Guild Wars 2

Fermi.2409:

Ansau.7326:

that ram at only 1600

You really don’t get anything from ram above 1600MHz, though

Yes you do.

It can, but Illusions is a waste of time in zergs. A torment&confusion stack here and there does nothing.
I find Inspirations way better. Protected phantasms + izerker is too good. Plus you heal a bit and cleanse conditions when healing, and give 1s of distortion…

Uhkapian.7068:

Thanks for the videos.

Though I noticed that you have shadows on medium, character details on medium and you have turned off High Resolution Textures.

That is why I am trying to figuring out what takes to have EVERYTHING maxed out and turned on.

Because you also have AA turned off. Know what I mean?

So I think to just be 100% sure I will go with the 390. Its currently 370 euros here, still much more than the USA but it is what it is.

This will be pretty much impossible. Gw2 works so everything that does the gpu also goes through the cpu. Even if you have an overkill gpu, you will be bottlenecked by the cpu, and yours is not so good without a top overclock and that ram at only 1600.

The first video is showing more the performance in heavy fights, and since there is cpu is stressed to the top, I reduced some settings to get more framerate in the blobfest.

In the second I have everything maxed, but disabling reflections, shadows and putting Character Model Limit to Low. This three changes gives me nearly double the performance while getting a very small graphic downgrade.
- Reflections only work in water, and while they’re nice, most of the time you won’t see the benefits (since there’s not much water around the game).
- Shadows is the most taxing setting. But I only find worth Ultra. The rest just change the distance at which shadows get low detail. But there’s only 2 types of details, None and Ultra.
- Character Model Limit only renders more or less people, putting a lot of stress in the cpu.

If you want to max everything, first you’ll need a 6700k oced to +4.8GHz and +3000MHz RAM. And even with this expect some drops below 40fps.

I have a r9 285 (which is a 2gb 380). I can play gw2 at 1440p nearly maxed out at +60fps in most places.

I did a test some time ago, the gpu was at 1040/1550, just a tad better than 380 stock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSvcnLcmwI

Here is a much recent video, gpu is at 1100/1570 and settings are all maxed, but disabling reflections and shadows and character model limit to low. Again 1440p:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBSIOXtBfAk

First disable Reflections and Shadows, and put Character Model Limit to “Low” or “Medium”. These 3 settings are very cpu intensive, reduce a lot the framerate and add a lot of stuttering.

If not, it could be the PLX chip found in your MB. It adds more pcie lines, but at expenses of more latency. Gw2 is very sensible with pcie bandwidth, even going from 3.0 x8 to 3.0 x16 adds some performance.
Try playing with a single gpu on the pcie slot 2 (which is the one bypassing the PLX chip).

It could also be a driver issue. Nvidia has had tons of problems in Gw2 since the started launching W10 compatible drivers. You could try some drivers pre W10.

The fact that this game is cpu bottlenecked means as you get better gpus they’re being used less, since they still need to wait for the cpu to finish its work.

You can disable Reflections and shadows, and put Character limit to Low. These 3 settings are the most cpu ones, so you should try to minimize them.

Also, your SLI might be bottlenecked by pcie speed. When enabled, each gpu is running at 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwith as 3.0 x4. Pcie speed in gw2 matters a lot, I’ve test it, and 3.0 x4 was getting much less performance, specially in non cpu stressful areas, like underwater or open world pve.

Doug.4930:

Spurnshadow.3678:

So, I hate the Mid-March, 2015 stability change. And here’s something that occurred to me.

Way back, confusion mesmers used to be really good.

This double standard is just beyond me.

Condi mesmer’s have ALWAYS <—————- been broken.

I mean seriously. I agree crowd control is a bit rampant atm, but comparing cc to the good old PU condi mesmer is… just…. wrong. haha

btw, have you played chrono condi lately? I went and tried it to see if its as overpowered as the old PU builds.

Its worse. By far the most forgiving build that I have ever played. On top of that it can outspike some burst classes in terms of damage. And its condi.

I wouldn’t mind if stab got buffed, as i play a teef, and never can use it anyway. But condi mes was a bad example. It needed a nerf back in the day. It needs a nerf now more than ever. I dont need to work for a win when im plaing condi chrono, no build should be able to hold a 3v1 against good players with ease. Particularly me, as I barely know how to play mes.

