Guild Wars 2

U can bypass the new interface, u have a standard desktop there, i never use the metro interface, believe me u don’t need it al all. Again, try it, see the boot speeds and u will just love it
Hybrid boots wors diferently on win 8, they made some huge improvments, i am a microsoft hater, i hated every single windows after win98 hehehe and i hate the new interface, but since u can just do everything on a desktop eviroment i can say win8 has some very good improvments, it performs a lot better, and it is totally worth a try. Again u can download a RTM version from interntet, and if u like it buy it before the trial period ends.

Get a 128GB SSD it will load any map in 5-7seconds tops

Try upgrade to win7/8, win XP is outadated in terms of multithread CPU performance. Download a trial version or something just for testing purposes. Win 7/8 are much more efficient using multicore processors.
Despite what critics says i think win 8 is amazing it boots/reset/shut down in 5-7 secs on my SSD, and everything runs smooth as silk i highlly recomend it over win 7.

zerk.9701:

Upgrading to a 560ti is not a good idea. Your going to buy a new card for about a 10% performance increase.

Amen, terrible idea indeed. It will give u 10% FPS in other games in GW2 u will see 0 improvments since ur CPU is the bottleneck not the GPU.
New CPU is also a bad idea since sandy bridge is allready 1+year old, Ivys are not good overclockers , and new architecture is coming very soon with a new socket and chipsets.

Aspar.7285:

Your problem is probably connected with run time data loading, hence the fps drop when turning around.
Several things i could point you to:
1. NEVER EVER after the era of P4 and the epic Athlons, even think about using AMD CPU for gaming – they simply suck these days. Unless something drastically changes, AMD is a bad CPU for intensive gaming and doesn’t seem like Intel will drop the ball in the near future.
2. I noticed your OS and the game are on the same disk. Unless they are on SSD this is bad. In your specs you don’t say if it is SSD, just 250gb.
3. Get more RAM and turn off swap file, many ppl don’t even know they can do this, but this single step can lead to huge boost in some areas of your system performance, especially connected with disk usage, ESPECIALLY if your run the OS and the game from the same disk. It is good to have at least 6GB ram for this, or you can have software crashing, when out of RAM.
4. Overclock your CPU (on your own responsibility, this may be risky, so do it at your own risk and read before (if) you do it). GW2 benefits from high CPU speed most.

1. AMD CPUs are slower for gaming, this is true but, if read the thread u will realize he had respectable performance at some point, all of the sudden the performance droped from 50FPS to 15FPS. AMD or not this is obviuslly not a processor brand problem(which u would understand if u read the thread or know about hardware).
2. Irrelevant SSD or not, SO and game on the same storage unit is irrelevant for FPS, it will just help the loading times, and may be the frames dips while moving fast. Again if u read the thread or understand what the OP is saying, u would realize, this is not the source of the problem.
3. 4GB of ram is more than enough for this game, in case u are running other stuff on the background 8gb is recomendad not 6. Why is this: there are no 3gb memory sticks, u need either 2×2gb or 2×4gb, to make proper use of dual channel memory controller, 6 gb on 3×2gb or 4gb+2gb will perform noticeable slower than 4/8gb configs in dual channel. Again u would know this if u had a minimum needed hardware knowleadge.
4. Overclocking is totally useless in this case, why is this. System is being bottlenecked somewhere away from the CPU itself,even if he managed to get some liquid nitrogen and oc his CPU to 7ghz that wouldn’t help him for a single frame in this case. Also some ppl think a 25% OC will give u a performance boost of 25% more frames, this isn’t true either there are other thing to consider, like motherboard FSB speed, chipset, memory speed, etc. a 25% oc lets say from 3.2ghz to 4ghz in real world performance means arround 15% more frames on a 890gx platform (not going into details here, probably too complex for u to understand anyway) that overclocking the motherboard chipset which is not easy. So if u take a minute to yourself and do the math 15FPS+15% OCing it would be arround 17FPS, which makes overclocking totally useless in this case anyway.
Do u want more reassons why u shouldn’t have posted this in first place?, go make make a thread yourself called: “Aspar tech recomendations”, but don’t flood ppl’s threads with useless advices like this.

