Guild Wars 2

You didn’t ask the ANet support staff. To do that submit a ticket.

Don’t fret EQuake, some DIYers here don’t believe in low cost systems. I was going to suggest the FX-4300 over the FX-4130 but you beat me to it.

- I hope that’s 2×2GB of memory and not one 4GB stick but I’m guessing it’s a single stick. This isn’t that much more and it’ll allow dual channel memory access and is probably faster than that Kingston memory.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231193

- You are on a budget yet you picked a relatively expensive case that you still need to add fans to. And it doesn’t have a side fan, just a spot for a top one (one 200mm or two 120mm). Not saying there’s anything better, it’s a nice case, but on a budget you don’t spend 15% of it on a case.

- Power supply. Something you shouldn’t under spend on, and I hate that Cooler Master does this but if the sticker on the side is to be believed, it’s not a 460 watt PSU but only 400 watts (the sticker says 3.3V + 5V + 12V can’t exceed 377.9 watts of output). At least Corsair CX-430 is honest about it’s continuous output.

- Video card. Please tell me that’s not the MSI HD 7750 with DDR3 memory. If your choice is between 2GB of DDR3 and 1GB of GDDR5 ALWAYS go with the faster memory. Always. The extra memory is never worth the 65% reduction in video memory bandwidth. You are tying boat anchors to a swimmer. You can get HD 7750 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory for about the same price.

- Lastly a Z77 motherboard doesn’t take AMD FX cpus. That’s a AMD 970a board.

I’ll be back later to comment more and maybe try to get a parts list together close to your budget.

If you don’t plan to overclock, the Evo is fine and is much better than the stock Intel cooler. If you ever overclock the Evo just isn’t going to hold up much past 4-4.2GHz. It’s just a matter of heat dissipation and the Evo can’t keep up, Haswell heats up fast once you have to bump the voltage up for OCing.

The CoolerMaster 612 and 812 will handle the thermal load better than the 212 Evo and are both cheaper than the H100i but they aren’t as gamer sexy as a 240mm radiator liquid cooling system.

Don’t see a problem with anything on your list other than the debate on the CPU cooler.

As for the question of if an H100i will fit in the Phantom 410. One with the radiator inside and the fans outside and one with the fans inside and the radiator outside the chassis.

@Malediktus – you refuse to take people’s suggestions (adjust the prerender, do a system memory test) and if this was a universal problem then the boards will be on fire about it. I guessing you aren’t even submitting the logs to Anet because “they should know about this problem already” with the attitude you’ve shown in this thread.

Turn down the Character Limit and Quality settings and see if it goes away in those events. But I bet you won’t even try that.

So suffer with a “busted” game while the rest of us go off and take your spot in those zergs.

Personally I use the Performance Summary chart from whatever latest video card review at TechpowerUP like this one.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_780_Lightning/26.html

The percentage is base on the card currently reviewed but it does give you a pretty good idea of the lay of the land. They also have a bang for the buck chart as well.

The one problem with Intel is price. They don’t really have low price true quad cores. The cheapest is $180 at NewEgg. And while the AMD FX cores are significantly slower than Intel’s, a FX-6350 will outperform a similarly priced i3 as six slower cores will beat two overburden fast cores in most things.

Of course then the argument becomes “but for only $X more you can get an Intel quad and game over”. That’s true but a lot of DIYers are on a fix budget, can’t wait for more income to raise their budget and are simply trying to maximize their experience. That means for most games to emphasize the video card over the CPU because most games become GPU limited when you crank the game’s graphic options up. Most aren’t willing to take $50 off the video card budget to stick it on the CPU/MB budget or go without a luxury item like an SSD.

@Haiden – You shouldn’t see a problem with just 8GB of memory as long as the rig isn’t multitasking while playing games (let me just render this video/compile this project while I’m getting my daily done :p ). For a lot of DIYers here, it’s all out or nothing which means getting the OC “k” version of the top i5 or i7 but overclocking presents a whole pile of other issues, namely better CPU cooling and a bigger PSU than that 450 watt Corsair.

As for the power supply 450 watts will limit you an future video card upgrades. If you know this going in fine but if you decide to upgrade to a much higher performance video card at a later day you will have to upgrade that power supply. As it is it’s more than enough for a plain GTX 650 and whatever CPU you match it with.

