Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t Crossfire or SLI… I don’t think there will ever be a fix for it. I believe its a poorly coded game. I am frustrated with two HD 5870’s that don’t crossfire, so I emailed for tech support and here is the response. (note that I was very frustrated) lol. – FYI – AMD UPDATES, MICROSOFT UPDATES, and NVIDIA UPDATES don’t help at all. Even AMD’s CAP2 updates doesn’t help.
I wrote:
I have an AMD FX 8150 with 16gb Ram, 2 SSD in Riad 0, and Two ATI HD 5870 Graphics Cards. Crossfire doesn’t help in the slightest over 1 card. I have newest drivers, just like most other posts like this one, but still no success. I have tried other games and benchmarks which crossfire perfectly with no issues, simple and straight to the point. Guild Wars 2 however doesn’t like crossfire. I have read from a random comment that Guild Wars 2 is built off of the Guild Wars 1 game engine. I noticed Guild Wars 1 doesn’t crossfire either. Seems like poor coding or no concern for people who have SLI or Crossfire. I find it sad that ArenaNet is suggesting Microsoft Updates, Nvidia Updates, and AMD Updates when every other game out there works fine. Seems to me ArenaNet should have built Guild Wars 2 off of the Battlefield FROSTBITE engine or the CRYTEK Crysis 2 engine…. They are so much smoother than this crummy game engine. I am frustrated that every other game works in crossfire but this one. I tried everything and its not NVIDIA, AMD, or MICROSOFT…its ARENANET’S poor coding and lack of caring for their customers or lack of knowledge on SLI or CROSSFIRE. Maybe Guild Wars 3 will get it right. This is the 21st Century….try and act like your in it!
The Reply was:
Thank you for contacting NCSOFT Technical Support.
I apologize for any inconvenience and frustration this issue may have caused you but please understand that Guild Wars 2 is very CPU intensive and so often times an SLI or Crossfire configuration will not show much of a performance boost in game. I would recommend updating your CAP files as well as this has been known to improve performance somewhat. Additionally, we appreciate any feedback and suggestions that you have in regards to the game, however, this is the Technical Support Department and so we have no involvement with the coding of the game. I would recommend posting your feedback to the Suggestions threads of the official forums as the Development Team does look at these.
Again, I apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you but should you have any additional questions please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Regards,
Ashe
NCsoft Technical Support
In Summary:
In my opinion there is not a CPU out there that won’t cost your an arm or leg to play Guild Wars 2 nicely above 60fps consistently. They should have offloaded more to the GPU and not on the CPU as Dual GPU’s are cheaper than having to buy a $1000 cpu to be playable. Maybe in 5-10 years the CPU’s then will run Guild Wars 2 properly and be affordable.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t Crossfire or SLI… I don’t think there will ever be a fix for it. I believe its a poorly coded game. I am frustrated with two HD 5870’s that don’t crossfire, so I emailed for tech support and here is the response. (note that I was very frustrated) lol. – FYI – AMD UPDATES, MICROSOFT UPDATES, and NVIDIA UPDATES don’t help at all. Even AMD’s CAP2 updates doesn’t help.

I wrote:

I have an AMD FX 8150 with 16gb Ram, 2 SSD in Riad 0, and Two ATI HD 5870 Graphics Cards. Crossfire doesn’t help in the slightest over 1 card. I have newest drivers, just like most other posts like this one, but still no success. I have tried other games and benchmarks which crossfire perfectly with no issues, simple and straight to the point. Guild Wars 2 however doesn’t like crossfire. I have read from a random comment that Guild Wars 2 is built off of the Guild Wars 1 game engine. I noticed Guild Wars 1 doesn’t crossfire either. Seems like poor coding or no concern for people who have SLI or Crossfire. I find it sad that ArenaNet is suggesting Microsoft Updates, Nvidia Updates, and AMD Updates when every other game out there works fine. Seems to me ArenaNet should have built Guild Wars 2 off of the Battlefield FROSTBITE engine or the CRYTEK Crysis 2 engine…. They are so much smoother than this crummy game engine. I am frustrated that every other game works in crossfire but this one. I tried everything and its not NVIDIA, AMD, or MICROSOFT…its ARENANET’S poor coding and lack of caring for their customers or lack of knowledge on SLI or CROSSFIRE. Maybe Guild Wars 3 will get it right. This is the 21st Century….try and act like your in it!

The Reply was:

Thank you for contacting NCSOFT Technical Support.

I apologize for any inconvenience and frustration this issue may have caused you but please understand that Guild Wars 2 is very CPU intensive and so often times an SLI or Crossfire configuration will not show much of a performance boost in game. I would recommend updating your CAP files as well as this has been known to improve performance somewhat. Additionally, we appreciate any feedback and suggestions that you have in regards to the game, however, this is the Technical Support Department and so we have no involvement with the coding of the game. I would recommend posting your feedback to the Suggestions threads of the official forums as the Development Team does look at these.