Aspar.7285:

Rampage.7145:

Yes, i said it allready, if u don’t know about hardware, don’t try give advice to other ppl cuz u are not helping, just making it worst. Thanks (for stop posting here) in advance.

I don’t see anything in your posts showing your “knowledge” about how hardware works.
I don’t seen anything either, about what of the things i said is not true, because all of them are tested and completely valid points. If you have other opinion, show it, base it on facts, cause i don’t see any of this done by you.
All i see is a bitter person trolling and offending for no reason.

Ocelod had a hardware issue, i helped him to resolve the issue, didn’t u read the thread? (omg still) why didn’t u resolved it with ur useless posts?
1. because u obviouslly didn’t read the thread before u post.
2. U don’t understand how hardware works, u just read a couple of internet reviews and think u are a hardware expert.
3. Im not offending u, im just trying to keep u out of this kind of thread cuz u are not quallified to help ppl, and that is the main goal of this forums. This is not tom’s hardware website, this is not a hardware discussion, this is a forum full of ppl having problems asking for help.

No it is not optimized for GPUs and it will never be cuz it is an MMO, and this kind of games are allways CPU bounded, that is why faster GPU won’t give u higher frames, ur CPU is just not fast enough to feed them. Yes u will say u have a top of the line CPU and im wrong, but im just pointing out a fact about how hardware works. May be if we are lucky we will have good enough CPUs in 2014 to make this game run the way it is meant to be played. But yeah a high end GPU will never help GW2 cuz it is not a graphically intensive application. In 2 or 3 years u will see integrated video chips pulling 60+FPS easy.

Indeed, they don’t test the game on NASA supercomputers, so they are aware of the performance issues, it is a complex problem, so don’t expect a full fix anytime soon. Just deal with it for a couple of years untill hardware catch up with this game, is the same with many MMOs, remember how did WoW ran on P4 processors? Some ppl say this game suck cuz WoW runs prefectly smooth and that is not a fair comparison, WoW is an ancient game, so it is to be expected after 9 years we have hardware good enough to make it smooth.
P.S read the Kirito’s thread, u will find valuable info about the performance problems and why GW2 do not push ur hardware to the limits like other games do.

I had the same issue myself on every system i tryed to play since a week or so, glad i could help.

Indeed in Norn areas ur GPU can stretch their legs cuz they are less CPU intensive areas (too much snow, only few trees lol) But in a town u won’t see any difference because u have similar CPUs and that is what is holding back ur video cards. If u take off the 560 and get 3 gtx680 and SLI all of them u will still get 31 fps in that spot.

Yes normal, saddly but this is a perfect example about how this game performs on very decent rigs hehe

Yes ur GPU won’t be pulling full load since ur CPU is not fast enough to feed it, but at least u will be having respectable performance. Ur GPU was showing 99% load before because it was not working properly, actually it wasn’t working anywhere close to 99% that was just the afterburner missreading the sensor’s information due the PCI issue. Glad i could help.

650w looks enough to power up ur system specially with no CPU overclock. Ur mobo has a high end chipset and 3 PCI-e ports. Try the first 4 steps i told u before and come back, if none of that works. When u switch the card use the 2 blue ports, not the white one, just in case.

