Guild Wars 2

I’d like to point out that the CPU limits for GW2 don’t really kick in until huge amounts of players like Tequatl events or WVW. A GTX 870M would have a bit of a better chance over an 860M. With my Asus G75VX the limiting factor on it is the clock speed is too low on the GTX 670MX that it has, otherwise the i7 3630QM has very little problem.

If the 860M on whichever laptop you’re wanting is a Maxwell unit, I’d say go for it otherwise it’s practically a neutered GTX 770M and would go for the 870M instead, and with the price difference between 860M and 870M, the choice is fairly obvious since normally the price difference is around $250-ish for those two chips in otherwise the same spec of laptop.

My verdict: Go for Ghost Pro. It’s 870M (which is originally a GTX 680M) is still a very high powered graphics card and will have no trouble with this game and possibly not much with other more intense games.

Intel i3 will do well enough as a budget option.

PVE should be fine for most areas but it’ll suffer in wvw (everything suffers in wvw)

Think it’s safe to say that the only people who would still have version one PCIe slots would be the ‘gaming’ computer with a cheaped out piece of crap board or a really old school gaming computer when PCIe was new like in the age of Pentium 4 Prescott and Core Duo processors.

Without breaking the bank I think the MSIs are the way to go in my opinion with the GE Apache Pro or Stealth series. Otherwise it’s the much thicker, much gamier GT series which house the more powerful graphics cards for higher prices.

And normally if they’re the same spec but different size for the MSI ones, there’s no difference except size. GT70, GT60, GE70, GE60, same spec, different size for what kind of screen you want. I have an Asus G75VX 17.3 and the thing is massive. It’s not a traditional gaming laptop where the back is huge and the front is huge, it’s designed for prolonged periods while still being comfortable. Though it still takes up a large area compared to say an MSI GT70 i7/GTX770M unit.

If it’s in an X8 slot it won’t make too much of a difference but generally you’ll want it on the top PCIe slot.

Anything with an i7 mobile processor and a good mobile gaming graphics card will do good enough for that budget for everything but wvw which you’ll see it pushed to it’s limits fairly often.

I’d recommend the MSI GE60 or GE70 Apache Pro with i7 4700HQ and GTX 860M Maxwell. It’ll handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

You did uninstall the old drivers before installing new ones, right?

To save time explaining why they couldn’t and wouldn’t, I’ll just say no.

There is no issue here. You’re seeing something that is shockingly normal.
You’ll have to lower CPU intensive graphics.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

Avelos.6798:

Come to think of it I doubt more there are a lot of people who even play Guild Wars 2 with a DX9 graphics chip anymore. DX 10 for Nvidia started at the gaming line of GeForce 8 series and Radeon HD 2000 series for ATI. Anything beyond those two lines are extremely dated and probably way too slow to run the game adequately anymore unless you had/have like two 7800 GT or two HD 2900 in SLI/Crossfire. Though multi card setups of those generations would probably be more problems than solutions. Crossfire and SLI was still rickety and performance gains were eeehhhh.

Also I went and seeked out information that confirmed your information as positive, TinkTinkPOOF that DX11 games will play on DX9 hardware. That the games will have some sort of DX9 fallback mode. I find that actually interesting.

Indeed it is, but then it makes you stop and think….WTF devs, why are there so few games on new DX when MS has made it a point to be backward compatible? And the only real answer is consoles, which is why when new ones come out, I could careless about the HW in it, I want to know what DX it will be based off of, and most of the time they are to cheap or lazy to do a PC version and what we get is a chopped together port that runs like crap.

Because DX 11 was not available until 2009. DX 10 still required high CPU power as far as I’ve seen. ANet wouldn’t scrap 2 years of work just to change APIs anyway.

Come to think of it I doubt more there are a lot of people who even play Guild Wars 2 with a DX9 graphics chip anymore. DX 10 for Nvidia started at the gaming line of GeForce 8 series and Radeon HD 2000 series for ATI. Anything beyond those two lines are extremely dated and probably way too slow to run the game adequately anymore unless you had/have like two 7800 GT or two HD 2900 in SLI/Crossfire. Though multi card setups of those generations would probably be more problems than solutions. Crossfire and SLI was still rickety and performance gains were eeehhhh.

Also I went and seeked out information that confirmed your information as positive, TinkTinkPOOF that DX11 games will play on DX9 hardware. That the games will have some sort of DX9 fallback mode. I find that actually interesting.

unless you’re playing in Windowed Fullscreen you won’t see the actual usage. I saw the same numbers but then had the game up and checked and it was at higher numbers.

