? For me the game runs fine most of the time. I run with the graphics maxxed with the exception of shadows on high instead of ultra.

Most of the time I’m 50-80 frames per second but then out of the blue the frame rate will plummet for a few second and the games feels very choppy. And it’s not in areas with insane particle effects or massive amounts of players, I expect and see reasonable performance drops in those areas. Just seems to happen in normal pve environments.

I check back on my system performance logs and cpu, gpu and ram are nowhere near loaded, and system temps are fine. So I just assumed the game was needing to be optimized and that nVidia needs to help on their end with driver support.

Addy.3751:

Milo-
Can you be more specific on the performance increase you’ve seen? For me the game runs fine most of the time. I run with the graphics maxxed with the exception of shadows on high instead of ultra.

Most of the time I’m 50-80 frames per second but then out of the blue the frame rate will plummet for a few second and the games feels very choppy. And it’s not in areas with insane particle effects or massive amounts of players, I expect and see reasonable performance drops in those areas. Just seems to happen in normal pve environments.

I check back on my system performance logs and cpu, gpu and ram are nowhere near loaded, and system temps are fine. So I just assumed the game was needing to be optimized and that nVidia needs to help on their end with driver support.

Nvidia themselves have stated that GW2 is a CPU-bound title, and there’s not much else they can do drivers-wise to improve performance.

Forget about nvidia claiming so, even GW2 developer has said the game is CPU-bound. (Source: Read Q11)