Guild Wars 2

Was it in your character’s inventory or in your collection? If it was in the collection, that’s shared across all your characters, and you should still have it.

That’s hard to say. What IS your graphics card? Does it support DirectX? Or, have you looked on the manufacturer’s website to see if anyone else is reporting problems/success with the card and GW2?

I’d like to be positive and say that you’re framerate will go up by 60-70 FPS, but I’ve read too many FPS threads to believe that will be the case. If GW2 likes your system setup, you could probably see framerates in the 60-80 range or higher, depending on your settings. If GW2 doesn’t like your system setup, you might see framrates in the 40 FPS range or lower.

My computer is an i7 920 (2.7GHz), 6GB RAM, and Radeon HD 6870. With vsync on, my framerate is almost always capped at 60 FPS. If I turn vsync off, the framerate varies between 70 and 90 FPS most of the time.

The best advice is probably to check out the Thief forum, under Professions. You’ll get much better answers and advice there than in this forum.

I’m not sure if it’s encouraging or not, but… I’ve created many characters, and I’m finding that (with my style of play) thief seems to be one of the weakest professions. That said, I still enjoy being a thief and I intend to spend some time learning how to play them well. I’m sure that once I put some time into learning what weapons/attacks work with my play style, the class will be even more entertaining to play.

In order to answer that question, you’d have to look at the architectures of the two cards. ATI and nVidia have different philosophies on pixel shader pipelines, vertex shader pipelines, width of the memory path between GPU and VRAM, etc. And with older cards paired with newer/faster CPUs, I would expect the differences to be more pronounced. That’s because the GPU will almost never be able to render scenes faster than the CPU can provide data, so the biggest factor in framerate will be the graphics card and how well it’s feature set works with the application that’s running.

Some games to more with textures than they do with shaders, those games will benifit from a wider memory path. Games that use lower resolution textures don’t get the same benifit because they simply aren’t shuffling around as much data.

Some games will use shaders to “add details” to the rendered scene: bump maping, lense flare, bloom, certain water effects, etc. These games would benifit from having more pixel and/or vertex shaders available for use.

Games that don’t rely heavilly on either of those to features will work equally well on both brands of cards. Games that make heavy use of one or the other of those features will favor one brand of video card over the other.

And I don’t remember which brand does what. I just remember being kind of confused on the issue back when I was looking into things like that, way back when…

In theory… moving the game out of Program Files should be sufficient. The only catch I see might be the “ownership” of the files. You may need to check who owns them (usually a group name) and make sure that your user account is part of that group. You might also need to turn off the “Read-only” flag on the files.

I’ve never moved my GW2 installation, so I’m not sure if there are going to be any hidden gotcha’s or not.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that there might be something that’s forcing your video card to run at a much lower clock speed than normal. Just based on specs, I would expect you to be able to get at least twice the framerate you report.

Some likely candidates would be media players that are configured to use “hardware accelleration” since they adjust the GPU clock down to audio/video playback speeds not gaming speeds. (they adjust my GPU clock from 900 MHz down to 400 MHz) So if you might want to look into something like that. Things like streaming videos from youtube load a video player that can do this if hardware accelleration is enabled.

There might also be some issues with what driver version you are using. Some people have reported getting better performance with the newer nVidia drivers. You might want to look through the “Tech Support” forum. There are a lot of low framerate threads (mostly whining and complaining and finger-pointing, to be honest) and some of them have good information in them. It’s also possible that you might find some useful info on the Alienware forums, if other owners are having similar issues to yours, or if their tech staff is keeping up to date on the latest games. (might be a stretch, but depends on how good their customer service is…)

Madmardagan.7945:

I am not so sure why installing it in the Programs Directory would cause problems, but if it fixes it not doing that, who cares!

Windows likes to treat programs in the “Program Files” folders almost like they are system files, so it severely limits access to them. Sometimes you can get around the issues by having an administrator account or running programs/games as the administrator, but even that is problematic. So programs that constantly have to modify/update their data files have issues – like many games and their habit of installing lots of patches, creating temp files, deleting temp files…

So for games (and other programs) that do a lot of file access and need to create, delete, and modify files a lot, it’s always better to keep them out of the Program Files folders to keep Windows (and some anti-virus software) from interfering with the game’s normal operation.