Sorry if that was ranty (it was) just a tad annoyed at how unbalanced the game is atm, and how players who haven’t gone #pay2win will always be at a disadvantage against elite specs.

He’s talking about Glamour confusion mesmer.

To OP:
Disable Reflections and Shadows, tick Effect LOD, and put Character Quantity Limit to “Low”.
Game will be much more smoother and you won’t see those deeps in zergs.

Orpheal.8263:

The point is, Anet officially said that they would upgrade the game, before it got released also somewhen to DX11 and we wait on that now for over 3 years…

They never said they would upgrade the API, but they’d look at it. They must saw the improvements of a newer API were really small, since the issues of Gw2 are not graphic related, but with the game engine.

Orpheal.8263:

It would have been nice at least to get on that topic finally an clear update from ANte, if we will ever see in that part of the game a positive change, or if the game will stay always on DX9 and that they practically scrapped already their plans they had for this to upgrade and that these plans are practically offically forever off the table.

As long as this doesn’t get finally officially answered by a responsible dev of that department that works on graphical performance things for the game, so long will stay the demand after at least a DX11 upgrade, same as like that demand stayed for all the years and got permanently requested again and again for finally giving the game a 64bit client to the point, that Anet was with Hot finalyl practically FORCED to brign it to give us a quick solution to solve the terrible OOM fiasco that came along with HoT due to the new vertical much bigger map designs being way too much for the 32bit clients to handle with their bottlenecked very limited ressources.

Anet has already said something:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Orpheal.8263:

Guess thats no news for anyone here.
The DX topic has been in my opinion already way too long silent.
Its a boiling topic and its just a matter of time, until it boils so over that it won’t be any good for Anets reputation, until we get here finally some official clear words on that topic that will tell people, if they can get finally happy fo some iupcoming improvements here, or if they can finally get to know, that they never need to have any hopes up for this topic anymore and can GO ON.

That thread is silent because there’s nothing more to say. It has been said and explained dozens of times why moving the game to a newer API wouldn’t bring a performance overhaul, since the issues are not graphic related, aka DX9 has nothing to do with gw2 problems, so DX11, DX12, Vulkan… wouldn’t be able to solve the problem.

A gtx 960 or r9 380 is more than what you need to max this game. Going for a 970 won’t bring better framerate.

Most taxing cpu settings are Reflections, Shadows, Character quantity Limit and Effect LOD.

I have reflections and shadows disabled, Effect LOD enabled (when enabling, it disables fancy animations of skills) and Character quantity limit to low. I’m around 40-45fps in zergs.

Precognition was also very good for zerguing, and a reason to bring mesmers. Now it’s just garbage and mesmer start to go deep in the uselessness in zergs.

Painless.6149:

So what upgrade would you recommend from an i5 3470? Specifically for GW2.

For Gw2 it would be an overclocked skylake + fast ddr4 (+3000MHz). You can get a non k i5 and overclock it to 4.4-4.6GHz with a z170.
Another option would be an overclocked broadwell i5 5675c with a Z97.

The only thing you can do is upgrade your computer.
That APU is very weak. The cpu barely meets the minimum required, and the gpu is as much powerful as the igpu from skylake, which is not good enough to run the new maps.

Upgrade path there’s broadwell with i5 5675c and i7 5775c, which both bring quite good gaming performance over haswell and even skylake with that L4 cache, specially in cpu based games.

But the i7 4790k is such a solid cpu that it will last quite amount of years.

No. Server loyalty is dead (not in flagged servers) because:
- There’s much less people playing now than before, and for a server it is more difficult to have an enough big playerbase to deal with the 24/7 system we have.
- There’s a big chunk of players who only look for fights and bags, and they stacked in a single server that ends collapsing, as it happened with Seafarer.
- Auto-upgrade has killed one big part of the competition this mode has, making worthless the defense and killing the small scale side. At least they’ll fix the problem.

If you think WvW is all about primetime, sorry but this is not your game mode. Matches and ranking are won in off hours, which are 70-80% of the total amount of time played in the whole week. Not the 2-3 hours when everybody connects.

