Guild Wars 2

Alright so I’m more than positively likely going to be buying an i7 4770K next week (and then saving up for a board, and yes I do mean the i7, I’m dead set on it) and I will be moving up from the AMD FX-8350 (I still think it’s a great processor, oh yeah.) so what could I expect from such an upgrade? And why I chose the i7 over the i5 is that both the AMD FX-8350 and i7 have 8 threads so I don’t want to lose four threads. I like… keeping it the same, or better without losing anything. Or much.

I can imagine world events would be much more enjoyable in FPS and such, WVW will play better.
Would there be any drawbacks though?
I read that Hyper Threading can pose a problem but over the years of it’s use, the bits of technology have made the issue of the conflict of on dye resources a nearly non-existent problem. But, anything else?

My PC is pretty loaded as it is. Two 7970s, a 1000W PSU, 16 GB DDR3, etc.

The AMD cpu is more or less the cpu going into a build on a lower budget. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t great when compared to Intel’s offerings. The 4770k beats it in single threaded performance by quite a decent margin.

Don’t know why you have a 1kw PSU for this setup lol, but overall you won’t see a drastic increase in FPS if that is what you were hoping for. If you do any rendering/modeling or anything of the sort you should notice an improvement.

I have a 1K PSU because it’s a Rosewill Lightning. It’s got all sorts of neat lighting on it and the cabling is great, not to mention I have two 7970s, 2×2TB HDD and SSD along currently with a 125 watt processor. Giving dat headroom. I read that the intel i7 4770K has around 50+% more single threaded performance so going off that compared to my current FPS, I can see an increase happening. I also plan to try and crank the i7 up to 4.5GHz at least. (plus the 1K was a steal at 180 dollars)

You should see a noticable frame rate increase but it still wont make GW2 smooth in WvW zergs, it will just make it more tollerable.
My other rig in the house (well it aint mine but i built it so :P ) uses a 4770k and has run GW2 on it, large WvW zergs just at its stock 3.9ghz had acceptable FPS ~25. I havnt tested it in worst case zergs where i know my own CPu can drop down to around 20 and thats with a OC, so i suspect a stock 4770k would drop lower, however with a OC to around 4.3-4.5ghz u should be set for a 20-25 FPS minimum so long as ur culling settings (particularly texture limit) is set appropriatly(low-medium).

Regarding OC’ing, do remember the 4770k is one hot mofo ..ull need some seriose cooling to get 4.5ghz and above OC’ing done unless ur real lucky with the silicon lottery and get one that can hit 4.5ghz on a low voltage.

Oh I know it won’t make wvw any better than maybe as much as 30 fps in good times. I got a Corsair H100 ready to go for it too so overclocking to at least 4 GHz shouldn’t be a problem. Also ew culling I never turn that down lol. After playing the game on my i7 based laptop with GTX 670MX I finally decided I want to get that wicked FPS and playability in most areas. the 3630QM at 3.2 GHz which it maxes out at for all four core turboing can crank out some pretty good FPS paired with a GTX 670MX so I expect the 4770K will do even better with one of my 7970s.

Texture culling on medium still looks pritty good tbh. The number of people it allows to be fully textured is enough for battles to look fine, whilst those in the distance are green, u barely notice it, and this is coming form som1 who uses a 42" screen. its deffinatly worth the performance boost it gives in zergs.

Character culling stays on Highest, u want to be able to see every1 at all times

Avelos.6798:

I have a 1K PSU because it’s a Rosewill Lightning. It’s got all sorts of neat lighting on it and the cabling is great, not to mention I have two 7970s, 2×2TB HDD and SSD along currently with a 125 watt processor. Giving dat headroom. I read that the intel i7 4770K has around 50+% more single threaded performance so going off that compared to my current FPS, I can see an increase happening. I also plan to try and crank the i7 up to 4.5GHz at least. (plus the 1K was a steal at 180 dollars)

ya but the thing is you want double float precision to be better for gaming as its going to be working on the render of the scene , single isn’t as important and tbh is why a 8350 from the last time i was on gw2 would destroy intel cpu’s this is pre haswell mind you and im sure the game has had several updates since but your honestly not going to see any improvement playing most games.Then the fact next gen systems are using amd hardware id stick with amd hardware since they will be better optimized for games in a year or two a 4770k is a big waste of money you could put that $600-800 towards a lot of other pc gear and what kind of motherboard is with your 8350 , if you were dead set on upgrading wait another year or so for amd to release new cpu’s its about time for them to upgrade anyway waste of money for a 4770k