As long as this new system will be significantly better than what you currently have and fits in your budget, don’t let the naysayers drag you down or make you feel that your system is inadequate. It’s easy to spend other people’s money.

Model designers, level designers, mission desingers, etc. aren’t programmers. And I would guess that the vast majority of the people on the 4 LW teams are just that. They are using 3rd party tools as well as preexisting home grown ones to build content for the LW they are doing.

The people at ANet who are programmers aren’t interchangeable cogs. The team in charge of the server side code can’t just be loaned out to the client rendering team and vice versa. Teams become specialized with their aspect of the game.

Lastly optimization of this nature is a very tricky thing. You are trying to improve the worst case areas without penalizing the areas that are working alright. And it’s surprisingly easy to do just that, fix a slow spot but in doing so reduce the performance everywhere else. That’s not going to fly well with most people.

You have the frame buffer being shown, the frame buffer being worked on (may be more than one), the depth buffer, any buffers used by post process effects … it can add up but it’s at worst 10% on a 1GB card.

While the game can use 4GB on a 64-bit system and 3GB on an enabled 32-bit system it’s still only 2GB on a 32-bit system that isn’t set to allow 3GB apps. It still makes sense that the game manages memory usage, freeing data that relates to zones you are currently not in, players who aren’t currently in the same zone as you, critters that aren’t in this zone, etc.

The devs have said that quality of salvage kit will make no difference in extracting EoL.

The H100i is a tad overkill if he’s a first time OCer and not shooting for the Moon. But the Hyper 212 Evo is a little, OK a lot lightweight. I would avoid air coolers that relies on direct heat pipe contact and look for ones with full heat spreader. The Cooler Master TPC-812 is a better choice than the Evo and is cheaper than the H100i. It just doesn’t have the same gamer creds as a liquid cooler does.

Sunlyte.3768:

Behellagh.1468:

You didn’t say if you used it or not (FarCry 3 64-bit client).

But my point still stands. Unless the game being tested + 64-bit OS is actively needing more than 4GB then you won’t see a performance shift from 4GB to 8GB.

All that more system memory buys you is the ability to run more 32-bit apps at the same time without the apps fighting over who gets system memory.

The game doesn’t need to statically occupy all of its available physical memory for additional system memory to provide benefits. It’s not just about being able to multi-task more effectively.

Windows does have a good caching system that will utilize available memory, and that any time something has to be loaded from the disk, it’s better if it loads from memory cache rather than the disk.

The specific instances where GW2 bogs can be alleviated by having at least 8 GB of memory, a decent Intel CPU and a quick graphics card. Any issues beyond that would require software optimization from ANet.

You may have misunderstood me. I’m not saying that you won’t see difference in performance between 4 and 8 GB with GW2, just the games Swoo tested.

No idea. It may just be a problem with GPU-Z, but that shouldn’t be that much of your problem.

Only other thing to try is setting your Power Profile (Control Panel —> Power Options) to High Performance and see if that helps. Otherwise the usual suspects in the Graphic Options is Reflections (set to none) and Shadows (low or medium) followed by the Character Model Limit/Quantity (set both to medium). A think the rest of the settings can be left at what best appearance sets and that will be likely the best you will be able to get. Of course in WvW and big events you will probably want to turn the Character Model settings back to low.

That’s all I can think of, sorry.

Then that’s very weird because both the HT speed should be higher with a AMD 970 and it should be talking to the video card at V2.0 speeds.

Wait. I swore I read your HT speed originally at 2000MHz and not 2400MHz. So no problem there, my bad.

But the PCIe link should still be V2.0 not 1.1.

By disabling Core Parking, your rig won’t shut down, turn on, shut down, turn on … cores while running.

I’m guessing by looking at your CPU-Z and GPU-Z that you are running on an older motherboard like the ASROCK N68C-GS FX that uses the nVidia 70xx/630a motherboard chipset.

