Guild Wars 2

Will do.

I can also add that the lines aren’t always black.

No dice with old drivers. No dice with beta drivers either. And I’ve already tried all the options I could find.

The card isn’t OCed, and the entire system is brand new, so unless we’re talking about a faulty model, heat or OC couldn’t possibly be an issue.

Oops… I meant 7800… silly typo. I edited my post.

I’ve noticed that the world is filled with… black lines.

They seem to be like a big grid (they don’t move with my character; rather, they are fixed in position). At first, I thought they are some sort of shadow-related artefacts (as they affect my character, when I’m walking through them), but after disabling shadows (and even trying out performance mode) their behaviour is still the same.

I suspect it might be a driver issue or an engine issue.

I’ve got an AMD Radeon HD 7800 with the latest non-beta drivers (12.8).

One screenshot is with my usual settings, and the other is using performance settings.

Again, please note that those lines appear everyone where in the world. They’re most visible in snowy areas (black lines on white ground stick out a bit), and they’re definitely not there by design, unless we’re all peons on a chequerboard.

Mightynandui.3467:

In my case, the GPU sits bored at less than 30% while the CPU is on fire.

To be honest in today’s processing Cpu/Gpu usages don’t mean much. If a GPU is at 50% and the CPU 100% it doesn’t mean that the game is not using your GPU, it means that the GPU is waiting for the CPU to send the rendering instructions and it is not being fast enough.

This can be caused (and in most cases are) by poorly optimized code. Example: CPU processing two files when only one was needed to achieve the same effect (abstract example).

I’m a coder myself (albeit I code business apps, not games).

Just for the record, there’s never any need to render stuff close to the player/camera; that just needs to be kept in memory.

And that’s pretty much what I said; if a game is using CPU at 100% and the GPU isn’t utilized, then something is wrong with the game code.

Mightynandui.3467:

For those of you with computers that are 3 to 5 years old, it’s very much a reality that you may have to invest in a better computer to get the results desired (especially if you’re a big pvp’er and want all the WvW goodness you can get your hands on).

Unfortunately, this is the sad truth. You must invest in your PC components to get more performance. Technology is always on the move and even 2 year old components get outdated very quickly.

Yes… and then no. If someone with a 5 year-old system is expecting 60 FPS on a brand new game on the highest settings… well, I’d like to know what they’re smoking.

But after lowering the resolution and turning off some bells and whistles it’s normal to expect a decent framerate, even on older computers. Of course there’s a certain limit after which no amount of coding magic will make things smooth, but the specs I’ve seen people post aren’t there yet.

Also, the game, while good-looking, doesn’t warrant the requirements. I mean, hell, Crysis looks better and runs on my system, so go figure.

Elysios.9274:

I believe that they will fix this in time.. I’ve seen many zones of the game double in fps performance since the 1st beta.. I believe they have to go zone by zone optimizing them for every possible setup that we have

Uhm… unless the map designer(s) accidentally copy-pasted all the map objects on top of each other causing the whole thing to use twice as many polygons, I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.

Personally I think it’s a more serious bug within the engine itself; something is causing peoples CPU to start insane calculations which becomes a serious bottleneck. In my case, the GPU sits bored at less than 30% while the CPU is on fire. Perhaps it’s the physics? I’d love to see a physics setting in the video options (like in Diablo 3) where you can choose to reduce the quality of physics effects (they are, after all, purely aesthetic). As far as I can tell, every character has some physics effects (hair, clothes), so the more characters, the more calculations…

Of course I could be COMPLETELY wrong. :P Just guessing, after all.

Mightynandui.3467:

Exactly. The game is just awesome and that is the reason I don’t want it to fail due to some performance issues.
I really hope ANet comes up with something. However, I must be honest, after what I have seen in another MMO’s, my hopes are not very high. I don’t want to start comparisons but any recent mmo has performance issues that have not been addressed.

Maybe ANet can show that they are better at this, who knows.

I feel the same way! I haven’t played a lot due to those performance issues but I can SENSE the game is great. I really, really want to see it in it’s full glory.

I’ll be perfectly honest… I was expecting issues at launch, but not this kind. I thought there would be massive lag, connection issues, server downtime. In fact, I think I would be more happy if that WAS the problem.

When the servers are laggy or down, you can pretty much bet the developers are working on getting things to run, and it WILL be fixed eventually.

But with performance issues like this, despite acknowledging their existence, there’s no guarantee it’ll be fixed, especially if the problem is rooted deeply in the graphical engine.

Also, that camera issue Mightynandui mention? Unless it’s directly tied to the low performance people experience, I doubt it’ll ever get fixed.

Ditto…

Same problem here. I’ve got an old Core2Duo, but why in the world does the game only use 30% of the GPU while frying the CPU at 100%? Just WHAT is it calculating?

Why was the low FPS thread merged with the crashing thread? These are completely different things! >_<

System
OS: Windows 7 (SP1) x64
CPU: Intel Core2Duo @ 1,86Ghz (slightly overclocked and running near 2GHz)
RAM: 5GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTS 250
Graphic driver: GeForce 304.79 Driver

At the start of the game (starting areas) I get 5-20 FPS. If I look at a wall or straight into the ground, I’ll perhaps get 25 or 30.

Running GPU-Z I’ve noticed that the GPU isn’t being utilized to it’s fullest and is running around 30-40%. At the same time both CPU cores are being used at 100%; I’m thinking perhaps physics effects are being calculated for every character regardless of visibility by the CPU?

If I move ever so slightly outside the starting area (still the same map), the FPS jumps to ~20 FPS or so, but it’s still way too low.

I know my CPU is old, but really… there’s no AI or advanced simulations to calculate, so it shouldn’t have an impact. The GPU is clearly underused.

Also, it doesn’t seem to matter if I try medium or low settings, the FPS pretty much stays the same (only if I put everything on max does the FPS drop to 5+ FPS or so), at a weak 10-20 FPS.