Not a good idea. Server loyalty and dedication is completely lost, servers would become the next EoTM, and people would then complain about a few servers having full map queues while the rest are deserted.

Shivan.9438:

Pepsi.8907:

The time it takes to rewrite a game so that it adapts to newer graphics is insanely high.

They had 10 years.

Pepsi.8907:

In fact, the only game I’ve ever known to go to such length and stay up to date is Eve Online.

Unless Anet had recieved zero funding from NC Soft or sat on their butts… if Eve Online can put forth the effort, so can Anet.

One of Anet’s common replies to not having what other games offer is “It’s not in our skillset.” Really? In 10 years a company can’t hire people to do the job or be picked up by a parent company that can offer them support and make the game better and take care of a 5+ year old franchise?

Bull-kitten.

DirectX 10 was released in late 2006, and they started to develop Gw2 in 2007. Investing time in a newer api would have meant delaying the launch. Later, they preferred with the continuous temporary content release over spending time in a newer API. Then it came the expansion.

About EVE Online, same story as always. Different game, different publisher, different situation and different internal politics and perspective. When people will stop doing these unreasonable comparisons…
Its developer has nearly twice the amount of employees than anet. First API upgrade in EVE came with directx 9, 4 years later, and directx 11 came 10 years later (not that you can relate to the same 10 years from Gw1 Factions).

Sargoth.8104:

Ansau.7326:

This setting is only available for cpus with 4 or more cores.

False. I’m using a dual core, it is neither grayed out nor uncheckable for me. The dev post VaLee linked confirms that the check box should not be grayed out for anyone, but the option to choose the high texture setting from the dropdown menu is disabled if the cpu has only two processors.

The improvement provided by checking the box is marginal on medium settings and probably not distinguishable to the human eye on low settings, so they might as well have grayed it out for machines that don’t qualify for the high setting.

Which cpu do you have, btw?

Regev.6971:

I can’t see the logic in getting a $229 380x when a 390 8GB can be had for $299 (found on Ebay minutes ago) and is substantially stronger.

While being substantially stronger, it’s also substantially more expensive. You pay a 30% extra price for 15-40% more performance, depending on the game. In Gw2 the difference will be minimal, specially with that cpu.
With a r9 285 I get 40-50fps in Auric Basin with game maxed at 1440p and SweetFX enabled. You don’t need more gpu in this game.

1- Bad design to punish people for playing.
2- It doesn’t resolve the situations where there’s no population from a server or 2 of the 3, and one server can pvdoor everything without opposition and can keep most of the structures for hours.

Aezyr.5304:

Ansau.7326:

In my guild we have a druid in the commander party. Everyday the com is amazed about the healing potential of it.

No wonder since you only fight doors.

I didn’t expect such little from you… Grow up kid.

In my guild we have a druid in the commander party. Everyday the com is amazed about the healing potential of it.

SkyShroud.2865:

Jitsuryoku.9038:

SkyShroud.2865:

overclocking is effective for amd but not so for intel, there isn’t a noticeable difference when u oc intel for gw2

If you have a CPU that meets recommended system requirements you should feel no change at all – intel or amd. If your AMD cpu shows a performance boost in GW2 when overclocking then either your cpu is slow to begin with or it’s too loaded by other programs.

The topic author is running a 4 core i5 at 3.7ghz (default clock). I’m surprised anyone even considers suggesting he actually overclocks or upgrades to improve GW2 performance….

Until recently I was running a somewhat old i7 2.4GHz and GW2 showed no significant performance difference when i switched to a 4.0ghz default clock (no change in settings and settings were in medium range – not the highest).

Anet did not provide any recommended system requirements thus what you say base on that doesn’t apply. Where did you come up with your own set of recommended requirements btw?

A benchmark test on guild wars 2 for processors have already been done during the launch and it clearly show that amd has significant performance gain when you OC it while intel do not have any gain worthy of note. The reason for that is simple, anyone who has basic understanding on the difference between intel and amd will be capable of telling you that intel has a higher single core performance than amd.

I wouldn’t take a benchmark done nearly 3.5 years ago to prove a point, as devs have done quite a lot of micro improvements in the game engine. And specially when it was done in the Norn starting area, far from being cpu intensive in this game.