To send commands and data to the graphics card an AMD CPU must transmit to the motherboard’s “Northbridge” chip and then it transmits it to the graphics card over the PCIe link. First according to CPU-Z your CPU is talking to the Northbridge at 2GHz instead of the 2.6GHz that it could. Then the PCIe controller in the Northbridge is talking to the video card over 16, Version 1.1 links which maxes out at 4GB/s. Your video card can talk to a PCIe controller that supports V2 links at 8GB/s or a controller that supports V3 links at 15.75GB/s (V3 is currently way more than any graphic card can use or CPU provide). That isn’t helping in the long run but how much it’s hurting, I don’t know.

We can confirm this by looking at the mainboard tab in CPU-Z. Please post a screenshot of that.

Core Parking is a way to save power by disabling cores when CPU load is low enough that not all cores are needed. It tends to go hand in hand with “turbo” automatic overclocking but the added clockspeed doesn’t really make up for loss of one or more full cores.

AMD FX series was designed to embrace the notion of disabling pairs of cores to reduce power consumption (a problem AMD has had since forever) while boosting the clock speed of the remaining cores. It was one of it’s touted features when first introduced.

Some players here have touted improved performance with FX CPUs once they disabled core parking.

At least your HD 7850 is running at x16 but at only PCIe V1.1 bus speed. Curious.

Don’t turn this into a 99 Vs 1% argument.

The game is free to play and these tools are a convenience. ANet decided to fund their continued operation by cash shop and not subscription or some hybrid where “premium” ie subscribers get nearly everything for free plus $5 of cash shop currency while F2P players get restricted to class/race, tiny inventories, restricted area, the same extra plain looking armor and nickle and dimed at every turn.

Because of that they have to, for their survival, put out attractive and useful items that cost a lot and to maximize their income, character not account bound them.

1st where are you in that screenshot of your settings, can’t tell. 2nd post a GPU-Z screenshot. 3rd post a screenshot from that same location with settings at best appearance. Lastly what is fullscreen resolution?

I’ve found running in Windowed Fullscreen to be slower than running dedicated full resolution.

Have you embraced the notion of disabling Core Parking? There are utilities out there that will allow you to adjust this.

http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

There is also a Windows 7 hotfix to disable CP.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060/EN-US

The 300% luck fine will be a long term or very costly endeavor. This means the market will be flooded with basic mats as EVERYONE salvages their previous “junk” blues and greens for luck.

You didn’t say if you used it or not (FarCry 3 64-bit client).

But my point still stands. Unless the game being tested + 64-bit OS is actively needing more than 4GB then you won’t see a performance shift from 4GB to 8GB.

All that more system memory buys you is the ability to run more 32-bit apps at the same time without the apps fighting over who gets system memory.

you would think, with so many people asking for a feature and ANet not doing it says the answer at this time is a resounding NO.

I’m guessing that these tools are one of their best sellers so why “discount” it by switching it to account bound? Not to mention the hassle that if they did, players who bought multiples would demand compensation.

The problem with that SandraSolace is that the support site’s security certificate has expired thus making careful web users hesitant going there. I understand that the anniversary of the game lined up with the US Labor Day holiday and someone didn’t get around to it either at ArenaNet or whoever updates the certificate but that’s the reason we’re seeing more forum messages about tickets.

Add to that the mobile authenticator mishap from Google and chaos abounds.

Since I’m assuming all those games are 32-bit clients, if Large Address Aware then they can only use up to 4GB of memory and if not LLA then only 2GB. Doesn’t mean they got anywhere close to those limits during the tests either so I’m not surprised the test was a wash.

Not any more.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Unintended-Monthly-Achievement-Rollback/2764214

Isis O Ziris.6350:

Yes, you can. 15char

Just watched a vid of someone cracking 1500 fine armor, got around one item for every two.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Results-of-salvaging-1500-lv80-fine-item/2768073

SandraSolace.7682:

Or, take it, compose a mail to the sender and send it back.

You can’t mail Gem store items.

marnick.4305:

Gery.2718:

So after salvaging 1500 level 80 fine armor, I’ve got:
-656 blue (common) Essence of Luck
-128 green (uncommon) EoL
-11 yellow (rare) EoL

It boosted me from 35% MF to 67%

I know it doesn’t matter what salvage kit you use, but since I don’t have an infinite one, I used mystic kits for convenience reasons.
Why no greens? ’cause they have that “are you sure want to salvage” window (or maybe anet removed that already?), it would be a pain in the A to salvage all of them. Plus they are more expensive xD

video proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10FU1hsLUDA

ps: I hope there’s at least someone who needed these results xD

Has been removed.

