Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if this will help anybody else as I’m sure you’re all far cleverer than me and would have spotted this already, but if it helps others, I don’t mind looking a fool.

I too was suffering serious lag. Many expletives were vocalised. In big WvW battles, frame rates were dropping to an optimistic 1 FPS, but not always. I tried setting the graphics options to “best performance”; a little better, but no real help.

On examination, the graphics card was running at 1-2% (I wondered if this was a fault), the CPU 75-84%, memory 24-26%, no serious disk access and no viruses found. Ok the CPU was high, but nothing seemed to be wrong with my system until I checked the temperatures. The problem was caused by the CPU overheating, hitting a cosy 81 degrees centigrade and causing it to throttle back.

My system consists of an AMD FX8100 (with standard fan), 32Gb of RAM and Sapphire Radeon 6850/1Gb. This is all exists in an older case with 1 front and 2 rear fans. I thought this should have been enough cooling, but it turns out it wasn’t.

I temporarily rigged up a sophisticated mechanism with a desk fan blowing into the front of the case. Temperatures dropped to 65 degrees and lag disappeared, even on high settings. Well not quite true. It did lag once more when my son knocked the fan. 30 seconds after putting it back in place the temperature dropped sufficiently and the lag disappeared.

I have now rigged up another fan blowing into the side of the case while I wait for new components to arrive, temperatures have dropped to a comfortable 54 degrees.