Guild Wars 2

Wow, as painful and embarrassing as it is for me to admit it, you guys were spot on about the PCI-E slot. Funny thing is I already had GPU-Z as part of my earlier troubleshooting, I just only cursorily looked at the PCI bits as it was not conceivable to my mind at that time that this would be the issue. Frankly, I am somewhat gobsmacked that everything else ran as well as it did.

At any rate, as much as I would have liked to have never posted here again to expose my shame, I felt that I owed you all a hearty “Thank You!” as well as providing a record for anyone else having the same issue.

Thanks again mates, that had been bugging me for some time!

So I built a new system back in late December.

Previously I had i7 920, AMD 5870,and 8GB RAM running in a 2560 X 1010 window on Windows 7 and performance was fine (I could not tell you any specific frame rates now, but I never had any noticeable issues).

My new machine is, in theory, far superior to the old machine. It is an i5 3570, AMD 7970, and 16GB RAM on Windows 8. I am also running off an SSD now.

Sadly, running GW2 in a 1600 X 900 window at the very lowest settings produces frame rates of 14-20 FPS outside of major towns.

It was so bad at first, that I assumed that there was something wrong with my hardware. After trying many other applications and games without issue, I determined that it was not in fact a hardware issue.

Not feeling like messing with it at the time, I thought I would just wait for new drivers and/or GW2 patches and see what happens. Over the last five months, whenever a new set of drivers (betas included) would be released I would grab them, fire up GW2 and see if the situation was rectified. No joy thus far, still sitting at 14-20 FPS at the lowest settings.

Things that I have tried thus far:

Installed new drivers (13.1, 13.2 Beta 6, 13.3 Beta 3, and I am currently on 13.4 – there have probably been others as well).
Made sure that the Intel 4000 HD Onboard was disabled in BIOS.
Made sure that all of my CPU cores are running with GW2.
Verified that the GPU clock speed is appropriate while running GW2 (950).
Tried running it in full screen mode (both at 1680 X 1050 and 5040 X 1050).
Other various smaller tweaks that elude me now.

When running, my CPU is doing fine and not taxed (at least in the areas that I have been in while trying to rectify this problem). My GPU sits pegged at 99%.

In the five months since I have built this rig I have used it without issue (I just gave up playing GW2). Everything else has worked fine. FC3, BF3, XCom, Football Manager, Neverwinter Beta, iRacing, etc. Most of those have been run at full or high detail in 5040 X 1050 Eyefinity.

Clearly something is going very, very wrong with GW2 and my machine. It is not a matter of a tweak or two to improve the frame rate, it is just flat out broken. At this point I am at a loss as to what to even try. Any advice or ideas would be welcome.

Thanks!