No, no AMD does not destroy the Intel CPU in guild wars 2. I can get on Guild Wars 2 on my laptop right now and get better performance out of the Intel i7 3630QM at 3.2 GHz than my AMD FX-8350 clocked at 4.1 GHz. when it comes to the i7 and AMD FX-8350, considering them for the fact that they both have eight threads and are at the top of the line before going into extreme processors (Intel LGA 2011 or AMD FX-9370/9590,) I’m confident that the i7 4770K crushes FX-8350. Maybe if the 8350 was clocked at a horrifying 5.5 GHz or more it would be a different story, but that is not the case here. This is base frequencies with the turbos included. And my board is not good for overclocking beyond something like 4.5 GHz anyway. Biostar TA990FXE is a good starting board if you want to have all the good stuff like SATA 3, Crossfire/SLI and AMD FX native support for a low price, then that is the board to go with. Overclocking is very poor beyond the point I specified.

Yes considering the consoles will be using AMD Jaguar with at least a 1.75 GHz clock, that could mean better performance geared towards AMD FX-8/9 processors especially, but I figure that since Guild Wars 2 has been the game that I’ve been playing the most out of every single game I have for the past year, this sort of upgrade would make the game much more enjoyable for me.

Why wait to spend money on something that may or may not get me better enjoyability out of a game I play so much of when I could spend money on something I know will get me better enjoyability?
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SolarNova.1052:

Texture culling on medium still looks pritty good tbh. The number of people it allows to be fully textured is enough for battles to look fine, whilst those in the distance are green, u barely notice it, and this is coming form som1 who uses a 42" screen. its deffinatly worth the performance boost it gives in zergs.

Character culling stays on Highest, u want to be able to see every1 at all times

I will keep that in mind then

Avelos, this is kinda off topic since ur not upgrading ur GPU but…

When u do decide to change GPU’s in the future, u may want to serisoly consider going NVidia. Just today Nvidia released information on a peace of hardware & software called G-Sync. Its bassicaly the replacment for V-Sync.

As we all know, V Sync makes ur GPU wait for ur Monitors refresh before it sends out a frame. This can cause stutter when FPS is below that of the screen refresh, what happens is a single frame is displayed twice every now and then and more so the lower the FPS is (this gives us the stutter effect), additional V-Sync adds a small amount of input lag (only noticable by a small % of gamers) BUT u dont get screen tearing. And if u turn it off, well then u get screen tearing.

G-Sync is bassicaly the oposite operation of V-Sync. Instead of the GPU sticking to the Monitors refresh, the monitor instead changes refresh rate to that of the GPU’s fps. Its totaly dynamic. So say for example u have a 120hz G-Sync compatable monitor, ur fresh will be what ever FPS ur GPU pumps out from 1 to 120. it removes screen tearing without adding input lag or stuttering.
The bad news (becouse there is always bad news) its a phsyical bit of hardware that needs putting into a monitor, ether at the point of manufacturing, or ,in select casses, it can be modded (DIY) into an existing monitor. AND it only works with Nvidia kelper and above GPU’s.
Expect to see this in monitors from early next year.

personaly im hoping Asus’s 39" 4k monitor comes with it..that would just be the icing on the cake that is 4khd

The problem with G-sync then is that if I switched to NVidia GeForce (which I don’t think I will any time soon, nothing personal against them I love the GTX 670Mx in my laptop) that would also require buying a kit or a new monitor to make it useable which is a bunch of money on top of even more money. Since I have two graphics cards… I doubt I could go anything less than two graphics cards, or a single card as powerful as two GPU xD

Avelos.6798:

Alright so I’m more than positively likely going to be buying an i7 4770K next week (and then saving up for a board, and yes I do mean the i7, I’m dead set on it) and I will be moving up from the AMD FX-8350 (I still think it’s a great processor, oh yeah.) so what could I expect from such an upgrade? And why I chose the i7 over the i5 is that both the AMD FX-8350 and i7 have 8 threads so I don’t want to lose four threads. I like… keeping it the same, or better without losing anything. Or much.

I can imagine world events would be much more enjoyable in FPS and such, WVW will play better.
Would there be any drawbacks though?
I read that Hyper Threading can pose a problem but over the years of it’s use, the bits of technology have made the issue of the conflict of on dye resources a nearly non-existent problem. But, anything else?

