Guild Wars 2

I currently use a Radeon HD 6950 2 GB card. It’s somewhat outdated but has mostly worked well for me over the past year.

I would like to get a newer card, though, and I’m wondering if it’s worth it as I’ve read that GW2 is CPU bound. I’ve already overclocked my processor to 4.5 ghz to get some extra performance and everything runs great in most of the game apart from crowded places like Lion’s Arch (25-45fps) and WvW.

I primarily want to get better graphics performance in WvW. Any advice?

Thanks.

You really don’t need to if your using a single 1080p or less monitor.

Eh, really?

I am on a single 1080p monitor and that’s kind of disappointing to hear.

So I guess this is as good as it’s going to get unless I run my processor even harder…

You might be better off with a good solid state drive over a video card. What are your others specs?

Well, my current hard drive isn’t an SSD, but that was also on my list of upgrades. Would you mind suggesting a good one?

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Well, my current hard drive isn’t an SSD, but that was also on my list of upgrades. Would you mind suggesting a good one?

OCZ Vertex 4 are good SSD’s

Samsung 840 only brand I recomend, build with, and use.

zerk.9701:

Samsung 840 only brand I recomend, build with, and use.

I ll second that with my older 830.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

I currently use a Radeon HD 6950 2 GB card. It’s somewhat outdated but has mostly worked well for me over the past year.

I would like to get a newer card, though, and I’m wondering if it’s worth it as I’ve read that GW2 is CPU bound. I’ve already overclocked my processor to 4.5 ghz to get some extra performance and everything runs great in most of the game apart from crowded places like Lion’s Arch (25-45fps) and WvW.

I primarily want to get better graphics performance in WvW. Any advice?

Thanks.

if you want maximize your fps in www and game still looks fantastic follow my advices in my thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p/first#post2636642 where I describe how I can play with a 7 years old pc in www zergs without lag at all

and the advices in the post https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p/first#post2640737

note : maybe the no antivirus solution is not recommended and you can skip it but it is up to you

SonicTHI.3217:

zerk.9701:

Samsung 840 only brand I recomend, build with, and use.

I ll second that with my older 830.

Third, Samsung makes an excellent SSD.

oO why would you guys tell him to get an SSD? It doesn’t improve performance. Just speeds up load times.

I don’t think a new card will help you very much with GW2. I’m running @4.3 GHz with a Nvidia 780. I get 120-180 frames/sec all over the world. But since our glorious last update, I still get lagged to death in the sames places as everyone else. My lowest frame count is about 30 in Lion’s Arch with everyone is dancing around and shooting off fireworks. More troubling is the places I get the horrible lag (any Scarlet event, big WvW, etc.), I am getting 60-70 frames/sec, but the lag is still there. Whatever the problem is, it’s not in the video card. I am curious about the SSD. Has anyone upgraded and noticed a difference in GW2?

I have noticed a memory leak since the last update. It is slow, but increases steadily. It is not zone dependent and it does not drop. Has anyone else noticed this?

Thanks for the advice everyone and I’ll check out that thread when I get a chance reborn.

I used to have lag and d/c problems a couple weeks ago but most of that seems to have cleared up. My main concern is fps, so crossover, I’m wondering how you’re getting 120-180 fps in the open world? I bounce from 70-110 fps in the open world and inexplicably dip into the 50s in certain areas, but those are few and far between. I do get 30 in Lion’s Arch like you, and this is worse than usual because of all the people there around for the living story stuff. What are your settings like? I just set mine with auto-detect and almost all the options were set to high, save for a few.

I typically run my settings on high across the board (no ultra). The 120-180 is PvE open world running (not in cities). As you would expect, it fluctuates all over the place in that range. If I stand on a high vista and swing the camera around 360 degrees quickly, I can lag myself down to 30 for a second or two —- once. But my point is those extra frames aren’t very helpful and we both still grind in the same spots. So I don’t think you’d be very happy if you upgraded your card just for GW2.

I’ve also noticed that knocking my settings down to medium doesn’t get me much. Taking textures and shadows down to medium only gets me 3-5 frames/sec. Turning shadows off and reflections to “sky & terrain” does get me an extra 20 frames/sec, but not in the places I really need it. Again, this would suggest the video card is not the limiting factor.

I wasn’t even aware of SSD until it was mentioned here, so I researched it a bit. As I understand it, they basically help your load times. So when you zone into a place like Lion’s Arch, all the different characters and textures get rendered a lot faster, improving your fps indirectly. It also sounds like it would help your fps dips from spinning around.

Anyway, I’m wondering if it would be possible to keep my current hard drive, add the SSD, and just run the game off the SSD while keeping my other stuff on the slower hard drive?

The next generation of ATI cards are coming out soon (9000 series). So don’t bother upgrading yet.

Also yes, you can install your OS and a few games on to an SSD and keep the HDD with everything else on. If you do buy an SSD, stick to Intel and Samsung. A lot of the others are a bit un-reliable tbh. I’ve had a corsair and OCZ die on me within a year :/

I am wondering about this as well. I’ve noticed my most laborious lag times coincide exactly with a spike to 100% disc usage. Not conclusive in any respect, but my hard drive is certainly the lowest piece of tech I have and not on level with my other gear. I was hoping someone on here had upgraded to an SSD, and could provide some tangible before and after feedback.

You can certainly add an SSD drive to your existing drive, as long as you have the hardware connection for it available in your rig. You need to install an internal SSD, or your just wasting your speed away through a USB cable. However, note in Reborn’s link above, his mention of installing the operating system on the SSD (as well as keeping it on your existing HD). I have heard this before, but unfortunately I can’t tell you why that is or the consequences of not doing it.

The thing is the HD 6950 is “good enough”. It’s equivalent to a HD 7850 and there’s not a lot of up to go from there unless you are playing on a high resolution monitor or bank of monitors. Sure you could go with an HD 7950, a $230ish card that has 30% better performance in regular games but here?

The game does stream data while playing from the hard drive. Besides sound effects I see an occasional large read. Now an SSD can improve on this not only be a faster transfer speed but the near elimination of seek time. A 14ms average seek is equivalent to a 1.4MB read of data on a 100MB/s hard drive. SSDs are normally under 0.05ms “seeks”. That’s why small reads and jumping all over a file to get data (16GB data file anybody, there’s got to be lots of seeks in there) could help eliminate some frame rate jitters. On top of that if it’s hooked to a 6Gb/s SATA III port then it also has 4x the transfer rate of a normal HD.

But first in need to see if the HD 6950 is what’s holding you back. You could monitor GPU workload while playing and check to see if the video card is pegged where you are experiencing less than desirable frame rates. If it is then a graphics card upgrade is in order. Then maybe an HD 7950 ($210-320), GTX 760 ($250-270) or HD 7970 ($300-395). In other games we are talking 30-60% better performance over what you have. Here, again who knows?

SSDs only affect performance outside of loading only a smidgen but it “feels” like your rig is faster. And if you what to upgrade something, then at the prices above we are looking at a 240-256GB size SSD. The basic retail box version of the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro is $240, the slightly slower 250GB Samsung 840 is only $175.

Well, I just tested in my GPU usage and it’s 99% at all times in game . I’m not even in Lion’s Arch…this is out in the world in Mount Maelstrom. I don’t think I ever saw it hit 100% when I used to play WoW.

I think this would explain why I didn’t notice much difference when I overclocked my processor from 3.6 ghz to 4.3 ghz.