Zero Day.2594:

Jitsuryoku.9038:

mrauls.6519:

Hey Guys,

I know GW2 doesn’t use a CPU’s entire potential, so I want a beefed up CPU that will give me the highest upkeep of FPS. I’m tired of turning my camera and experiencing FPS stutter because the cpu isn’t being fully utilized.

S/n: My motherboard is a Z97

Just to point out few things you may or may not know.

1) If your CPU is not being fully used it’s usually because
—-A. CPU overheats (or reaches temps that are close to manufacturer defined maximum) and maximum frequency usable by CPU is limited by drivers and software on your PC.
—-B. GW2 has no use for more CPU power. Seeing what your current CPU is this is probably the case.
2) Most graphical problems you will find can be traced back to Graphics Card. (seeing as you say yours is already 980ti you should probably post the other PC specs)
3) It’s REAAAAALY hard to tell something based on CPU alone. If you’re having problems I highly doubt it’s caused by CPU alone (Unless you’re one of those people who overclock everything without proper cooling and expect it will work out, in which case it may have degraded)

^ What this guy said.

---

To all those that OC’ed…

So, does GW2 use speeds past your normal clockspeed? Does it go past 4Ghz?

Like, now that you have all that power/speed, are you actually using it?

Here with an i5 4690k oced to 4.5GHz. I see cpu usage between 75-90% at that speed in WvW zerguing.

beefjus.9347:

So THIS happened today. It just reaffirms my vote for DX12. I don’t get why GW2 is running like crap, but Witcher 3 (high, hairworks off, low shadows and water) still runs at 60fps… SMH

More a problem with your computer than the game.

Main issues for a console port are royalties in game sales, upgrade system with a lot of difficulties with anet upgrade policy and the fact you have to use Sony and Microsoft servers, which would be separated from pc/mac (that means eu and na also for each console).

JediYoda, you need to learn what exactly is an API, what it does, what parts of the rendering it affects.
Instead of linking such amount of links claiming what they say is more accurate than the words of a dev that has worked on this game, you could spend the time reading Microsoft DX12 articles, which explain exactly how the features are.

I mean, it is easier for all of us you learn why the api has that little effect in gw2 performance issues, and not try to explain you it…

PD: The second link you use to “prove” dx upgrade bring better performance is actually showing a decrease in dx11 over dx9.
At least, make sure all your arguments are consistent.

OGDeadHead.8326:

I’m wondering when it comes to these large scale events/wvw zergs, exactly what it is that’s causing the cpu to be so taxed. I would think it’s because the structure of the game currently is that everything needs to be sent to each client, which means that my computer somehow have to take into consideration what each and everyone around me is doing.

Now this means a kitten massive amount of data that needs to be processed on my side when there are 20+ players within close proximity to my character.

If this turns out to be true, question is, how can this be remedied?
Imho, there should be some predictions made here. Servers should stand for most of the calculations, and they should be able to somehow predict things that may or may not affect another player. Maybe this is already the case, and what we actually see is bad server performance? But then again, if that were the case, there shouldn’t be such a wide deviation (?) between clients – in short, different cpus shouldn’t have such a wide range when it comes to performance.
And then, yet again, it doesn’t seem to be the case that it actually is such a wide difference in performance between different cpus when it comes to these cpu taxing events – most everyone suffers from bad performance in these scenarios.

It’s interesting to theorise about. It sure would be interesting to hear a lot more from the engine programmers on these forums, even though they may or may not be able to sort things out, only to hear their side of the story. They got enough data by now to see where the bottleneck really is, when it comes to GW2-

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Here you have the answer.

In your case the best cpus are either 4790k or 5775c. There’s also the 6700k, which is a bit better than both before, but that would require new motherboard and new ram.

JediYoda.1275:

Listen I didn’t make up anything, just more of your spin tactics, Did the Dev post any benchmarks to back up any of their claims? Nope, not one benchmark posted to compare the performance difference between DX 9 to DX12 on gw2 engine. One last time no one will truly know how it will perfume till they try it, till then talk is cheap without bench marks to back any of it up.