Decado.1726:

Even if this game is so CPU bound even the best of CPUs currently can’t use the highest graphics settings and still get 60 fps steady in some areas. It’s crazy.

MMORPGs like this with Direct X 9 are very strange but the explanation is sorta simple I think. There’s too much load being placed on the CPU because of the currently used API which was chosen so that the game would be the most accessible to anyone with a computer. Windows XP, Vista and 7 are the most used operating system and MAC has DX9 support so it’s a given that they’d want to make it with that.

The only drawback is the substantial amount of work that then makes the processor need to do. It was then made further inefficient by adding in all of the huge amounts of visual effects. Those visuals are done by GPU yes but the CPU needs to throw them at the GPU first.

When it comes down to it if I were one of the developers of the game I would have opted for DX9 as well over 10 or 11 so more people could play the game. Even with the game how it is you can get reasonable acceptable performance with most hardware configurations since the game’s graphics are scalable.

Just another case of the pros outweighing the cons.

I can clearly see that. You’re getting about as good as performance can get. There’s not much difference between the Haswells, Ivies, and Sandies right now. Unless you could maybe push that 3820K to like 4.8 GHz, you could possibly see better.

You will understand a lot better if you started playing the game and then changed to an Intel processor like I did. My in game performance pretty much doubled from an AMD FX-8350 to an i7 4770K.

Behellagh.1468:

@Avelos

But HT simply lets the cores run more efficiently by presenting the instruction scheduler with a second set of code that doesn’t interact with the first, allowing a higher IPC.

And since the ARM cores in the 360 and the x86 cores in the XBone are single thread, thought to use the i5 in comparison so HT doesn’t get in the way.

Just offering correction that “i5 2600” does not exist but is an i7 2600. :P Otherwise it’s just an i5 2500.

Tip: i5 2600 is an i7 3.4 GHz quad core /HT.

Holding both right and left click will result in forward movement. Strafing and moving backwards, you’ll need a board.

sirsquishy.8531:

Avelos.6798:

DX10 or 11 isn’t going to help the game much. That is all.

yea, it would.

DX10/11/11.2 are all multi-threaded. DX9 is not.

that in itself would be a HUGE performance increase.

GW2’s MAIN weakness is that single threaded Rendering thread tied back to the DX9 API. If that was able to span 1-3 additional threads, we would see HUGE differences from what we are seeing today.

DX 11 didn’t do much for WOW raids.

DX10 or 11 isn’t going to help the game much. That is all.

Could use GPUZ and another temperature monitoring program to make sure neither the GPU or CPU are thermal throttling. I can’t remember any for the CPU however.

I can vouch for SirSquishy’s words. You’ll be stuck with atrocious FPS in cities with the AMD FX-8320. It was no better with my FX-8350 and I eventually got fed up with it and bought an i7.

Clean out your laptop. You have to check and maintain a gaming computer at least every 1 month or 2 months if you game excessively on it.

No, for this game the current i7 is vastly superior to the Phenom II X6 1100T.

I don’t consider my R9 290Xs to be faulty at all since it’s been happening to me with numerous hardware configurations.

That might be because the 560TI was enough easily handle the game’s generated graphics? If you changed from something like an AMD processor to a current generation Intel processor, then you’d see gains.

Just installing the new drivers will do it. You have to uninstall the previous one AND THEN install the new drivers for it to work. Well, that’s what I had to do with my Asus R9 290Xs.

The overlays shouldn’t be crashing it. the only overlay I have is Steam Overlay for GW2 because I use steamchat a lot. However it did not do this at all previously. But then it just started happening out of the blue with my AMD FX-8350 w/ 7970s, then i7 4770K and 7970s and then still with the R9 290Xs though the amount of which it happens has dropped significantly. Guess that’s one more reason for me to not go with an AMD CPU anymore. LOL

SirSuquishy: Any ROG G74/G75/G750 laptop will have two hard drive bays.

setting everything to lowest would probably enable you to have visible player count at maximum and still have pretty good fps so you know what’s fully happening in wvw.

also yes lowering everything will result in massive boost in fps.

I have the non beta version of 14.4 as well and it’s running very good for my R9 290Xs. Still have that issue where the drivers screw up sometimes when I load a video while gaming… it’s infuriating. Did this to my 7970s and when I was using FX-8350.

I see you have a Republic Of Gamers laptop. Do you have the charger plugged in? They do not game on battery.

