Guild Wars 2

Character Name: Tinna Stark
Server: Gunnar’s hold
Level 70 Story i chose “fail at something and lose the respect of my comrades” and i think at first my story went correctly as i did: “Shell Shock”, “Volcanic Extraction”, “Marshaling the Truth” but after “Battle for Fort Trinity” my story changed to “Liberating Apatia”.

I m very disappointed. Not by the fact that performance is horrible but for the fact that we were misled or lied to. From the very start of it we were being told the game would run on “yesterdays” computers, and since the first BWE we were constantly being promised optimization and less CPU dependancy.
Its been 4 months now and my FPS is virtually the same it was when i first ran GW2. Where you the OP get 20 my framerate can go as low as 5 in WvW no matter the settings and i ve basically given up on that part of the game. And no my PC isnt bad: Q6600 @ 3GHz, 560Ti – a mid-high system. Yes its not an i5 ivy/sandy but after all we ve heard from ANET those shouldnt be the minimum or rather recommended requirements.
Sure i would accept those system req. if they were stated beforehand and actually justified but when say in Divinitys Reach i face a wall made of probably 2 or 3 polys with only the top of my character shown and get measly 34 FPS with 65% CPU and 20% GPU utilization something is horribly wrong and it is definitely not my PC.

I ve had a lengthy discussion with support over this for the past 2 weeks. Here s my original post to them:

I run a Q6600 @ 3Ghz and a 560Ti.
My framerate last stress test on max settings in towns was around 25, in the first zone 20 and in combat with 10+ people on screen 10. Reducing shadows to low and reflections to “sky&terrain only” got my frames to around 35/25/15. Other settings had no effect.
CPU cores were at 60-80%, in combat around 70-90, GPU never went over 30.

I ve submitted several diags/benchmarks, changed several settings and drivers and clocked my CPU back to stock. None of it helped. Rather the last (first suggested) action resulted in worse performance.

It definitely is not my gfx card that is causing these issues. That leaves CPU performance and memory bandwidth as far as hardware goes and/or really bad code optimization for older CPUs which seems to be the most likely case.
As it currently stands the actual recommended spec for this game is an i5 ivy/sandy since only CPUs that good will not bottleneck most decent gfx cards and deliver 30+ FPS 90% of the time.
I really hope ANET can fix these issues and bring CPU dependency down to a more reasonable level.