You don’t need to test properly a thing to know if the upgrade is worth or not. As long as you know how the overall system works and if that area if a bottleneck or not, you can predict the behavior.
You’re asking how better a 6700k would be over a 2600k in a system paired with a 8800 gt playing at 1440p…

Btw, that isn’t “just” a dev, but more a lead programmer engineer.

Are we discussing this again?
Real issues are more related to the game engine. This is a mmo, and there’s a huge amount of cpu calculations, which have nothing to do with graphics, aka the api is irrelevant here.
Dx12 and Vulkan cpu improvements are related to the graphic rendering managed in the cpu , but cannot do anything to the game engine stuff that is rendered solely in the cpu.

Btw, Gw2 can use multiple cores. What it can’t do is to take advantage of multithreading rendering (a gw2 thread can only be executed by 1 cpu thread).

This setting is only available for cpus with 4 or more cores.

Thing is it is pointless to upgrade to a newer api if the game engine is not redone, which is the culprit of the performance issues.

And redoing a game engine of such a complex game like gw2 is not an easy task.

It is not true sli/crossfire didn’t work in 32bit client.
Anyway, doing that crossfire is not the best option. Any nowadays low end gpu is quite more powerful than yours.

Your dgpu is just only about 10% faster than your igpu. But in gw2 the interface between cpu and gpu is very important, so it is normal the igpu works better than the dgpu.

In a i7 you should see 2 threads being used around 70-90% with others at 30-70%. There’s clearly something not working well. Try a few things:
- Repair the gw2 client.
- Close all other useless software (mouse/keyboard client, p2p, spotify/itunes…).
- Put gw2 priority to high or real time.
- Reinstall graphic drivers (use ddu to uninstall), or try older drivers.
- Re-seat the ram and make sure it is not faulty.

Make sure the gpu is running at pcie 3.0 x16

Use DDU to uninstall all gpu drivers and reinstall the Nvidia one, also try different drivers from Nvidia.
Make sure the gpu is running at x16.

sirsquishy.8531:

NilSatis.6720:

Kraggy.4169:

A piece of software can’t “set your GPU on fire”, overheating is due to bad or inadequate cooling which in your case doesn’t seem to tolerate the GPU being run at load.

By definition, a piece of software can’t make a processor work harder than it is designed to do, so any heat issues are poor cooling design.

Utter utter rubbish. You display a simple 3d environment on a modern gpu capable of churning out 2000 fps on that image and it will overheat and cause coil whine etc as the capacitors are strained. That is not what is happening on this game, but badly coded/optimised games also can, and will heat your gpu/cpu up more than they should; and this statement you made is utter crap. The “setting on fire” is an expression if I really need to tell you that; what they mean is their gpu is working far harder than it should be and is heating up as a result. Good cooling or not.

I have noticed (liquid cooling on cpu; tri-x cooler on gpu) that this game is really heating up the gpu/cpu a LOT more than any dx9 game should by definition. There is something badly wrong with the latest patches since HOT and they need to investigate asap. I know people who are artifacting etc. JUST on this game because of said issues. There is a major problem and Id suggest they know this. Fixing it needs to be a priority and statements like this are stupid and achieve nothing.

I see some good suggestions about cooling above, but when you have played the game extensively you can see the problems that are there now that never used to be there; users cooling issues are another “issue” entirely.

Sorry, you are wrong.

TDP has been an RFC for a long time and for good reason. If a GPU, CPU, or RAM is overheating its due to poor cooling. That could be a bad/clogged fan, dried up Thermal Paste, or blown heatpipes.

its not going to be the fault of the software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power

You’re contradicting yourself with your explanation, and a link with tells us the contrary. TDP is just the maximum heat the component creates in a “normal intensive workload”, which doesn’t measure peaks. So software is a quite important part in the equation.
This normal intensive workload is similar to pretty much all real software programs, but that doesn’t mean software capable of pushing the component beyond that TDP doesn’t exist.
There’s real software that takes advantage of more stressful instructions or parts of the component that generates more heat, so it is possible to get a higher TDP than the specified from the component with a proper cooling solution, and getting higher temperatures than normal.

