Guild Wars 2

Have you tried other games, are they fine?

If anything, that seems like a GPU issue. What have you done trying to fix it? Updating/reinstalling drivers, checking it’s temperature?

Is it the whole fractal or which part of it is lagging? Also posting your system specs would be helpful. What kind of fps are you getting normally (you could specify PvE soloing, dungeons, world bosses, WvW, other fractals) and how’s it compared to this scenario?

Aza.2105:

dodgycookies.4562:

shadows consume a lot of cpu power, turning off the dynamics shadows (Low or Off settings) boost performance significantly

Every since the eotm patch the shadow settings don’t lower performance as much, which is why I have it set to ultra. Turning shadows off gives around a 6fps increase in the spot I stood by the mystic forge. So not a significant boost.

Not significant? 6/36 = 17%. I think that’s quite something. Doesn’t mean too many fps, at least in a demanding situation, but you know, little drops of water and so on.

Aza.2105:

locx.6412:

Yeah, it is!

Actually I am currently at 4.6 GHz, I haven’t updated my sig cos it’s not 100% stable. I have my little Hyper 212 EVO, seems to be worth it’s cost.

Does the 4770k use ddr3 1333?

What do you mean? Yes 1333 MHz RAM goes along with it just fine, so does 1600. Check your motherboard for more compabilities.

Good to hear! Happy gaming!

That’s the problem, right there, if you’re getting that reading even while playing the game. Pull the card out of it’s slot, blow some dust out (if you do it with your mouth watch out for saliva), clean the connectors and put it back to it’s place. Also reinstall/update your video card drivers.

EDIT: Also make sure it was a x16 slot to begin with, if it wasn’t, put it into a correct slot.

Yeah, it is!

Actually I am currently at 4.6 GHz, I haven’t updated my sig cos it’s not 100% stable. I have my little Hyper 212 EVO, seems to be worth it’s cost.

Right, it’s the poor optimization. It isn’t even optimized for those i7’s. Currently not even 4670K/4770K (fastest single core performance) or 4960X (fastest overall, excluding Xeons) don’t have enough power for this game. I have GTX 660 running high setting excluding Shadows and something else and I get that ~60% usage as well. Out in solo PvE my fps jumps up to 90+ and so does the usage.

@FlyingBee Shaders are GPU heavy, not CPU. I just fiddled with it, in LA I got 55-57 fps shaders set to high. when I turned them to low it went up to 60-63. As I turned Shadows down from High to Low, it went up to 70, even when Shaders were on High.

Also you shouldn’t turn Char Quality to lowest, that’s when you see every player in a generic pink armor. setting them to low-med should be sufficient. Limit can be lowest-low tho.

Those settings should be set no matter what CPU you have, but especially with FX-4100 or slower.

That’s some good statistics you’ve thrown in there for future reference, but unfortunately the the ugly truth is MMO’s use much more CPU than single player games, or even limited multiplayer games (like the ones you listed), and GW2 is the worst one. for GPU, it is very light, as you can see by looking around in the game compared to Crysis 3 for example. Looks a bit different, no?

You’re absolutely right, it is poor optimization, doesn’t matter which CPU you have, it wont have enough power. All we can do is pray and tweak the in-game settings.

Aza.2105:

locx.6412:

@Aza, sure I will, I wont be home this evening but I’ll do that as soon as I can. It wont be identical because of the player factor but I’ll try to make it as same as possible.

Thanks! I appreciate it!

SS taken. Tell me if there’s anything else you need!

It’s an issue that ANet is aware of, it was discussed and replied by a staff member in another thread. Currently the only thing you can do is play in normal size or at least turn it to normal when using the TP.

When you’re around those 10-12 people or start noticing the performance drop, open up your Task Manager and check your RAM usage. GW2 is a 32-bit program so it can’t use more than 3.25 GB either, but of course your OS and other programs in the background require some as well. Try killing any unnecessary tasks to make it easier.

WvW zerg / world boss lagging is usually CPU’s fault tho, so the next thing you will want to look at after the RAM issue is that.

Where are you getting 6 fps? what are your in-game gfx settings?