Then what did I just watch?

Edit: Oh the confirmation on greens were removed.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

Hey guys, just because the wiki doesn’t have a page for it (at least I don’t think it does). I just wanted to post my drops from salvaging. Maybe we can get a feel if we can get a decent sample size. I don’t know if this is the proper thread or not either, so sorry if a mod needs to move it.

Salvaged 556 masterwork items:
587 Essence of Luck (fine)
138 Essence of Luck (masterwork)
18 Essence of Luck (rare)
11 Essence of Luck (exotic)

You must have slipped a digit somewhere chief since you can’t get more than one essence of luck per item.

The game’s 32-bit client is large address aware (ECHO … Echo … echo) and on 64-bit Vista/Win 7/Win 8 it can use up to 4GB.

Congrats! Your the one thousandth thread on this subject. You win a year’s supply of nothing. :p

I know the forum search here sucks and all but did you think you were the first with this suggestion (which should have been in Suggestion Board). Here are a few previous posts on the subject.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/The-Unlimited-Gathering-Tools

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Make-permanent-gathering-tools-account-bound

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Turn-unlimited-gathering-tools-account-bound

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Gathering-Tools-Armor-Skins-Town-Clothes

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Make-gathering-tools-account-bound

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Gathering-tools-should-be-account-bound-sellable

This suggestion goes all the way back to when the Pick Axe first came out.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Plz-make-Molten-Pickaxe-Account-bound

I’ve been using crude kits for fines. Work fine.

Draco.2806:

To get the obvious out of the way, why do Legendaries require so much grind to get to? Just so that very very very very few players have them? Why!?

Because if they were easy to get then everyone would have one and then they wouldn’t be Legendary they would be COMMON!!

Oh yea, there’s a stone over there that just spits out Legendary swords, you just got to wait your turn. Too many people are to use to the Monty Hall rewards in other games where everyone gets everything they want if they just raid enough. That’s why the darn bar is set so high, so your Legendary will be fairly unique in this world and becomes a status symbol. A wielded title showing your hard work.

Just be happy that Legendary weapons aren’t personified.

I guess it would be acceptable to those who can’t get the extra 10 laurels to have 10 laurels taken away from those who did.

What a bunch of spoiled, entitled people who other than buying the game pay nothing to keep playing it.

You weren’t shafted, some people were fortunate. Deal.

It’s like ordering the veal and getting charged for the chicken or buying the regular edition of a film and finding the collector’s edition in the box. Mistakes happen, some people are lucky.

So the better solution for you is to go back and lose both items and the upgrade to move a look?

Based on the notion that it’ll take 280 BLT to get 70 scraps (1 scrap per 4 chests) to get 7 tickets (10 scraps per ticket) for it. 5 keys for 450 gems at 80 gems per $1 comes out to be $315. Of course for some the RNG wasn’t in their favor.

Mystic.5934:

try it and let me know!
also, how much of each?

:p

I know! Let’s get Mikey.

$3 to recover both items plus upgrade Vs simply transferring a skin to another item.

You choose.

The US ones are in Austin, TX

I’m marveled by all the ways people will complain about this game.

1) I lost my progress – Okay that’s legitimate but it’s very early in the month.

2) Some people will get 20 laurels instead of just 10 – Dead whoop, fortune favors those who played over the US holiday.

3) I will have to do it again – Why? You got your reward right, it wasn’t taken away right? It’s just that green monthly reminder will be on screen. Does it gnaw at your soul or something, whispering “do me”? Or is it because you didn’t get the new monthly loot.

Reminds me of a quote in someone’s sig at my old MMO. “If the game gave out free $20 bill people would complain they weren’t sequentially numbered. If they became sequentially numbered people would start complaining they weren’t random enough.”

So do we get T6 dust from ectos and an Essence of Luck or dust and a chance for Essence of Luck or either dust or Essence of Luck? Patch notes are vague on the subject.