Gw2 is so weirdly coded it can heat up a little more than most games or gpu benchmarks. Even in specific bonfires it puts any gpu on their knees and you can see temperatures similars to furmark, with the gpu getting downclocked as it gets beyond thermal throttling.

Which cpu do you have?

Get the 6600k, overclock it, pair it with +3000MHz ram and you’ll have the best experience.
The extra cores and threads from the 5820k won’t be as useful as the better IPC and higher overclock from skylake.
Also the 5820k is quite more expensive once you count cpu, MB and 4 channel ram prices.

Gw2 is very cpu intensive, specially in world boss fights. That guy who said he was running at 50-60fps was playing at minimal for sure. There’s no pc in this earth that has the enough raw performance to play this game in such a heavy situation at ultra at such high framerate.

Your framerate seems normal, but there’s a few things you can do to improve it:
- Overclock the cpu and RAM if you can.
- Make sure the gpu is running at pcie x16.
- Also make sure the FLCK frequency is running at 1000MHz. At first, Skylake motherboards put it at 800MHz and intel rates desktop skylake for 1GHz. It has been proved it helps a little bit with dgpu performance.
- Disable Reflections and Shadows, and put Character limit to Medium. These are the 3 most taxing settings and the graphic quality improvement is minimal or inexistent.

Zakxxx.4103:

Ansau.7326:

nassaya.7109:

After reading some stuff I think it has to do with gw2 itself. Is it the reused gw1 engine I dunno. Core load with gw2 is 80% on module 1 core 0. Memory use is 2.9gb when I walk and 5 gb peaks in big events. Graphic card use is normal. So got Juise to spare still awful fps.

With an i5 4690k and a r9 285 I can play at 1440p nearly ultra at 55-60fps in pve maps, 35-40fps in LA and new maps, and 30-35fps in zergs.
The issues are with people’s pc, not the game itself.

Incorrect, the game is using the gw1 engine and coding. The low fps is because of this. The game is not optimized for cpus with multiple cores and multiple threads. The only reason intel gets better performance is because of their single core strength. My fx 8350 would go toe to toe with many i7s out there if the game was optimized correctly for these cpus. Yes, Intel performs better than amd, I agree with that completely but do you see where the fx 8350 and 8150 is placed on this list? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

There’s no reason an fx 8150 should be getting less than 30 fps in gw2 even in massive zerg fights on the lowest settings if the game was optimized correctly. And yes it can be optimized, take a look at ffxiv for example, even in dx9 a fx 8350 will almost never drop below 40-50 fps and will most likely be sitting at 60+ fps. Cpu usage sits at 90%+ when running that game. Cpu usage for gw2 lowest settings on my fx 8350 sits at 60% give or take.

This is not related to what I said.
I wasn’t talking about game engine optimization, but more about the low performance people is getting regards its specs, which is a problem with their computer rather than the game.
OP pc with an i7 SB and a 960 should be getting way more fps than he does, and this is a problem with his pc, not the game.
The fact I can run the game maxed at such high resolution without major issues proves it.

About what you said related to game engine optimization, you’re worng in several ways:
- Gw2 engine is not just the gw1 one, but a heavily modified that can do things the previous couldn’t even imagine.
- DX9 has little to do here since the performance issue in big scale fights is related to game engine threads, not the API.
- You can only compare other games with gw2 IF they have similar stress situations where the computer needs to render a fight with +50 people involved. There are not so many games with such situations, and pretty much all are mmo. If we analyze their performance we see similar drops.
- Funny you name FFXIV, as it’s not such a good example to compare with gw2, besides it also experiences deeps of about 50% of performance in heavy fights.
First because the most stressful situation is a joke compared to the 100-150 people in world bosses or the blob fest in WvW when pairing 50vs50vs50.
Secondly because combat in FFXIV is way simpler than gw2 in terms of calculations. Mobs and enemies move less, AoE spells are based on target position rather than ground target, there’s no such a thing as dodge… Position of targets adds a huge amount of calculations.
And third because in FFXIV there’re less things being done at the same time. In gw2 you can be dealing damage in AoE from 3-4 different skills while dodging, plus healing yourself and in AoE, plus activating sigils or runes, plus receiving damage from 4-5 different conditions… Or imagine a Feedback reflecting projectiles from 50 different people. Even some attacks require several calculations, like GS#2 from mesmers, a projectile that bounces 3 times (so 4 different calculations) with different ranges, different possible friend target, adding effects of boon and condition and each one can be avoided or not independently.