The bus speed is bottlenecking ur system beacuse ur video card cannot comunicate fast enough with ur CPU That is why u have low FPS. Imagine a 16 lane highway from a city to another (CPU and GPU). CPU city sends 60 tons of meat per second to GPU city using this highway, GPU process this meat into hamburgers and send it to u. To be happy u need 60 tons of burgers (Frames) every second, as long the highway is in optimal conditions there won’t be a problem. At some point there is a massive accident and blocks 15 lanes, all the traffic have to use only 1 lane to reach from a place to another, this means Even while CPU wants to send the 60 tons of meat they cannot pass trough fast enough cuz there is only 1 lane open, GPU wants to send u 60 tons of burgers but it cannot cuz is only reciving 15 tons of meat, so it sends only 15 tons of burgers. That is what is happening on ur motherboard, ur CPU want to comunicate faster with ur GPU but they cannot cuz there is only 1 lane open.

ok i will explain a little better u see the picture u just post, it says Bus interface: PCI-E 2.0 x16@ x1 2.0. it means u have a PCI-e port 2.0 (this is just the tech generation) x16 (this is the bus speed x16 is the maximum posible speed of that PCI-e slot) @ x1 (that means currently, ur bus is working at x1 speed which is the slowest speed for the interface). If u could provide me with the model of ur motherboard and Power Supply it would be helpfull to diagnose where the issue could be.

U can try the following things to fix that.
1. Check ur windows power options set it to high performance.
2. Check if u are plugging the card on the right PCI port, thel all look the same but some of them will not run at x16. Check ur mobo user’s manual.
3. Check all the hardware is properlly plugged in, unplug the card, clean all the dust using air if u have another PCI-e port @ x16 plug the card there (check the manual).
4. Reset ur BIOS, take out the battery from ur MOBO for min then put it back in.
5. Overclock the PCI-e port from 100mhz to 105mhz, also overvolt it just a click this is a little more advanced, if u have no idea how to to this research a little.

Ur PCI-e port is runnig at x1 instead of x16 dude… that is the problem, as i suspected from the beggining. can u tell me the model of ur mobo and PSU?

If u have a low en rig, let’s say a C2duo 2.3ghz and -3Gb DDR2 memory yes it will help, but if u have mid/high end rig u won’t see any performance gain.

This is how the card should work

OC ur current CPU, u will see a nice boost 12-15% FPS boost if u take it to 4ghz. Buy a Cooler master hyper 212EVO for 30$ it will give u pretty much the same performance as an entry lvl watercooling system (which is awesome). Ur CPU at 4ghz@1.5v won’t go hotter than 40c using that cooler, which is pretty kitten cool if u ask me.

U won’t get a noticeable enough boost over ur current setup to justify a upgrade. U will need a faster CPU but also a new high end mobo to overclock that CPU in order to achieve close to 30 frames in WvW (not to mention the cooling system) even highlly OCed i7s drop to 20s sometimes in heavy fights. So my recomendation would be wait for the new CPU gen, OC ur current CPU that phenom can do 4ghz easy, and wait for the next generation or a game fix, whatever comes first.
Most likelly even the Haswell CPUs will struggle in WvW unless the OC like beasts 5+ghz, no way to tell since they havn’t been released yet :P
Ur videocard can max out this game, so a 500$ card will not increse a single Frame on WvW battles, because the problem is the CPU performance, but again there is no CPU up to date capable to keep up with really heavy WvW battles at constant 30+FPS I have an i7 2600k OCed to 4.5gzh, even tryed 5Ghz one day for testing and i saw it as low as 20FPS on a battle inside SM castle hehe.
An i5/i7 at the same clock speeds will give u about a 35/40% more FPS over u current CPU, do the math, if u get 15FPS right now on a battle u will get 21FPS using a i5/i7 CPU at the exact same situation.

Can Mac ppl post on Mac tech forums? :P

Im pretty sure u can download new drivers directly from AMD website, i do that with most of the laptops i reviwed, only had issues on a VAIO and a Toshiba last year, what is the Brand/model of ur system?

Ocelot.3148:

Ocelot.3148:

kirito.4138:

Yea, i know you said you formatted, but who knows if you installed anything else like antivirus or what not that could be doing something. Going down to the lowest denominator helps narrow down troubleshooting. So many variables with software configurations.

