Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

My old GPU melted last week so I got an upgrade. I went from an Nvidia 560ti to an AMD R9 270 – a fairly significant upgrade (the new card is something like 20% more powerful/faster according to most benchmarks).

After playing around with it last night (latest drivers, etc.) I loaded up the game with the exact same settings and seem to have no performance increase at best, and a slight decrease at worst. I used to run almost everything at “high” settings except character model limit and quality, both set to medium (nothing at “ultra”) at native render sampling and a resolution of 1920×1080. When soloing my framerates were in the 30’s pretty consistently, and that would obviously drop in a WvW zerg, in Lion’s Arch, doing Teq, etc., and I was ok with that.

Last night my FPS were more consistently in the 20’s and it seemed noticeably worse. It’s possible that it’s no worse than it was before and I just had an expectation that isn’t being met so it seems worse, but regardless, I was hoping for a performance increase! Under “settings preset” I chose the “auto detect” and it turned a couple of graphic options UP, nothing down. Still lousy framerates.

I’m wondering now if my CPU is bottlenecking me. I’ve got an AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 Ghz Quad Core in there now, a few years old. Am thinking about trying to overclock it as I can’t really afford a new CPU atm.

Btw, 8 gigs of DDR3 ram.

Do I need a new CPU or is there a different problem that I’m not seeing?

Thanks.

Its your CPU thats holding you back.

But, you should get the same/similar performance as from the 560ti. Did you wipe out the Nvidia drivers before installing the AMD?

Look for Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and run that from safe mode, then Install the lastest AMD drivers ( 14.4 version 2)

Thanks Squishy. I deleted the Nvidia drivers but will try running DDU and reinstalling to make sure.

Any idea if overclocking my CPU to, say, 4.0 mhz would give me much of an increase? Just ordered a new heatsink/fan (needed one anyway) so when it arrives I think I’ll try it out and see.

loupson.3690:

Thanks Squishy. I deleted the Nvidia drivers but will try running DDU and reinstalling to make sure.

Any idea if overclocking my CPU to, say, 4.0 mhz would give me much of an increase? Just ordered a new heatsink/fan (needed one anyway) so when it arrives I think I’ll try it out and see.

AMD is 50%-65% behind Intel in IPC. So squeezing every little bit of Clock out of your AMD will close that 50%-65% gap, increasing performance. The best I have seen is a 5ghz FX8350 pushing 80FPS using a R9 280×. But the settings were mostly on Medium at 1080p.

One last thing – because I’m runnin Vista, AMD recommends that I use version 13.12 of the driver, but I think that’s mostly due to a catalyst compatibility issue. Think I should still try and find somewhere to download 14.4 version 2?

loupson.3690:

One last thing – because I’m runnin Vista, AMD recommends that I use version 13.12 of the driver, but I think that’s mostly due to a catalyst compatibility issue. Think I should still try and find somewhere to download 14.4 version 2?

yes you should, 14.2 introduced a couple DX9 fixes that actually speeds up GPU performance in GW2 (I get 10 more FPS between the 13.12 and 14.2+ drivers actually).

And if you can swing it, you should consider upgrading from Vista to 8.1 (the upgrade is like 40 bucks IIRC)

Great, will try it out – thanks!

And yeah, I’ve been debating upgrading my OS as well, but I’ll probably wait to do so until I can afford replacing my aging HD…

Edit: just tried installing 14.4 but it says that I can’t because it’s not compatible. Any known workarounds?

Try installing another driver like 14.7 RC3 beta driver. I’m having no issues with it except for the notorious driver crash which has plagued me with every single 2014 AMD driver to date. It seems that some people are having that issue and some are not. 12.8 drivers were not compatible with my 7970s so just look for a different one I guess.

I was having the same issue. I have the same CPU as you, Loupson, running at 3.4 Ghz. I oc’d it to 3.6 Ghz and got a 20 FPS.

EDIT: It turns out that my 4GB’ s of RAM weren’t running at their intended settings. I achieved even better results (with the CPU running at 3.4 Ghz) by going into the BIOS and setting the RAM to 8-8-8-24 with a target frequency of 1600 Mhz.