The prove that makes FFXIV not a good example is in cpu cores usage compared with gw2. FFXIV average is around 40% per core and it doesn’t go higher than 60%, while gw2 can stress all cores at a range of 70-90% in heavy fights.
Basically, FFXIV is a gpu based game while gw2 is a cpu based one.

There’s no deny on the fact gw2 could be optimized better, but we must also consider the work behind it is beyond the resources from anet. Just an idea to realize how different are both games, the company behind FFXIV has around 7.5 times more the amount of employees anet has.

Fx cpus suffer so much in those situations not because the game is badly optimized, but more because they don’t have the enough performance to deal with the huge amount of calculations needed.
FX cpus are penalized hugely from internal latencies(which affect a lot while gaming), they even need twice the amount of cores and 1GHz more to match the stock of the i7 Ivy Bridge multithread performance.
Even with multi-threading on the main threads, FX cpus would still have a hard time in heavy situations.

nassaya.7109:

After reading some stuff I think it has to do with gw2 itself. Is it the reused gw1 engine I dunno. Core load with gw2 is 80% on module 1 core 0. Memory use is 2.9gb when I walk and 5 gb peaks in big events. Graphic card use is normal. So got Juise to spare still awful fps.

With an i5 4690k and a r9 285 I can play at 1440p nearly ultra at 55-60fps in pve maps, 35-40fps in LA and new maps, and 30-35fps in zergs.
The issues are with people’s pc, not the game itself.

Make sure the gpu is running at x16

a) Making the game multithreading is the optimal solution, but it’s also the hardest task for devs, since it requires to redo a lot of the coding of the game engine.
This is not an easy, neither a quick thing to do in a game which is constantly being updated, so unless thy have being doing it secretly, there’re pretty much no chances to see it happening.
Also, it is false the game uses one core. I can guarantee you there’s a problem with your configuration or you have a setting that is making a huge bottlenecking.
I have an i5 4690k oced to 4.5GHz and it’s easy to see cpu being stressed nearly to its maximum, being the least used core to around 60%.
Also, there’re videos in youtube of 8 core FX using all cores and seing % of usage beyond 40%.

b)A dev said recently upgrading the API wouldn’t bring performance improvements, since the worst scenarios in gw2 are not bottlenecked by the graphic rendering part.
Also, the upgrade from dx9 to dx12/vulkan is really huge. The newer APIs are low level, which means devs need to do a lot of the work the driver was doing since now.

There’s very little you can do, the problem is that weak cpu. The only way to get a big improvement would be moving to intel.

I first tried condi shatter with chronomancer, but in the end I felt chrono was only adding a thing here and there to the whole build, so I stayed with the typical Sc/T-Staff duels/chaos/illusions, but modifying some traits and going nearly full rabid (Confusing Images dealing nealy 3k with crits and iWarlock +2000).
Won 3 2vs1 (twice against same war+guard and once ranger+thief), melt a revenant and won quite easily against a P/P thief and a reaper.

I feel people have forget completely about conditions (both offensively and defensively) and that’s the best opportunity for traditional condi shatter builds.

Here with i5 4690k and r9 285 and I don’t experience OOM crashes. Everything at ultra, but Character limit to medium and shadows and reflections disabled.

Fermi.2409:

Ansau.7326:

Since you’re building a new pc, I’d go for skylake with high speed ddr4:

You’re paying another $150 (20%) to gain like 5% performance. It’s really not worth going for Skylake, given the price difference between it and Haswell.

Well, you put a very low end MB with a low end cooler, you’ll be lucky getting stable 4.3-4.4GHz.
With that in mid, the gains are more than 5%, since that is comparing Haswell with 1600 ram vs Skylake with 2133 ram, and at same speed. But here I pair Skylake with high speed ram and also a good MB and a good cooler that will be able to reach easily 4.6-4.7GHz.
Overall the gains can be around 15%, with a much better motherboard with tons of more features.