I’m gonna go ahead and contradict some of Sobe’s information here.
GW2 isn’t exactly a ‘poorly optimized’ game, it’s an MMORPG. You’ll find terrible FPS happening in WoW, Defiance, any other MMORPG with high player population where the fps is crap in some places. The stuttering FPS however may just be a setting on the laptop that’s not what it should be.

Mobile intel CPU can handle this game fairly well compared to desktop AMD processors anyway. I7 3630QM Versus FX-8350? The i7 will perform better. It did for me, at least.
An i5 processor will also shine.

With my Asus G75VX armed with i7 3630QM, GTX 670MX and 12 GB RAM, the very slight issue with the game this laptop has is particle effects. Enough of them will drop it’s FPS because the GTX 670MX is slightly under speed to handle it well enough. Other than that, it handled the game very well.

Looking at it some more, the 1TB hard drive will hardly effect his gaming aside from loading new zones.
The GTX 860M is superior in performance to the GTX 670MX as well, being the new Maxwell architecture. It’s about slightly faster than the GTX 770?M which is much faster than the GTX 670MX

Moving on, don’t bother with that ‘unparking cores’ crap. It’s bullocks and an easier way to do that is to set the laptop power plan to ‘High Performance’ mode rather than going into the Registry to make one of the other power plans a hybrid of power saving and high performance (Who even thought of this?)

But yes, if you haven’t done so already, plug in the laptop charger and the machine will take care of the rest. Make sure the Power Plan in Windows is set to High Performance or, what Asus likes to call it “Power4Gear Entertainment”

The spec will play pretty much all of the game except for wvw fights at enjoyable FPS. You’ll learn to find enjoyment in the lower FPS in wvw fights because its not going to get higher anytime soon and you’ll be glad it won’t be 6 fps. I honestly don’t think there is a way to increase the fps because of how cpu bound it is in that regard.

Don’t waste your time with a mobile APU. It’ll do worse than that i7. More so don’t waste your time with HP laptops.

FX series processors today are an interestingly executed concept for a processor compared to how they were going about with the Phenom II processors.

AMD wanted to build something for the future, figuring a more multi cored processor to be there and ready when software starts taking the multi-core way. They essentially took one core and broke it into two parts. This also unfortunately cut the performance of the single thread portion of the core but it gained the HSA technology that AMD enthusiasts like to go off about sometimes.

I don’t remember too much details but essentially it’s about a third, give or take a bit less in single thread performance than the Phenoms for DX9 games, such as Guild Wars 2.

In a way, the FX-8##0/9##0 processors are ‘eight core’ processors but in a way they could be known as quad cores with their own sort of multi thread gig going where the Phenom II X6 is an actual six core processor I saw this same thing with the game Defiance when I used an AMD Phenom II 975BE and then upgraded to the FX-8350. Defiance became very slideshow in large player population events.

Baseline, however, to see relatively the same frame rates, you’d have to overclock that sucker to 5.5 GHz or something to start seeing similar FPS.
So far as it looks, Phenom II was the final CPU era that was designed with large use of Driect X 9 use in mind.

Edit, in response to a few more recent messages,
Both of my R9 290X run at 8x mode in 3.0 slots in crossfire mode all the time. Though if you had a GPU that was running at 4x lanes I couldn’t imagine there being a huge drop in performance if you were using a very high end graphics card that could compensate for it’s speed being essentially cut in half.

For the record though, running at 8x lanes is very normal if anyone is wondering. the only time you’d see a graphics card actually take advantage of all 16x lanes if it’s in that mode is if it were a dual chip graphics card like GTX 690, R9 295X2, etc. Or maybe an incredibly high end single chip card like a GTX Titan Black.

you’ll see acceptable, playable fps in pve with up to medium populations in sight. that internet connection requirement is bollucks though. you’ll get superior fps if you change that FX-8350 to any haswell i5.

I ran the game on max save for no shadows or reflections and for PVE it was just fine. it’ll suffer in wvw.

Doesn’t have to be at least 256bit. 192 is just fine. Remember, 128 and 192 bit are sweet spots for budgets.

This is how an MMORPG works, Deathwing. I have yet to play any MMO that was ever GPU bound because the key thing that is not scripted is the players, and there’s a lot of players, obviously. All of those visuals, queueing of commands, moving around, doing anything with the players, sheer numbers of, all of that starts adding up and the power needing to simply drive that goes right up. You’ll see it in WoW, Defiance, FF14 (Not sure, haven’t played) this obviously, and other MMORPG. But the Intel will handle it better.