Again, I apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you but should you have any additional questions please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Regards,
Ashe
NCsoft Technical Support

In Summary:
In my opinion there is not a CPU out there that won’t cost your an arm or leg to play Guild Wars 2 nicely above 60fps consistently. They should have offloaded more to the GPU and not on the CPU as Dual GPU’s are cheaper than having to buy a $1000 cpu to be playable. Maybe in 5-10 years the CPU’s then will run Guild Wars 2 properly and be affordable.

I think there is coding issues with Guild Wars 2… or some optimizations need attention badly. I ran into FPS problems in lots of gameplay with an FX 8150 8 core, 16gb ram, 5870 1gb video. I have tried many different builds of PC’s all seem capable of running a lot of newer games with ease…both INTELS and AMD’s…but this game has issues with it. I am a Guild Wars fanboy who has over 30+ rank in Hall of Monuments and I may go looking for Greener Pastures due to the poor performance in this game. Another game you can try with bad programming/performance is Alice: The Madness Returns … anyone with that game knows what i mean. Some levels are smooth as silk and some levels don’t use much CPU or GPU and you get 5fps for no apparent reason. And its not my PC when thousands of other users have the same issue from both the INTEL and AMD worlds… It boils down to poor engineering… The Asurans are right! Don’t let a booka program a technologically advance video game!

Hello, I have built Intel and AMD systems, and I love supporting AMD because they are the underdog. I have a FX-8150 8 core which does poorly in my opionion on GW2. A friend who has a PHENOM X4 960T smokes my 8 core in GW2 and most other games.
I like AMD, but the FX line is not a great gaming choice. I thinking about selling my FX chip and getting a Phenom X4 965 as a replacement.

My FX-8150 with ATI 5870 and 16gb ram….. Best Appearance 50-80fps
Friends X4 960T, 16gb Ram, HD6870 ..Best Appearance 80-110fps.
The 5870 is stronger than the 6870 due to new gpu scaling by AMD.
See my problem.

I would not recommend FX line of CPU for gaming.
Benchmarks show good results for AMD A8 or A10 APU’s and Intel i3 or i5 CPU’s
Like others have said…. If you go A8 or A10 the on chip graphic are descent for what you get. If you go Intel i3 you need a seperate video card and intel graphics are a dismal no matter what fanboys tell you.

If you have the cash, go i3 with about 8gb of ram and separate video card.
If your on a budget the A10 would be a good choice with 8gb ram and try the on chip graphics, I haven’t tried it, but it’s supposedly not disappointing, but you can alway get a good A-Series Motherboard that supports SLI-Crossfire and add video cards at a later time.

You need an FM1 board for Llano CPU’s or an FM2 Board for Trinity CPU’s. Also if you buy A-Series CPU’s with on chip graphics, I am told the graphics are very dependent on ram speed, so buy DDR3-1866mhz as a minimum speed in my opinion.

FPS in Guild Wars 2 seems very inconsistant. I see that this game is very CPU intensive.
They should make this game use more GPU dependent rather than CPU dependent.
Hopefully new patches will fix issues with FPS.
I will try tweaking AMD CATALYST CONTROL CENTER and
NVIDIA’S GRAPHIC DRIVERS to see if that does anything helpful.

Here is some CPU’s and GPU’s I have tested with GW2 @ 1680×1050 resolution

— Pentium D @ 3.0ghz, 2gb DDR2 667, 80gb 7200rpm hard drive and
ATI HD3870 on best performance only gets 5-15fps mostly everywhere.

— AMD X2 250 @ 3.1ghz, 4gb DDR2 800, 80gb 7200rpm hard drive and
ATI HD3870 on Balanced Preset gets 35-45fps mostly everywhere.

— AMD X4 945 @3.0ghz, 8gb DDR2800, 2-80gb 10,000rpm hard drive
in Raid 0, ATI HD 3870 on Balanced Preset gets 55-70fps.

— AMD X4 945 @3.0ghz, 8gb DDR2800, 2-80gb 10,000rpm hard drive
in Raid 0, Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 640mb Video Card on
Balanced Preset gets 60-80fps.

— AMD X4 960T@3.8ghz, 16gb DDR3 1600ram, 2-640gb 7200rpm hard drives
in Raid 0, AMD HD 6870 on
Best Appearance gets 80-110fps mostly everywhere.

— AMD FX-8150@4.4ghz, 16gb DDR3 1866ram, 2-90gb SSD’s in Raid 0,
ATI HD 5870 on Best Appearance gets 50-80 fps

My system is the FX-8150 which I am finding out may not be the greatest CPU
for gaming. I am thinking about selling the CPU for a PHENOM X4 965
as the PHENOM 960T blew my mind how much better it handled GW2.
Definitely there are tweaks that still need to be done to the game to
improve FPS even better. Offloading CPU tasks to the GPU may help,
but that is just my guess-timation. I really don’t know what I am
talking about in terms of tweaking.