The Transmutation Splitter is now available in the Consumable category for 300 gems each, 5 for 1350 gems, or 25 for 6000 gems. Transmutation Splitters will return the two current source items from any transmuted item and will also return an applied upgrade separately. All items returned from splitting a transmutation are soulbound. Items using a skin will return a base item with the original appearance. Another Transmutation Stone will be required to reapply the skin.

It sounds like you get both items back plus any upgrade.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Behellagh.1468:

You don’t get a special prize if you finish off your monthly way, way early.

Everyone who completed early gets the reward twice so what’s your point!?

Oh I thought the complaint was they almost had it completed and now it’s reset.

Oh wait … it was.

GOSU.9574:

I had one daily remaining to complete my pve monthly and it gets reset….lame.

As for those who are not able to get another 10 laurels, congrats. It’s like those who got two birthday gifts.

Just saw this in the patch notes.

Optimizations in the audio engine have been made which reduces the issues of audio loading slowly at map load and audio drop outs during scenes involving many players and sound effects.

Galen Grey.4709:

Small game? 3.5m copies sold in a year makes it a small MMO? Over $189m profits in the first year of its operation. If what analysis call the fastest selling MMO in history is a small game what is a medium mmo or a large mmo ?

Not profits, sales. And a tad over $200 million USD in sales (230,135 million KrW). Hate it when people exchange sales with profits. There is no data on profits. Not even on the subsidiaries anymore.

@Gehenna – The 70% drop is sales was from 4Q to 1Q, or from post launch and holiday game sales to an increasing amount of Gem sales. We know they had 3 million game sales in early January and at the one year mark it’s now only 3.5 million, that shows the drop off of game sale income quite clearly.

It’s the 3rd, you have 27 more days to do it. It’s not like they did it on the 28th. You don’t get a special prize if you finish off your monthly way, way early.

We are going to have to see where the TP prices end up. A lot of basic material prices went crazy as players either bought and horded or due to the invasions stopped harvesting so supply dried up or a bit of both.

Yes but it’ll get close enough for an estimate.

GTX 770, looking at the charts at Techpowerup, is about 15% slower than a GTX 780 (stock speed Vs stock speed). It’s also 35% cheaper. How a GTX 770 performs Vs a pair of GTX 470s, don’t know.

With this game, GTX 770 isn’t going to be your problem.

I’m currently on a US server. It’s IP address (/IP) is 64.25.33.61, you can ping that. Now all you need someone from an EU server to do the same thing and report their server’s IP address.

There is a log of market speculation since the rumors were confirmed about crafting of ascended armor and weapons. Nobody knows which way mats will break so there’s a lot of buying. Also with the Twisted invasion I think a lot of mat gathering had dropped off which hurts supply. Depressed supply means higher prices. Bronze ingots need copper ore.

The supply of copper ore when it’s supply dipped significantly. Price was reasonably stable until supply dropped under 800,000 and started to shoot up when supply dropped bellow 500,000. Supply is under 150,000 now from 1.1 million. That probably has something to do with it as well.

5 bronze ingots for 10 copper ore plus one lump of tin (80c for 10). So one bronze ingot is 1.6c plus the cost of two copper ore. So when copper goes through the roof, bronze ingots follow. At 66c per ore it’s still a loss crafting bronze ingots.

It’ll be interesting if the new TP price of copper will push players back into the low level areas to farm copper while the price is up once the hourly invasions are over.

DJRiful.3749:

Sorry… FX-4170 is hardly upgrade over the old Phenom II series CPU. FX-4170 is 2 cores total 4 modules, IPC is terrible. Your CPU is easily beat by Core i3 CPU from Intel.

Hence which is why you don’t see performance improvement.

2 module/4 core.

@MinkyMike – It’s all about adjusting your expectations with this game.

Current talk being tossed about is disabling core parking to help performance. After than it’s adjusting down the graphic settings that are very CPU dependent which is reflections, shadows and player culling.

By latest drivers do you mean latest beta 13.8 or latest WHQL 13.4? There were some reports of problems with 13.8 on some cards.

The FX-4170 should perform better than the Athlon II 255 simply because it is a quad core.

The exchange rate updates in real time. Store sales on items are irregular and unpredictable (didn’t know if you were asking about the exchange price for Gems or the Gem shop price for the flute).