Let’s just say in the absolute worst spot in Lion’s Arch in this game with an AMD FX-8350, I got 12 FPS. The same spot with my i7 4770K, I got 25 FPS. All same settings.

All modern graphics cards today can eat this game alive but it doesn’t matter when you don’t have a processor that supplies it fast enough.

Aside from all that I’m not sure why this topic still exists. A new one should have been made.

Pro tip, R9 270 is literally the exact same spec as the R9 270X but is around $50-$80 cheaper usually.

Game’s not broken, you should probably do some research on how the AMD FX series processors work and what Direct X 9 needs to power it. AMD FX and DX9 MMOs don’t mix. Yes I’m talking from experience.

I’d stick with the i5 4670K and GTX 760. i3 is a locked processor and does not overclock easily at all.

Maybe around the 10 fps area. from 3.4 to 4.2 isn’t a substantial jump, you’ll see a difference in FPS compared to the same overclock on the AMD which will see maybe 1 or 2 fps increase.

With how the game works, you’d be throwing money away for performance you could get with the same price. FX-8 or Intel i5? Some of them are the same price, some are not. But one of them performs much better than the other.
I’m only saying though, if you’re just building for GW2, forget about AMD.

Refurb is spotty as it is. What you get is what you get, hardly any warranty on it. You’re better off with the GTX 760.

In my opinion, you should go for:
MSI Z87 Gaming Edition board (I dunno any specific model)
I5 4670K
Hyper 212 Evo
120 GB SSD and you can put GW2 on it and load times will be blazing fast
1 TB HDD Seagate Barracuda
GTX 760
650 watt power supply
8 GB RAM DDR3 1600.

It seems like you intentionally cheaped out on the AMD build and made the intel one far superior. You really shouldn’t do that to be honest, or get parts that you may not even use. Like the H100 Corsair CLC. Closed loop liquid coolers only shine in load temperatures. Air coolers are far superior to them and much quieter if you’re not overclocking.
I happen to have a Corsair H100 but I do not overclock my i7 4770K under it often. It runs 3.5 GHz most of the time. I use it because it takes up less space around the motherboard than an equally capable air cooler. It’s a lot noisier too. Don’t be mislead that CLCs are quieter. It doesn’t matter for me, however as I use a headset for all of my audio.

Alternatively you could up the power supply to a 750 and have headroom for future graphics card upgrades. The rest of the machine won’t need to be changed. Not for a number of years anyway.

I stopped reading the first build at the AMD FX-8320.

For GW2, the Intel is vastly superior.
A CM Hyper 212 Evo is just as efficient and substantially quieter than a liquid cooler if you’re not planning on overclocking. But if you are, the load temperatures are where the liquid cooler shine.
Protip, never shop for RAM based on their speed. Unless you’re doing CAD work, it makes no remotely noticeable difference. DDR3 800 CL6 keeps up fairly well with DDR3 3000 CL13.
I’d personally recommend Seagate Barracuda from personal experience. WD have been grindy and fail more often.
750 watt PSU has a higher capacity and thus with the higher capacity, the peak power usage will be a lower capacity so in the long run it will last longer.

You could go with the 2 64 GB SSD like in the AMD build and RAID them for double speed on the Intel build if you wanted.

I do apologize but I don’t have much to say about the AMD build if you’re building to play Guild Wars 2. I upgraded from an AMD FX-8350 to an i7 4770K and I can easily say that I will no longer recommend AMD CPU for Guild Wars 2 unless they’re on a tight budget in which I’d recommend the APU because the built in GPU on it is fairly capable compared to the Intel offerings.

Your exact issue was resolved in this topic about a month ago but with an R9 M290X (rebadged 8970M)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/AMD-R9-m290X/first#post3880851

no compatibility needed

General rule. MMOs are CPU bound. Try playing the game on an AMD FX-8350. Gonna tank. Try playing game with Intel i7 extreme edition. Still gonna tank even in WVW.

Also old thread dead thread necro thread should go away.

I get those annoying driver has stopped responding and has recovered thing as well. You may be surprised to find that it’s not always caused by a terrible driver…

Give this Microsoft FixIt a try and if it doesn’t work, you /may/ have incompatible RAM on your board. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946.

The issue normally has to do with Timeout Detection and Recovery.
It is not however an issue with the graphics card hardware.

I’m pretty sure you can deactivate the product key of a retail version and re-use it. that would be a kitten move to have to spend 70-300 dollars on a product key to not be able to re-use it if you need to.