Lookup your cpu/gpu’s clock speed info. Use HwINFO or MSI afterburner tool to monitor the clock speed.

Ok, im not experienced about those cpu speed/clock or gpu.
Just took some screenshot with HWinfo and MSI open.

• I was logged in WvW in a empty space close to the base.

There is something wrong in this values? Maybe 90-99% gpu usage almost always even doing nothing there?

MSI Afterburner :
http://i50.tinypic.com/2gsfy9x.jpg

HWinfo64bit :
1) http://i46.tinypic.com/5zb7a.jpg
2) http://i46.tinypic.com/b6ssk9.jpg

I hope those screen can be usefull.
Regards.

That’s why I’ve posted some screenshot above.
what’s ur toughts about them?

U have either, another sofware eating ur GPU resources (very unlikelly since u formated th whole thing), a broken driver, u can try the 12.7, 12.8 instead the new ones, or a MOBO problem, it could be on the South bridge of ur chipset, or on the PCI-e port itself. Tell me the model of ur mobo, chipset/brand and post the screen of the GPU-z first tab in here to check the values (not the sensor tab, the first tab “graphics card”) while running the game as u did with the afterburner one.

This is the image of me having the exact same issue on my phenomII system, notice the bus speed.
I also had the issue with 2 other rigs running i3+550ti and i7+hd7950 on high end ASUS mobos

Aspar.7285:

Rampage.7145:

I don’t understand why ppl who don’t even read the post, or have any knoleadge about hardware bother to answer and post trash in this forum. If u have no idea how hardware works then go post somewhere away from the tech section please.

Anything particular you have to say or you just want to offend ppl without reason?

Yes, i said it allready, if u don’t know about hardware, don’t try give advice to other ppl cuz u are not helping, just making it worst. Thanks (for stop posting here) in advance.

Indeed u can bind whatever u want on ur mouse as long u don’t automate the gameplay u can do whatever u want. What u can’t do is to create a macro to auto farm in 1 spot or something like that. But u can even create macros to use 2 skills with the same button for example, yes it is a hardware advantage, u pay for it, u are supposed to take advantage of it as long u don’t automate ur game.

a 500$ Video card is better and give u the edge over a 70$ one, is the same with keyboards, mouse headsets, expensive ones will give u the edge, otherwise they would sell the whole game along with a standard hardware to play it don’t u think?

Man i had the same issue and it was related to the PCI-e slot bus speed check it on GPU-z. i just cleaned and it worked, but may be u have a different problem, but check on that cuz i have the same Video card paired with a similar CPU and it hardlly reach 80% load and that is at 80+ FPS.

Same issue with FPS with 3 different cards HD 7950 HD 6950 and gtx 550ti, all had issues with the PCI-e bus speed, showed 99% load in afterburner and FPS were at 15-25. It has nothing to do with the patches.

Aspar.7285:

Your problem is probably connected with run time data loading, hence the fps drop when turning around.
Several things i could point you to:
1. NEVER EVER after the era of P4 and the epic Athlons, even think about using AMD CPU for gaming – they simply suck these days. Unless something drastically changes, AMD is a bad CPU for intensive gaming and doesn’t seem like Intel will drop the ball in the near future.
2. I noticed your OS and the game are on the same disk. Unless they are on SSD this is bad. In your specs you don’t say if it is SSD, just 250gb.
3. Get more RAM and turn off swap file, many ppl don’t even know they can do this, but this single step can lead to huge boost in some areas of your system performance, especially connected with disk usage, ESPECIALLY if your run the OS and the game from the same disk. It is good to have at least 6GB ram for this, or you can have software crashing, when out of RAM.
4. Overclock your CPU (on your own responsibility, this may be risky, so do it at your own risk and read before (if) you do it). GW2 benefits from high CPU speed most.