My PC is pretty loaded as it is. Two 7970s, a 1000W PSU, 16 GB DDR3, etc.

First you have to understand that both the Intel i5 and i7 are both quad cores. The i7 doesn’t have 8 cores, it just cons the OS into thinking it has 8 cores. Why would they do that? Because the Intel core is way overbuilt. Since the days of the Pentium the x86 CPU design attempts to execute two or more instructions at a time, as long as they result doesn’t impact one another. It’s called superscalar. Most every x86 CPU does this, both AMD and Intel. But it can rarely be sustained all the time because results from one series of instruction can impact another. C = A + B followed by E = C + D can’t be done at the same time however C= A + B followed by F = D + E can. What Intel decided to do was to introduce a 2nd thread into the instruction scheduler, the bit of hardware that spots unrelated instructions that can be done at the same time, and improve how frequently multiple instructions are executed at the same time.

But it’s not magical, you don’t get a whole core’s worth of performance out of it. You are lucky if you get a sizable fraction. In an i5 when one of it’s cores work on two threads, it alternates between them so each thread looks as if it’s running at 1/2 speed. In an i7 the boost if efficiency means each thread can be running at 60% speed on average.

Now that’s a great advancement if you have multiple threads that run all the time. But I’m not seeing that when I look at the thread CPU time while running GW2. There are a few threads that take 50-80% of a single core’s CPU time but many more in the 5-10% range. Now depending how they relate to the other threads in the game, some of those could run on the same core without impacting performance. In which case it doesn’t really matter if four or eight threads can be run at the same time as long as they get done before their results are needed.

Oh yeah, I know that, the i5 and i7 is a quad core, one with hyper threading. (And the i3 is a dual core with hyper threading to give it that quad core look in windows)
I’m pretty much considering AMD FX-8350 a quad core with it’s own version of multi threading just as the i7 has hyper threading (besides, would a real 8 core processor cost 200 dollars? Maybe the crappiest of 8 core processors on the planet but even then it might still cost 600)
Sure I can save a bit and just grab an i5 but you know… I want to pick up the best out of the line.

It’s not that the FX has 8 crappy cores. Their design mandate was to make a CPU that could be as fast as an Intel quad with HT fully running 8 threads. And they mostly succeeded. Problem is when you aren’t fully running 8 threads it’s inferior because an Haswell Intel core running one thread is 50%+ faster than a single core in the FX. Not a big deal running Cinebench but sucks when you rip with iTunes.

Selene.6471:

Avelos.6798:

I have a 1K PSU because it’s a Rosewill Lightning. It’s got all sorts of neat lighting on it and the cabling is great, not to mention I have two 7970s, 2×2TB HDD and SSD along currently with a 125 watt processor. Giving dat headroom. I read that the intel i7 4770K has around 50+% more single threaded performance so going off that compared to my current FPS, I can see an increase happening. I also plan to try and crank the i7 up to 4.5GHz at least. (plus the 1K was a steal at 180 dollars)

ya but the thing is you want double float precision to be better for gaming as its going to be working on the render of the scene , single isn’t as important and tbh is why a 8350 from the last time i was on gw2 would destroy intel cpu’s this is pre haswell mind you and im sure the game has had several updates since but your honestly not going to see any improvement playing most games.Then the fact next gen systems are using amd hardware id stick with amd hardware since they will be better optimized for games in a year or two a 4770k is a big waste of money you could put that $600-800 towards a lot of other pc gear and what kind of motherboard is with your 8350 , if you were dead set on upgrading wait another year or so for amd to release new cpu’s its about time for them to upgrade anyway waste of money for a 4770k

This is pretty much 100% wrong. The new PS consoles are using the AMD crap because their very cheap making their profit margine higher.
They are also going to use some cores for different parts of the game not just for the processing part like a PC will do.
AMD is so far behind on the performance side of things they pretty much have just gave up. Yes you can hand pick a program that will run with a Intel but just for raw performance it’s not even close.
The 8350 is 8 cores but 2 cores share the same lanes so it’s not a true 8 core processor.
I still have a old i5 2500K processor that will out perform any AMD in gaming overclocks like a beast current settings are 5.0GHz 1.25 volts 100% stable temps are very low max I have got running prime 95 are 76C using a H100 with 4X110 CFM fans.