When you’re getting that 6 fps (if it’s not constant) check your CPU usage % as well as memory from Task Manager (be sure to check per core), also download GPU-Z and check your GPU usage %.

Aza.2105:

XFlyingBeeX.2836:

i7 4770K 4.4GHz = i5 4670K 4.4Ghz
There will be no difference

There is a difference, the 4670k only has 4 threads, 4770k has 8 threads. I use Corel Painter for doing illustrations, the program can be set to use the amount of cores available. So losing 4 cores/threads would be a huge downgrade from the 8350.

FX-8350 is indeed about 15% faster overall than 4670K. 4770K also has 2M larger cache than it’s little bother.

@Aza, sure I will, I wont be home this evening but I’ll do that as soon as I can. It wont be identical because of the player factor but I’ll try to make it as same as possible.

@FlyingBee I actually believe there might be, not necessarily huge, just 1-2 fps, but since GW2 has around 50 threads (was it 47?) although only 3-4 has been stated to be heavily used, the extra threads could help a little. I don’t know where I’ve got this idea, but I also believe that they’ve done a little something to help multithreading compared to, say, few months back.

Also Shaders are more of a GPU heavy than CPU. Did you mean Shadows?

My 4670K OC’d to 4.5GHz gets 40-70 fps normally near MF, lowest has been about 35 in queued LA, with 4770K you should see a bit more, given that you do the same OC. Motherboard and 4770K is gonna cost you 400-450 bucks so if you need to include that GPU in that price range you’re gonna have a bad time.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but your PC was decent 5 years ago. Pentium E5400 has only 2 cores that aren’t exactly too powerful either, 2 GB of memory runs out very quickly and 9800 GT, well let’s say 1360×768 resolution is probably the maximum. Your best option is to pretty much do a full system upgrade.

Like Behellagh said, in crowded places that’s the standard. You can download a GPU monitoring program, such as GPU-Z and see if your usage goes anywhere near maximum, which it definitely shouldn’t. If it does however, something’s wrong and we’re going to have a look at that. Your GPU is more than capable of handling what this game has to offer (especially true for 1080p). My 660 gets 100+ fps soloing pretty easily.

That wouldn’t be too adequate for high settings, ideally you’d want to look for HD 7790 or above, or GTX 560 for nVidia counterpart. For your price range, this one should be pretty good. I haven’t played those other games, but based on quick googling you’re good to go. Keep in mind that this GPU is on the edge tho and the games coming out are mostly going to be more demanding so you’re going to be pushed to upgrade if you find some other modern game in a year or two. If you can save up, say, $30 somewhere, that might buy you another year with that card.

Well first of all, you are in the wrong place with this question, this section is for hardware/performance questions, but I think your best bet is to contact support directly, it’s up to their decision.

FXAA – turn it off
Reflections – turn it to terrain & sky at most
Shadows – turn it to low at most
Postprocessing – turn it off
CharQuality – turn it to medium at most
CharLimit – turn it low at most

Hard to say at this point, but if changing the load your GPU has to work with doesn’t affect the fps, your issue is probably in the CPU. That’s what’s limiting the performance in this game anyways, it requires a miracle from your processor.

sirsquishy.8531:

locx.6412:

That’s pretty much as I suspected, my Q6600 would usually stay at ~45 fps in solo PvE/dungeons. For me 45 fps is “enough”, as in enough to bring fluid motion impression. Let’s not derail this thread into how many fps the human eye can recognize, but I’m pretty confident in saying that vast majority of gamers would be fine with 65 fps. That was the whole point of my post, some AMD chips can bring gameplay that is smooth enough (exluding zergs and whatnot). If the player is reaally tight on money (student without a job and possibly even a ton of loan or a kid whose parents can’t afford to give him much, for example) and AMD system is to be found way cheaper, there’s no denying that you can get away with AMD system. I know this, you know this too, I’m sure. Of course there’s also no denying that Intel is still most likely going to win, maybe even on bang for the buck section. I personally am a student but I have a job so I could save up some to get a 4670K to get away from most of the trouble.