I have to agree. All the information in this thread points to “heavilly GPU dependent features taxing your GPU and lowering you framerate.” For higher framerates, turn down some of the graphics options like Anti-aliasing, Shaders, Shadows, and Post-Processing.

Working as intended.

@InsanityPlea
Your last post is completely useless. Did you not see where Smackjack highlighted the “BSOD Errors” portion of the OP’s post? Even if you disregard all the errors that he doesn’t have codes for, the OP clearly states that he does have at least some BSOD codes that might be useful in this discussion.

It may be a technical issue, from a certain point of view, but it’s also more of a new feature suggestion.

That said, I think I remember hearing talk of a more customizable UI in the future but I’m not sure where/when I heard it. It might be worth adding a bit of detail (get specific about the “things like that” part) and make this a formal suggestion.

Is your OS 32-bit? I seem to remember hi-rez textures not being an option if you only have a 32-bit OS.

If there’s a smell coming out of the computer, it’s definitely a hardware issue. Hardware stops working when you let the smoke out, you know.

Sniff around in the case and see if you can narrow down where the smell is coming from. If the smell is strongest in the PSU, that’s a reasonably easy/cheap fix. If the smell is coming off of something on the motherboard or graphics card, then you might be looking at bigger problems.

@skeletank
If you’re lucky, maybe your graphics card is based directly on one of the prototype boards. If so, there may be some diagnostic LEDs on the board that light up if the board fails and give you an indication of why it failed. You might want to open your case up, wait for the computer to crash, then look for lights on the graphics card.

I’d second the Radeon HD 6670 recommendation. My friend has that in his computer and it performs extremely well for a budget card.

There is a Mac beta client for GW2 that was just released today. That said, there is also a Mac beta forum. You might have better luck finding an answer there, since that’s where a lot of early adopters will be hanging out.

The first thing to check is: is the card in a PCIe 16 slot? Usually, the PCI 16 slots are close to the CPU and colored differently from the normal PCIe slots.

I would recommend against getting the 640M graphics chip. It will probably play the game, but not well. It’s a media card and isn’t really designed for high performance gaming. It’ll be better than the Intel HD integrated chips but…

Ideally, you’ll want an nVidia model number that ends with something over 50. So a 660 or a 670 would be good gaming cards.

As for RAM, 8GB is pretty much overkill, also. More RAM means you can have more things open at once without having to page data to the hard drive when you swap applications. If the upgrade to 16GB is cheap, it wont’ hurt anything, but you might be better off saving the money for the extra memory and applying it toward a computer with a better graphics card. imo…

Have you tried looking for the corrupted files in your game folder or the GW2 folder under “My Documents” and deleting them, if they exist? That seems to have solved the problem for a few folks.

They are usable directly from the collection now. Which is so much better than it used to be.

Discovery is trial and error. Things that can be used in discovery appear as their normal icons. Things that cannot be used appear to be shaded. As you drag items into the discovery window, the interface will gray-out shade items that cannot be used along with the previous items. So, as long as you have unshaded items in the left window, you can keep dragging them into the discovery window until the “craft this” button lights up.

I read another thread about this problem, and the suggestion was to look in folder to find the corrupted files and delete them and relaunch the game to allow the patching to complete. A second person followed the suggestion and said that it worked.

Check the Wiki page.
Look for command line options.
Find the one that downloads the patches.
Hope it works.

You’d probably have to test it and see. Lots of people are saying that GW2 is heavilly dependent on CPU speed, though, so trying the 3-core solution might be the best since it gives you the fastest chip.

Of course, I haven’t tried this and am only guessing, so…

Guild Wars 2 keeps all of its data files in a single file: GW2.DAT. If that file gets corrupted, there’s no telling how many of the files it contains might affected.

It seems like you need to use more command line switches to get it to work. If you want to create an autologin shortcut that takes you directly to the character select screen, you need to add “-nopatchui” to your command line. You can add “-autologin” to make things clearer for you, but it’s not necessary.

