Guild Wars 2

While it’s fun right now, I expect the interaction between flamethrower and health-on-crit foods to be nerfed soon – the foods will probably get an ICD to bring them in line with (almost) all the other x-on-crit effects.

Sadly, it turns out that forcing PhysX to use the CPU only delays the problem, but does not entirely fix it – the trigger areas will eventually still cause an extreme FPS drop.

Another update (I should charge ANet for debugging :P) – I noticed that areas causing the FPS drop had the common feature of objects requiring physics calculations, i.e. a swinging pully in the Memorial Quadrant. So new theory: there’s a bug in that code path.

Forcing PhysX to use the CPU via the NVidia control panel has resolved my performance issues so far, I’ll post again if that turns out to be incorrect.

Follow-up – doing a display driver uninstall/reinstall fixed my performance issues.

Edit:

No, it didn’t. Initial performance on launching the game is fine, but after a while, or after visiting particular areas (Memorial Quadrant in the Black Citadel, for example) performance drops back to the ~10FPS range.

The particularly odd part is that once performance drops, it stays terrible until another game restart.

I also got a massive performance regression with this patch – yesterday I was getting 30-60FPS, today it’s 7-15FPS. No changes in my system other than the GW2 patch, so this is clearly a bug of some sort.

Attached my dxdiag in case it’s useful.