And seeing your Intel rig in your sig, I have no clue what that tells me

Currently, my ONLY complaint about AMD is the poor low end performance we see in ‘zerg’ like activity. like you said, i feel that 60~fps is more then acceptable for highs.

But, I find that 20FPS (even low) is about my tolerance point. It still feels fluid and I dont see that ‘jerking’ sensation. On AMD this is just not possible.

Now, that is not ‘exactly’ AMD’s fault. Anet decided to build GW2 using a single thread to render ALL dynamic event content (Player activities). And that is what drives this game. AMD just doesnt do this well.

If they were to break that render thread into 2 or 3 processes, there would be minimal differences between AMD and Intel for this game.

Right on. Minimum point (as well as the maximum) is of course formed by what the individual is used to. When using manually optimized in-game settings for my preference and getting 7 fps in zergs vs. turning it to best performance and getting 14, the game felt smooth as a baby’s bottom. Now after the upgrade and getting ~20, going back to 14 would perhaps feel like a nightmare.

Of course it’s not AMD’s or Intel’s fault we can’t get 60 fps in zergs. ST performance is getting near it’s maximum limit so there should be something done differently. Having the render thread split up would be a great start. We just have to wait and see what the future and ANet brings us (I seem to like saying that a lot).

I shouldn’t be talking about the 9xxx series either as I don’t have firsthand experience with them, therefore all I said about it could be complete garbage, but I’m counting on the statistics here.

However that’s pretty much as I suspected with the FX-8350, my Q6600 would usually stay at ~45 fps in solo PvE/dungeons. For me 45 fps is “enough”, as in enough to bring fluid motion impression. Let’s not derail this thread into how many fps the human eye can recognize, but I’m pretty confident in saying that vast majority of gamers would be fine with 65 fps. That was the whole point of my post, some AMD chips can bring gameplay that is smooth enough (exluding zergs and whatnot). If the player is reaally tight on money (student without a job and possibly even a ton of loan or a kid whose parents can’t afford to give him much, for example) and AMD system is to be found way cheaper, there’s no denying that you can get away with AMD system. I know this, you know this too, I’m sure. Of course there’s also no denying that Intel is still most likely going to win, maybe even on bang for the buck section. I personally am a student but I have a job so I could save up some to get a 4670K to get away from most of the trouble.

And seeing your Intel rig in your sig, I have no clue what that tells me

sirsquishy.8531:

XFlyingBeeX.2836:

sirsquishy.8531:

until the OP reveals his CPU we won’t know how to help him.

and Mr FlyingBee, STOP with your banter. you are doing NOTHING but Hi-Jacking threads at this point.

Man I wish there was an ignore/Block Feature on this forum.

Heh? Hi-Jacking threads?

Look i just get mad when users say that AMD is really bad – because it is not true
And if you have bulldozer and Gigabyte board you can do this

1. Unparking cores
2. Bios- settings
1 Core per Module (1 core per CU)
OC to 4.8-5.2Ghz and GW2 will run really good…
3. Buldozer fix for Win 7

Also you can do (1 core per CU) with other boards but you need to do it other way….

You just hi-jacked this thread to start a AMD vs Intel War.

Please stop, your looking very childish now.

I’m sorry, but I kinda see FlyingBee’s point here. If the processor has an AMD logo on it it doesn’t mean it’s gonna suck for GW2 (and I don’t mean literally the letters would have an effect on performace, I’m not that stupid). For example FX-9590 isn’t even that much worse in single thread performance than 2500K. Granted 9590 is the top of the line and 2500K is getting outdated, but it has been proven many times that even 4770K doesn’t bring adequate performance for the most demanding situation (this is just info for those that don’t know) so that specific AMD can hold it’s ground. Heck, my old Q6600 performed pretty nicely, excluding zergs, and it has about half of the ST performance over that of 9590.

sirsquishy is mainly right every time and when I see his posts I know there’s gonna be some cold hard facts, but this is just something to consider. AMD is a valid option, although not even as adequate for the smoothest gameplay as Intel. And this is coming from an Intel guy.