“D:\blah\gw2.exe” -autologin -nopatchui -email example@gmail.com -password itsasecret
“D:\blah\gw2.exe” -nopatchui -email example@gmail.com -password itsasecret

That should work. Or it’s what worked for me. It seems like you need to skip the initial launcher/patcher dialog in order for the autologin stuff to work. Also, don’t make a mistake on the email address or password or you will end up at a black screen and you’ll have to kill the GW2 process.

Or at least let us dye them like we can our other clothes.

@Noctura
How far back did you go when you chose the restore point? The intent was to go back to the closest restore point to today, or just before the unexplained drop in FPS. If you went back further than that, then try restoring a again at the closest restore point to today or the change in FPS.

If that is the point you chose, then maybe check the Window’s driver settings and see if they’ve changed. Selecting any restore point shouldn’t have affected your computer’s performance unless it undid a driver update or some settings changes.

Comparing a game to a program specifically designed to test a CPU isn’t fair. The test program is written to identify the features of a CPU and stress it to the limit. A game is designed to be as “easy” on a CPU as possible so that it can work on as many computer configurations as possible – and be as easy to maintain as possible.

You could get much better performance from games if they were written specifically to take advantage of all the features of a CPU, but then the game would be almost impossible to support and maintain. You’d have to have experts on every possible CPU, special game versions for every CPU, etc. That’s not practical, so games are written to be as non-CPU-specific as possible.

@spyridon
Comparing GW2 to WoW, performance-wise, isn’t really valid. The WoW engine was designed to run well on middle of the road computers of 8 years ago. And it’s been refined and optimized since it was released. So you should expect your computer to do significantly better in WoW than it does with GW2.

On my system, WoW can do 230 FPS most of the time. In GW2, my uncapped FPS usually ranges between 70 and 90. All things being equal, one might expect a computer to perform less than half as well in GW2 as it does in WoW.

Alabasterjones.7045:

@Alpha, then answer why I have 15 fps on absolute highest settings, and 15 fps on absolute lowest settings.

There’s no way you should have 15 FPS. Have you looked at your GPU clockspeed when GW2 is running? It really sounds like something is throttling it.

@Noctura
If you didn’t change anything, have you tried having the Windows Restore feature reset your computer to the last restore point? On my old computer, Windows would periodically screw up its drivers and wreck the graphics performance and network connectivity. The only way I could fix it was to restore the computer to the last restore point. Nearly all the time, windows would say that it couldn’t restore anything because nothing had changed, but just going through the motions would fix something that would get the computer working properly again.

It depends on what the problem is. If the problem is that your GPU isn’t able to display data as fast as the GPU is sending it, then overclocking will just give the CPU more cycles to calculate data that the GPU won’t be ready to process. If the GPU is constantly waiting to get data from the CPU, then overclocking will help.

As deltaconnected stated, though, make sure you do your research and overclock your system properly. At best, a bad overclock will be unstable and not give any boost in performance. At worst, a bad overclock can turn a poorly performing computer into a very large doorstop.

It’s only a CPU hog when it has to be. Things like WvWvW and when there are a lot of things going on on-screen will make the CPU work harder. So will having an graphics card (or old driver) that doesn’t support DirectX functionality because if a feature is not implemented in hardware, the CPU will have to emulate it. The CPU’s job isn’t to run at 100%. Its job is actually to run at as low a percentage as possible and get the job done.

To get an idea of how your CPU is performing in relation to your computer, you also need to look at your GPU usage. If you GPU usage is high, then your CPU is feeding the data faster than the GPU can process it. If the GPU usage is low, then the CPU isn’t feeding data fast enough. So it’s a combination of both usages that tells the important story.

And just because a lot of gamers all think that a game is a CPU hog doesn’t make it one. Sometimes it just something they say so they can feel better about their awesome computer not performing up to their expectations.

Depending on how much you know about overclocking, that might be a good idea. There’s a lot more to getting a good, stable OC than just changing the clock multiplier. You have to adjust core voltages, memory timing, etc etc etc. If all you did was change the clock, then putting it back might help get your system back in sync with itself, which could clear up some bottlenecks. It’s not a guarantee, though.

