Guild Wars 2

I’ve just got myself a Sapphire Radeon 7970 Vapor-x Ghz edition and after lots of research I decided this was the card for me. I loaded it into my rig last night removing the previous GTX 550 Ti’s running in SLI, installed the latest drivers (13.1 I believe) and fired up GW2.

Unfortunately I was left rather disappointed, with the settings as they were previously (native, everything on high, FXAA off, high res textures etc on at 1080p), in Lions Arch 25-35 fps and out in the world 50 fps but randomly spikes down to 40 every so often… This seems only slightly better than the 550’s.

The machine is running an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.2Ghz, 8Gb of Corsair vengeance ram and then the Radeon. When the games running the CPU is running at around 50% and GPU activity is sat at 31% – That seems rather low to me. I tried putting the graphics settings up and switching to supersampling to try and entice the GPU but usage stayed at 31% and the fps took a serious hit.

So am I just expecting too much or should the game be performing considerably better? Is there anything I can do to squeeze out some more performance?

Your CPU is somewhat limiting. I don’t know how many people are getting over 100fps, probably not many even on high end rigs. What are you using to measure your GPU / CPU usage?

On an i7-920 @ 3.8ghz and a GTX 275 I am using 100% GPU. Did you read the sticky in here for low FPS? I went through that and a number of other things and ended up going from 10-15fps on max to about 30-50 on max.

I know AMD processors as a whole are generally slower than Intel but should a 6 core 3.2Ghz processor bottle neck it that much?

I am using Windows 8 task manager to monitor CPU usage since it gives a nice break down and percentage and the AMD CCC to check GPU activity. Just to point out that when I previously had the 2 GTX 550 Ti’s in the machine GPU useage was at 100% and CPU usage at 50%.

I have checked through the sticky but not a lot has helped. If I drastically reduce the settings then I get a constant 60 fps (with everything on minimum), I just expected much more from a pretty highly rated card. Especially since it can crank out 60 fps in BF3 with everything turned right up.

I am at work at the moment so I guess I’ll continue to play around later.

That is the thing, the videocard won’t help u here cuz the processor is not being utilized by the game engine effciently, which means it cannot feed the GPU properlly, which causes low frames overall. I would recomend to overclock that 1090t to 4ghz it should be pretty easy, there are many guides online about how to do this, Then disable reflections completelly, and shadows at medium/disabled in WvW, since those 2 options are very CPU demanding and will drastically hit ur FPS. Doing this 2 things u will get very good frames most of the time and be able to enjoy the game.

Yes. The Phenom X6 1090T is one of AMD’s best processors, but even then, your CPU is still lacking, especially with one of the most powerful graphics cards you can buy today.
Most Games today (including GW2) have yet to take advantage of more than 2 cores. The game with the highest multiple core usage is Battlefield 3, and that is designed to use 4 cores. You have 6 cores, but Guild Wars 2 is probably only able to use 2 of those cores or 33% of your available CPU..in this situation, having more powerful cores will get your farther than just having more cores

To give you an example, I get the same frame rates as you on a i5 3570k @ 4.5Ghz on a overclocked Gigabyte 7850 @ 960mhz COMPLETELY maxed out..

Its a known fact that AMD processors just don’t even come close to stacking up to Intel processors, and unforunately in your case thats showing by running the 2nd (or 3rd) fastest graphics card you can buy on a “okay” processor..

OC that 1090T like Rampage said, you’ll DEFINITELY get a FPS boost, but to answer your question, your CPU is stopping your card from performing at its fullest..

It is slightly beter as you said, that is already good.
You don’t need to get more than 60 fps unless you have a 3D screen who do the same as they did for the movie “The hobbit” (that one in 3D 48 frames per second, twice as fast as the current standard) Then ok you will have a better image… But i guess nobody of us are playing the game on a cinema screen :P From our eye, everything above 24 fps seems fluid, so don’t try to be faster than nature :p

Hoegarden pls dont bring that argument here. What the human eye can see if evident to every1 who can see which, unless they have poor eyesight, completly disproves what u just said.

OP.

it is ur CPU bottlenecking.

GW2 uses 1 main thread 2 secondary threads and about 47 other minor threads to run. When any 1 of those 3 top threads can no longer run fast enough on a single CPU thread/core to process its data, the rest of the game lsows down along wiht FPS. Meaning u will never see 100% CPu usuage unless ur using a Dual core or Triple Core CPU.
GW2 relies on the performance of each individula thread. Some CPU’s have 2 threads per core (hyperthreading) but what ever the CPU has, its the Single thread perofrmance that matters. So even though u can have a 6 or 8 Core AMD cpu which runs great for highly efficient multi threaded apps, AMD CPU’s have very weak single thread performance compared to Intel. Thus GW2 tends to run worse on AMD CPU’s.

