Guild Wars 2

I love the game, really I do. I’ve been a GW and Anet fan and supporter for the last 6 years and finally getting to play this game made me happy like a kid on Christmas day.

However, all this joy is shadowed buy the terrible performance. I own a good gaming machine and have been upgrading parts of it since summer just so I can play GW2 at a comfortable and stable 60fps on high settings. Anything less than that does great disservice to the beautiful and immerisve world, not to mention the $1000+ I spent already on this machine.

I am tired, both psychologically and most of all financially of continuously buying new and better hardware just so that I can enjoy the game.

The game is so horribly (if at all) optimized that it used to run better during CB2 than it does now. Moreover, most of the times, reducing all settings to their lowest possible values gives me no performance boost AT ALL.

I tried all settings, 2 different GPUs – stock and overclocked, 4gb ram, 8gb ram, win7, win8, -cuda arguments, defragging, having nothing else but the game and video drivers installed on a fresh windows install… all to no avail.

Performance is severely inconsistent and generally bad.

All this is seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game and it has caused me to take a break hoping for a miracle patch that addresses all this.

Agreed, Arena Net your game is broken, if you wont fix it noone will

Could you please post all of your computer specs, cpu, psu, mb, hd, etc…

Just swapping out some ram and a gpu doesn’t mean a fix, you could have a weak psu, a bios upgrade may help, your cpu could be getting hot, or your gpu, theres a long list of possibilities… Welcome to the world of computer gaming:)

The reason upgrading ur computer as you have been doing has shown little to know imporvment is becouse you seem to have been looking at the wrong part.

its not the GPU. GW2 is one of a few games that has performance hinged greatly on the CPU.
If you indeed do have a good gaming machine then i can asume you have a Intel 2500k/3570k or better. In which case all you need to do if you havnt done so already ..is OC your CPU to around 4.5ghz (Sandybridge) 4.3ghz (Ivybridge). Do that and you should be fine. CPU usuage will not show 100% usuage so dont bring that up please ..plenty of posts around toexplain why ..browse my posts and you will find one explaining it.

If you already have it OC’d, then do share what your CPU and GPU usuage is ingame and what settings ur using.

Note you wont get 60 FPS all the time in some areas of LA or WvW no matter your rig.

I completely agree. I don’t WvW because it makes me feel like I’m playing on a 486 Turbo during the Everquest Days (circa 1999)

sadface

AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 4.0ghz
8gb DDR3
Sound Blaster Recon 3D
Game on seperated HDD then Win 7 64bit
GTX 580 @ stock

I mean seriously…

Its gunna sound like im bashing AMD again but JERRIX ..its your cpu :P I bet your 580 sits there at 50% usuage most the time right ?

And omg. .the 486 ..i remember those :d .. i ran a 486/66 then a 486/100 back in the day ..used ot play C&C on it and Wolfenstien ..and DOOM and such hehe.

ASRock H67
i5 2400 @3.1GHz
gtx 560ti oc 960MHz cloclspeed, 2250MHz memory speed
8gb ram @ 1333MHz
500gb WD 7200rpm hdd
400W PSU

Now I am fully aware the CPU is my system’s bottleneck, which I am hopefully going to upgrade to an i5 2500k/3570 and I would be completely happy with the performance my machine can offer if only it were stable. I don’t mind 40fps, heck even 30 fps is OK if it didn’t jump all over the place.

My issue is with the spikes and inconsistent performance. My framerate goes from 57-60, down to 25-30, then back to 50-55, then back down to 23-25 when I’m just running about harvesting and mining. It’s even worse when I turn the camera. Say my framerate idles at 60 capped by v-sync when my character is standing still, if I turn the camera, the framerate drops to 15 in a short second then jumps back to 50-60, after another 2 seconds. Turn the camera gain, it happens again.

To reiterate, I’m well aware of the available power of my hardware (which might not be all that great as I might have let you understand) and I’m not asking for anything my machine can’t do. I simply want consistent and stable framerates.

Okay, thanks for the info. Try a better psu, thats pretty low for gaming. I’m pulling close to 300 watts with the game running..

And I have the 560Ti and an i7 3770 , neither are oc’d and the game is running great at high settings

OK fair enough Umbra ..sounds good.

The fps drops your notcing are due to GW2’s culling mostly. User wise there only a few thigns that can be done to help reduce its impact.

Settings:
Relfections – Terrain & Sky
Shadows – High
LOD – High/medium

That should help.

Other than that its just down to hardware . The faster the cpu the faster it can re process the culled objects your loading as you turn. a SSD will help load up textures and model faster to reduce stutter and fps dips. Note a SSD wont increase fps it will just help reduce stutter.

As you can see in my spec i also run a 560ti also..slightly lower clocks than urself as its factory clocked 950mhz core and 4580 ‘effective’ memory. But i dont get as drastic fps dips as yourself EXCEPT in LA when i load it up for the 1st time ..i just spin the camera around once or twice and its sorted.

EDIT: 400W is slightly on the low side but since ur not OC’ing ur cpu its fine for what you have. If/when you get a new cpu and OC you will need atleast a 600w PSU since sandybridges atleast can pull alot of watts when OC’d, Ivybridge aint so bad.

SolarNova.1052:

Its gunna sound like im bashing AMD again but JERRIX ..its your cpu :P I bet your 580 sits there at 50% usuage most the time right ?

And omg. .the 486 ..i remember those :d .. i ran a 486/66 then a 486/100 back in the day ..used ot play C&C on it and Wolfenstien ..and DOOM and such hehe.

It does sit at around 50%, but what is strange is, at Supersample, the usage hangs out at about 80-99% with little framerate drop. So i’m sorry, I highly doubt it all comes down to an AMD cpu. I can max out my vid card if i want, but whats the point if the Minimum FPS doesn’t change much?? Its bottlenecking the game, not my GPU.

Oh well, I have no desire to buy an Intel. Planetside 2 sucks kittens without an Intel too. If this is the way games are going, I’m done building computers. Some of us actually don’t have $2000 to burn on a system…. It’s quite disappointing that instead of make programs run smarter on CPUs, they just go for the brute forcing of single threads.

Aye i agree it is a shame. And i also miss the days when AMD could compete performance wise vs Intel. Alass gone are the good ol days

JERRIX.5390:

It does sit at around 50%, but what is strange is, at Supersample, the usage hangs out at about 80-99% with little framerate drop.

Supersample will render the game at higher resolution so your GPU will work harder processing the image before fitting it back to native resolution. Naturally utilization will be higher at 80-99%, but the CPU is still slow/bottlenecked so it can’t telling the GPU the next frame to render.

the little FPS change is a classic example of CPU bottleneck. (Explained in Q4 & Q12 of this thread)

Oh god, the great and powerful Kirito is still adding value to these posts. Congrats, bro. Anet should pay this guy for covering up their slop engine.

probably more cost effective to pay bonuses to the devs as incentive for improving the code.

Personally, I’d settle for Anet simply responding once in a while to the problems expressed on these forums instead of simply ignoring everything. The only viable tech support I’ve EVER seen here has come from other players … that’s pretty sad. I started a thread here on that exact topic a couple of days ago and Anet deleted it … the stated reason being that I called them out using their name in the title of the thread. How hilarious is that?

I dont get why all you AMD users are having fps issues..I dont !The ONLY issues I am having is getting constant dc’s from the server farm .

I am running a 965 @ 3.4
8 gigs corsair
950 /w PSU
ati 6850
Although I dont OC for my own reasons ,I do substantial tweaks .

I get 59 fps locked with v snyc all day..Maxed out at 1080 ,with ONLY the shader turned down to medium .