Guild Wars 2

Grandma.8316:

Ok cool! I posted this same question on another forum and I got roughly the same answer that I should upgrade my GPU. That’s deffinatly something I can do, do you think my processor/ram is fine for most games It’s just my GPU holding me back?

Also how hard is upgrading a GPU with a Dell XPS 630 and the motherboard that comes with it?

I’d say my budget is probably £200 so about $300

Hi,

I have the same system (XPS 630) and had a similar issue around a year ago. I upgraded from a GT 9800 GPU to a GTX 560 ti and i got a great FPS boost in most games.

Currently with GW2 though i’m getting massive slowdown in populated areas (around 25 fps) but 60 FPS in unpopulated areas. My CPU was the Dual Core E8500 which i think was a step down from yours though.

To answer your question about upgrading the GPU in your XPS 630 it’s not that hard. It’s a 750w PSU and will probably take anything you can put in there. The GTX 560ti is a great card and has worked fine in mine for nearly a year now although it’s bottle-necked a bit with my current CPU, which is why i’m upgrading to a new rig this week

Try the card first, if you don’t get the boost you need with that then upgrade your motherboard and CPU (probably a new rig) then put the new card in there.

My current rig has a E8500 3.16ghz (OC to 3.8) and a gtx 560 ti (upgrade from old 9800 gt) with 6gb RAM.

I’ve been getting around 20 fps when there’s more than 10 people/characters in the vicinity and upto 60fps in unpopulated areas. Usually my CPU is at 80-100% usage whilst gaming and GPU never goes higher than 60%.

I’m not playing on highest settings though (goes down to 4-10fps when i do that). I turned down shadows, post processing, texture res and added vsync for those framerates above though. Game don’t look too pretty.

I also played SWTOR since launch and got similar slowdown in populated areas so i figured it’s the CPU bottleneck and time to upgrade the rig.

New rig is i5 3450 (3.10ghz) with 8gb RAM and HD 7570 card (will replace this with my current gtx 560 ti though).

Should get delivered tomorrow and i’m expecting much better performance so i’ll let everyone on this thread know ow it goes…