OC if u can, but dont get ur expectations up. ALWAYS spend equal amounts on the CPU and GPU , dont go cheap on ether. Becouse u will inevitably come across a situation (like with GW2) where one bottlenecks the other in a drastic way.

I know thats odd coming from me as i have a comparativly cheap GPU compared to my CPU, but i am waiting on the 700 and 8000 series to come out at which point ill be getting ether 1 or 2 of the flagship single GPU models ..at which point both CPU and GPU will be even in cost.

Btw the hd 7970 is the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world it is a great buy overall will serve u well in any other games specially graphically intensive ones, but not the optimal choice for Gw2 since it poorlly optmized engine runs too heavy on the CPU, GW2 will just run like crap for many years untill CPU tecnology catch up. This is probably cuz Arenanet actually wanted to bring this game to consoles, so what we experience in GW2 are somewhat the same CPU bottleneck we have while playing games like GTA4.

Just to update. I’ve managed to have a play around and overclocked the 1090T to 4Ghz and fiddled around with some the graphics settings in the CCC.

Well Lions Arch performance was up to around 45 fps and it seems to sustain 50-60 fps out in the world (V-Sync is on). It still does occasionally seem to drop every so often, and i saw it drop to around the 40-45 mark in combat. Overall performance has been improved. Still not super happy, but happier.

Thanks for all the responses.

hoegarden.4287:

the movie “The hobbit” (that one in 3D 48 frames per second, twice as fast as the current standard)

Very correct all movies are either 24 fps , 25 fps to , 59 fps, 60fps depending where you are in the world, and how it was encoded. No one ever turns around in a movie and says that was choppy as . because it is consistant frame after frame and sync’d.

In the pc gaming world however, i feel this does not apply as such, yes you can vsync 30 fps and if consistant it looks great. But i can ensure you it feels sluggish compared to 60fps because i feel its missing half the frames that it could be producing on a 60hz monitor. I was once how could this be then when playing Battlefield 3 or MOHW at 120fps on 120hz than 30fps 30hz or 60fps on 60hz monitor its like night and day

then you gotta take in account , micro stutters, cpu processing, gpu processing and networking, which breaks up the consistency, input lag etc etc.

Theres only been a few 7970 threads , but majority have the same problem. but dont threat soo much cause that card is the flagship of ATI and is in the top 5 cards on the market today.. makes you wonder you can max everything else out but GW2 comes along in DX9 (kinda like The Witcher 2) and makes you question your rig. Give Anet time to iron out the kinks , (its only high population maps anyways, whats that lions arch & wvw maps?) no PC game has been released perfectly in the last year and required no patching on launch day onwards.

AMD processor need to be overclocked to increase performance.

SkyShroud.2865:

AMD processor need to be overclocked to increase performance.

So does Intel, so we are all in the same boat here

But how many games have you seen on the back of the box give you system requirements that state : requirement 2600k OC to 4.7 or FX 8150 OC to 4.5

So the only solution to the problem is to not play the game at max performance.
Just set it up so you run 60 fps, and play the game without questions. I know the game has a bad engine, so until they make a new one, we can’t really change something. (unless you can afford a cpu of 970$)

correct unless you can and Im just guessing you will finish the game before that patch day, but theres plenty to do & plenty of expansions to come im guessing. well no some peeps are getting awesome frame rates off $200 ~ $300 CPU s because they are over clocked (which is something the user can change to aid their fps)

I wouldnt say its a bad engine from my experience, graphically its a work of art, very creative & Innovative in design and all round enjoyable game.

The problem may not be your video card or CPU or drivers.

Whether running an Intel or AMD CPU the render engine currently won’t max more than 1 core. To see my point, fire up Task Manager and MSI Afterburner in the background. You’ll see 1 CPU core close to max (that’s where the render engine is running), and maybe 2 more cores at 20-40%. You’ll also see your video card at maybe 40-50% usage, but not maxed.

The bottleneck is coming from being single-core bound.

For GW2, Intels will be a better performer at present because they have higher single-core performance. If Anet changes the rendering engine to make better use of multiple cores (* no small task), then everyone should see much better performance, higher CPU and video card utilization and smoother frames.