Guild Wars 2

Hello, I have an Alienware M14X, i7 processor, 8 GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650M with 2GB of Video Memory.

I never experienced any particular problem, I used to play with almost everything on high (few things apart) with 18-23 fps in most populated areas (WvW included), until today, I updated my Nvidia drivers and this problem appeared.
My game do works kinda fine, yet there are costant drops in fps which slow down my pg in a terrible way, making me impossibile to take part to any sort of competitve game, be it PvP, WvW, Dungeons or even the new race mini game. This seems to happen even when using the lowest settings.
I also tried to go back to the old drivers but the problem now remains.

Please help me overcome this, it’s really getting me frustrated.

Zeta.3198:

Hello, I have an Alienware M14X, i7 processor, 8 GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650M with 2GB of Video Memory.

I never experienced any particular problem, I used to play with almost everything on high (few things apart) with 18-23 fps in most populated areas (WvW included), until today, I updated my Nvidia drivers and this problem appeared.
My game do works kinda fine, yet there are costant drops in fps which slow down my pg in a terrible way, making me impossibile to take part to any sort of competitve game, be it PvP, WvW, Dungeons or even the new race mini game. This seems to happen even when using the lowest settings.
I also tried to go back to the old drivers but the problem now remains.

Please help me overcome this, it’s really getting me frustrated.

When you said you tried to go back to the old drivers, did you first uninstall the new driver entirely before reverting to the old driver?

Drivers aside, lets make sure your CPU and GPU temperatures are within the operational limits. If you don’t already have software the monitors your CPU and GPU temperatures, then I recommend getting HWMonitor, which can be found here:
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.23-setup.exe

When taking the measurements of temperatures, make sure you have had the game running for a few minutes before discerning what the maximum temperature is.

One of the recommendations I had from Anet – and yes, I’m one of many experiencing FPS drops I hadn’t had before – was a “-repair” of GW2. I haven’t tried that yet as I just haven’t got the time at the moment.

Whether it will help or not I couldn’t possibly answer but it may be worth a try.

Flatley, what do you mean by “repair”? Deleting it and downloading it again or what?

And Ilithis, I already checked the internal temperature, I also uses external fans to keep it cool, it never goes over 68c.

Thanks for your suggestions for the moment, I’ll try disinstalling completly the drivers before reinstalling the old ones although I doubt it would make any change

Zeta.3198:

Flatley, what do you mean by “repair”? Deleting it and downloading it again or what?

And Ilithis, I already checked the internal temperature, I also uses external fans to keep it cool, it never goes over 68c.

Thanks for your suggestions for the moment, I’ll try disinstalling completly the drivers before reinstalling the old ones although I doubt it would make any change

Is the 68C for the CPU or the GPU or both?

The Guild Wars 2 client has a -repair switch that you can add to a shortcut of the game to repair the gw2.dat file if any errors are present. I recommend following this wiki page:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments
It’s from the first game, but the concept is the same. The switch you want is -repair.

Both, the GPU is usually lower than that anyway, I’ll also try the repair switch next.

Anyway, I setted everything to the lowest settings, I just find it weird that the second before is 50 fps, the second after 5, than 15, than 30, than 10 again, and it just continue going up and down again, I also found out that in WvW it appears to be a little more stable (except for zergs obviously), in PvP it is really unplayable and in PvE it’s also kinda bad.

The point is that be it lowest or highest settings it doesn’t change much, it also doesn’t matter if I am in combat or not, it just keeps being that unstable (many times it has lowest fps when I am standing still that when I am running).

Ok, seriously, I don’t get, I changed stuff such as postprocessing and shaders from low to high and the fps went UP, from 15 they passed to 25.

I’m not even sure the problem are the fps themself, I wouldn’t know how to explain it, for example: I’m running normally, and then at some point it’s like if my pg and the whole world would slow down for a second or two and then go back to the normal speed, if I’m using a speed buff it’s even worse.
It’s not like a lag, it really looks like if it is “slowed down”, I wouldn’t know how else to describe it.

Zeta.3198:

Ok, seriously, I don’t get, I changed stuff such as postprocessing and shaders from low to high and the fps went UP, from 15 they passed to 25.

I’m not even sure the problem are the fps themself, I wouldn’t know how to explain it, for example: I’m running normally, and then at some point it’s like if my pg and the whole world would slow down for a second or two and then go back to the normal speed, if I’m using a speed buff it’s even worse.
It’s not like a lag, it really looks like if it is “slowed down”, I wouldn’t know how else to describe it.

It sounds as if the graphics card is switching between a low power state(s) and more full power state(s) randomly while you are playing the game. I would go make sure your laptop’s power settings are set to highest performance rather than power saver. Perhaps there are other settings in some Alienware bloatware that are also power saving and you might have to change those as well. I’m not familiar with what bloatware comes packaged with pre-built computers now a days.

when you say slow down, does it run fine, then suddenly slow down for awhile then speed up then slow down again?

if so, you may need to clean out your laptop fan intakes, it sounds like throttling.

I seem to have fixed it by formatting the whole system, so it wasn’t an hardware issue, yet I still don’t know what the problem was.

I am having the same problem, except only in SPvP. It never seems to happen in PvE. I have also made a thread about this, and I want to be sure there is a fix to it that doesnt involve reformatting my whole system.

Update: a repair didn’t work for me.