Nothing wrong with building a little something yourself

GW2 is known to be CPU hog, but it’s also said it doesn’t use effectively more than 4 cores. I have a 4670K which has 4 cores but each of them is almost twice as powerful as the cores of 8120, and I’m at 95-100% usage when there are even some people on screen fighting. CPU does the calculations for “non-predicted” actions (those that haven’t been programmed to do something specific, i.e. player actions) so logic says more players on the screen = more CPU usage right?

You say it lasts for about 10 seconds. If the battle goes on (basically every non-boss fight is over in less than 10 seconds) after this, does it get any easier?

What I’m basically saying is that when you get into a big fight, like world boss or WvW zerg, your fps is bound to drop and you don’t have to feel bad about that.

GW2 uses Dx9, so the fact that Win 8.1 supports 11.2 shouldn’t bring the increase, it’s somewhere else then.

I know that, of course there are situations where both of them shine. I’m just talking about GW2 POV since we’re on GW2 forums.

I also recommend 8.1 (even moreso over regular 8 ) anyway, don’t know about the added benefits for FX’s but sure if there are.

Well you’re right I guess, concept of “good” (or decent, adequate, let’s not get into linguistics) is subjective, of course AMD processors are doing calculations faster than we can on paper, based on that Pentium 4’s were really fast, but does that really mean anything?

It’s pretty much like it is in the GPU market, AMD is more bang for the buck while Intel for CPUs and nVidia for GPUs have the most expensive and most powerful option too.

And we can’t really speak what AMD and what Intel brings since we don’t know the models. 4670K has twice more powerful cores than a FX-8100, granted this is the best vs. the worst comparison.

“8 core processor” alone doesn’t tell enough as there are many of those. However I do believe it’s an AMD (probably FX-8000 series, like FX-8350) and if that’s the case, then your culprit is right there. AMD has very weak single core performance compared to that of Intel’s CPUs, which is what this game requires beyond limits. You only need 4 really strong cores for this game, any extra isn’t too much of a help. That being said, where do you experience 15-20? In Lion’s Arch during busy hours, world boss events, big WvW zerg fights, that’s completely normal I’m afraid. If it is even PvE soloing, then you might have some deeper issues. First try turning your Shadows, postprocessing, reflections, character limit/quality and FXAA down, those are the most CPU hungry gfx options.

Try updating the nVidia drivers once again by deleting the previous ones first like this; http://www.overclock.net/t/1150443/how-to-remove-your-nvidia-gpu-drivers

Then, reinstall GW2 (you can use the -repair function too if you’re in a hurry, it might not solve it that way completely tho).

If that doesn’t help, disassemble your laptop. Refer to some online guide while doing this if you don’t know what you’re doing (for example this: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/53660-35-laptop-notebook-disassembly-hardware-repair-guide). Do this at your own risk. Clean the dust you find inside,
pull the graphics card out of the motherboard, clean the connectors and put everything back to their right places.

If this doesn’t help, run the laptop over with your car. Seriously, how old is your machine? It could be just some part gone bad, however I doubt it as the GPU works fine on other games and tasks.

Pro tip: run your game in windowed fullscreen, that way you can have GPU-Z open on top and game running at the same time.

Try some benchmark (3DMark for example) and compare that score with the similar system results.

My 332.21 drivers work fine for me and many other players, so it’s not an issue with the driver version itself, as you probably know too. It would be nice to know what you (or the tech guys) have tried to solve this issue. All the basic hardware monitorings and GW2 reinstallings I assume?

How have you tested that it’s not your pc? And what are “those places” where it drops?

Then the issue is almost certainly related to that nvidia GPU (the cause could be for example in motherboards GPU link or somewhere else though, not necessarily IN the GPU). I suspect this since it can’t work alone and GPU-Z gives you no monitoring. Were you playing the game while taking those results?

Does any other game or gfx card heavy task bring you issues?

Obviously the dedicated card should be better, otherwise there would be no point in having it. Check if you can disable the iGPU in BIOS, there could be some conflict between them. It might not be possible, I’ve heard about that too, then just reinstall drivers to both units. Also download CPU-Z or GPU-Z and check that your link width is x16

Does it show in a screenshot? If so please post it here.
Does fullscreen vs. windowed fullscreen make a difference? What about fullscreen but other resolutions?
What are your system specs?
Have you installed the latest graphics card drivers?
Have you checked your CPU and GPU temperatures (with Real Temp or Core Temp and GPU-Z, for example)?