I don’t understand why ppl who don’t even read the post, or have any knoleadge about hardware bother to answer and post trash in this forum. If u have no idea how hardware works then go post somewhere away from the tech section please.

Well i don’t think is the last patch either, i mean game performance have decresed slowlly patch after patch, but really not noticeable performance drop (from 30 to 15 FPS). I have 6 systems at home one of them a phenom II@3.9Ghz and it performs ok in LA 28-70 FPS, that one is paired with a radeon 6970, in PVE i see up to 140 FPS hardlly drops below 50 FPS. So i don’t think staff will answer this since for most ppl the game is performing ok. Performance is not great no matter what system u have, that is a fact, but also the performance havn’t droped from 50 to 15 FPS in the last week. So there must be some kind of issue with ur hardware man.

Do this, buy a compressed air can, open ur case unplug everything from ur memory slots, and PCI ports, then use the compressed air on ur componets to clean out the dust, clean the internal connectors of ur PCI express slots, also clean ur video card gold connector, do the same with ur memory. Dust can be tricky i have 6 sytems at home and have to do that to 3 of them experiencing the same issue, all of them have a problem with the PCI e connector working at x2 or x4 instead x16 due the dust. 2 intel 1155 boards and an AMD Am3+ board paired with 2 AMD cards and 1 Nvidia card, i resolved the issue doing this on every case. Also tested BF3 run perfect at x2 bus speed, and many other games but GW2 had horrific FPS, so uf u have a dusty PCI slot u probably won’t notice the issue playing other games.

Are u running EVGA precision or MSI afterburner? currently there is a bug regarding their overlay feature. Close any of those programs, run the game, then open then back if u want.

PVE or PVP? What kind of player are u? Casual, hardcore, do u spend a lot time in WvW?

I would like to confirm this issue it happened to me a few times allready.

That is normal even 5000$ rigs with quad SLI and dual processors will struggle with this game. Game is power hungry, and 2012 hadware is just not good enough, u will have to wait untill 2014/2015 for fast enough processors o just deal with the bad performance, tbh is not too bad WvW @ 20 FPS is still very playable to me, compared to other MMOs it is actually a decent frame rate for massive battles.

AMD cards allways beats Nvidia cards at higher res gaming cuz of the memory bus/bandwith, so no surprises here, GW2 uses a lot of bus bandwith, AMD cards will perform a lot better, actually High end AMD cards are allways better at higher res/details pretty much at any title that isn’t sponsored by nvidia

Excelent balanced build, btw krito he got tht i7 instead the i5 cuz he found a 220$ deal for it… read the post before posting a reply… for that price i7 is a very good deal, more cache, slightly faster IPC (instructions per cycle due L3 cache) and also hyper threading (which is useless for gaming, in 2012 but may be not in 2014/2014), the 212Evo is awesome it performs as good as a corsair H80 and with 2 turbine CM fans it performs as good as a H100, so it is a very good deal, the card well i would have bought AMD card, they perform better in crossfire, and they perform better overall for the same money+i think the graphical quality is better(but that is a personal opinion, i have). And for the guy recomending the E3… Just don’t listen to him, he probably don’t know what a gaming CPU is. Have fun with ur build, it is insane for less than 1000$ i hope u enjoy it dude, u will PVPing as good as possible in GW2, even 5000$ systems won’t perform noticeably better than yours. Windows 8 performs way better than win7, better memory mamagment, it boots extremlly fast and apps are fluid as hell on it, im very glad with mine tbh, it is good to see some decent microsoft sofware finally.

P.D: 800w PSU is not an overkill…. u don’t want ur PSU running anywhere close to 80% load 24/7 if u want it to last more than 1 year.

This is pretty normal in GW2, the game is just not optimized for multithread rendering, which means, the game won’t take any advantage of ur 4 CPU cores. U cannot compare PFS games to MMOs in terms of performace tho, so even while ur rig crushes BF3, it dosn’t mean it will crush a MMO. Ur CPU is bottlenecking ur crossfire cards, it is not cuz the 2500k is a bad CPU, is the best for gaming, but the game isn’t just optimized for current hardware. Most likelly u will need a highly OCed 2014 or 2015 gen CPU if u want 60+FPS all the time.