So many questions to be asked…

Either manually tweak down those settings to your preference or upgrade your graphics card. Also remember that fps inevitably drops when there are other players around, e.g. WvW, Lion’s Arch and boss fights.

Soo back at OP: If you read carefully what Avelos wrote, it’s 4960X @ 7 GHz. That would be 3 GHz overclock and requires liquid nitrogen cooling. Basically even your CPU could do it but there’s just no way to go that high with stability. 4960X is an LGA 2011 socket CPU and those motherboards do support x16 for 2 cards in SLI. Like said, the performance increase in GW2 would be nonexistent but surely it would boost your 3DMark score.

And please, please, please let’s stop with this Mantle thing. There’s nothing we can do about it and there are no guarantees it will come in the next few years, if even ever. It’s nice to speculate but let’s stop hijacking threads for it. Someone could start a dedicated thread for it

NeedCoffee.1402:

locx.6412:

Right on what Behellagh said. It’s currently impossible. How you can get better rate on the other hand is buying a CPU with better single core performance, those would be 3570K, 3770K, 4670K and 4770K perhaps some i7-E processors too. That’d require a new motherboard too tho and those typically wont bring even 30 fps in the biggest zerg clash. As for running 3 monitors your performance shouldn’t decrease since that’s dependent on GPU power. Someone recently said 680 SLI is surely adequate for 1200p tri-monitor.

dual and triple monitor setups eat up your video ram. If you want to run multiple monitor make sure whatever cards you go with have 2GB each on sli . There also seems to be a trend in other games these days to use more video ram lately so more video ram is good future proofing.
If GW2 is the only game you play it probably doesn’t matter as much.

Personally, I have to believe 2 decent cards on sli both running x16 pcie-3.0 has to increase fps, but I also feel like the gain would be so small it wouldn’t be worth the cost of an extra card.

Based on quick googling I had hard time finding any results with 680 1 GB lol, I think he’s good to go.
Sure it increases at some points. My 660 gets capped at 120-150 fps in the open world at 99% usage. If we’re talking about fps in LA for example I’d put my money on that the increase is < 1 fps with 2 cards over 1, especially on this current 1 monitor build.

One more thing you could try is reinstalling it completely.

What are your system specs? Download Core Temp or Real Temp to check your CPU temperature and GPU-Z for GPU temps while gaming.

Fermi.2409:

Just OC the crap out of your CPU and it’ll end up ~as good as it will get.

Yeah, typically Sandy Bridge CPUs overclock better (even more so since he has a H100) than the newer ones so the final difference would only be a few fps depending on the silicon lottery.

I can’t really say why it’s acting like that, there’s no crash obviously since you closed the game yourself, maybe just for a small moment the game thinks it was a crash because of some bug but realizes it and closes the window. That window would pop up and stay if it really did crash for a reason. Doesn’t sound like very official explanation but I can’t put it any better and can’t think of no other reason.

Yeah, pretty much everywhere were the game lags, especially with your gfx cards, the reason is your CPU. Near Mystic Forge as well where people gather, dragon world events and other huge bosses too, even the entrance in CoF drops me down to ~25 fps when looking straight forward, when I look back or at my feet it goes back up to ~100.

For a laptop, It’s decent. if your resolution is 1080p don’t expect High/Ultra graphics to run but somewhere at medium you should be able to get 30+ fps in most places.

Right on what Behellagh said. It’s currently impossible. How you can get better rate on the other hand is buying a CPU with better single core performance, those would be 3570K, 3770K, 4670K and 4770K perhaps some i7-E processors too. That’d require a new motherboard too tho and those typically wont bring even 30 fps in the biggest zerg clash. As for running 3 monitors your performance shouldn’t decrease since that’s dependent on GPU power. Someone recently said 680 SLI is surely adequate for 1200p tri-monitor.

It just stays there loading, without freezing? Try repairing the game client or reinstall it completely. If neither doesn’t work let’s see what else we might find.