Don’t listen to SolarNova, he thinks he knows about hardware but he don’t, i don’t even know why he bothers telling u to OC ur CPU without even reading ur post first, 4 FPS in WvW is comparable to a pentium 4 performance, so i don’t know how someone can tell u something like that without even thinking for a sec before posting… 1. a 560 non TI will eat this game on high setting at resolutions even higher than 1080p. 2. Ur CPU is more than enough to run this game at 15+ FPS during heavy WvW events (yes even without overclock). U are are probably experiencing a hardware software/malfunction Try checking ur hardware load/temps. Also GW2 is highly dependent on PCI-e working @ x8, x16 sometimes a dusty PCI-e port will only run at x2 or x4 which would bottleneck GW2 very badly, u can’t notice that malfunction playing another games, cuz they don’t use that much bandwidth as GW2. If u are not a hardware expert i would suggest take ur PC to a guy who can properly diagnose the issue.
If u have some experience with computers download GPU-z, HWinfo64,and MSI afterburner to try diagnose the issue by yourself. Ur current rig should run the game maxed out without many issues.
Also do what Tekwiz said that fixed the issue to some ppl in the past.

U can play with the regardless the server, the only thing u won’t be able to do with them is WvW

Ur GPU is probably overheating. Can u check the temps when this happens? u can do it with MSI afterburner aswell. Actually print screen the graph and post it here.

I am having the exact same issue, pretty annoying

SSD OCZ vertex4 here 5-15 secs a lot quicker sometimes, depending on the ppl arround or something

Dunno what to say man, Artifacts most likelly means damaged GPU, but u have intel graphics, and u know what they say about that. They are good for word, excel, internet browsing, but when comes to gaming, they are just not made for it, awfull performance, no support, drivers from intel. U can’t pretend to win a F1 race driving a focus.

I have kind of the same issue, but it dosn’t happen often enough to be annoying, i was thinking could be my router.

Only thing keeps hooked to GW2 is WvW, it just too kitten fun lol, PVE and dungeons are kind of boring, also not having tanks, healers makes it extra boring, at least to me, so well i will just PVP untill u get sick of it, then get legendaries, then go back to PVP and show off hahaha. This is not WoW, i don’t see how a hardcore Wow player could possibly be happy in GW2. I love how casual the game is tbh, easy to find gear and u can jump whenever u want into PVP u don’t need a guild to progress on the game. Just very different to other MMOs i really love it, just wish wvw was smoother but it is smoother than some other MMOs, 20FPS is enough to me in massive battles, not enjoyable but playable.

Mmmmm i don’t see any difference, it is not insulting or anything, just plain truth, don’t see why would they edit it, may be a grammar problem?

U guys are wrong even being a budget CPU it is a sandy bridge family processor, it will run on par of top of the line AMD processors at least GW2 also is optimized for 2 cores, which means a faster dual core will run better than average octacore so u will do ok man.

A: Not anytime soon (that is why the don’t even bother to answer this posts, or trying to explain the issue to the comunity), is a complicated issue. May be if they are smart enough, will address part of the problem within the next game expansion (if they actually wanna sell copies of that). But i wouldn’t be surprised if the problem never gets fixed tbh, just live with it, wait for 2 CPU generations and u will be ready to play the way it meant to be played.

Looks like a videocard malfunction, u should be thinking about buying a new one very soon, a gtx650 or radeon hd7770 will play this game on high just fine, and those are cheap

A8 plays it very poorly, PVE playable, but enjoyable, A10 won’t be much different, laptops won’t play this game well at all, but i guess if u are ok with doing PVE/PVP but not intrested in WvWvW the A10 could fill ur needs.