If you want to try for higher framerates, first try turning off some of the graphics options that tax your computer. Things like Shadows, Anti-aliasing, Shaders, Reflections can have a huge impact on FPS. Start with setting those to off or low and see what happens. Then adjust them up to see what gives you the picture quality you want with an acceptable framerate.

I have an i7 920 @2.7 GHz, and depending on what’s happening in GW2, my CPU usage can range from 11% to 35%, and my framerate is a pretty solid 60 (with vsync on). I have an ATI 6870 graphics card and run at 1920×1080.

I don’t think it’s your CPU that’s letting you down.

You might also want to check your Catalyst Control Center and the 3D Settings. Make sure that the options are set to “Use Application Settings.” If the Windows driver tries to override certain game features, it can lead to similar graphics issues.

The GPU usage drop is telling you that the GPU is spending more time waiting for data to come from the CPU. In those large battles, it’s the CPU that has to figure out the positions of all the extra objects (be they characters, spell effects, NPCs, misc mobs, etc) in the world and then pass that information to the GPU. The more objects there are, the more work the CPU has to do before the GPU can to it’s job.

Well, for one thing, GW2 isn’t a car with 3 wheels. It’s a car with 4 wheels, but one of them has a slow leak. And on everyone’s GW2-mobile, it’s on a different tire in a different place. So it’s going to take some time to track down the problem and fix it. If you know anything about software, you should know how hard some of these issues can be to find and fix. Especially since a lot of problems are specific to some quirk on a specific system setup. As such, they’ve already said just about all they can, which is “We know there’s an issue and we’re looking into it.”

Until they get past the investigation stage, they can’t really say any more without telling people lies. If they don’t know the exact problem, then they can’t even guess about a fix for it. Without any quess as to what a fix might require, they can’t estimate any timeframe for a fix. Without an estimate of a timeframe for the fix, they can’t factor in testing the fix for system compatibility and making sure the fix doesn’t break something else. Without THAT estimate, they can’t give out any kind of useful date for the fix going public. So any date they give out would be just pulling numbers out of their kitten, at best. And we all know that most of the people who are having the problem would wait for that date/time period to pass without a fix and would then rip into Anet for misleading their loyal customers, telling lies, and stealing money because they knew they weren’t going to fix the problem and just wanted people to keep buying the game based on a promise – that promise being the uncertain estimate you demanded today.

That pretty much boils down to: Anet can continue spend their time looking into the problem and wait until they know something before they make any announcements on timeframes, or they can spend time posting the same information you already have.

I guess some basic questions for you would be:

Have you adjusted the bus voltages to give the CPU and RAM enough power at the higher clock speed? GW2 is pretty intensive on hardware usage, so you may have problems if you don’t get the power settings adjusted properly.

Have you tried extra cooling/higher fan speeds? Just checking because sometimes it’s the little things that trip you up. On my old ATI 4870 graphics card (notorious for running hot) I kept my GPU nice and cool but the voltage regulators were still getting hot and crashing the card. Once I added cooling to the back end of the graphics card, things worked fine. So there may be some small, uncooled chip that’s giving you problems.

Have you looked on overclocking sites? Many of them will review new games and they, or posters on their forums, might have posted stable settings that you can try. Another reason to check dedicated OC sites is that the people/posters there are more likely to know what they’re doing. Posters on a game forum are more likely to be the type who just “try values to see what works” but don’t know the ins and outs of properly overclocking a system.

Not really. The files that came on the GW2 DVD are “old files” since they were finalized before the game was shipped. Since then, there have been several updates that need to be applied before you can actually play the game. So it may be that the game is just installing the patches, and not the entire library.

Check the GW2 folder and look at the file sizes. If there is a GW2.DAT file that’s around 15GB, then you have most of the files and are probably just getting the updates. If the DAT file is less than that, you may indeed be downloading the entire library.

@stilness
It would think your computer could easilly do better than 10 FPS. It kind of sounds like something is forcing your GPU to run at a much lower clockspeed than normal. Do you have any programs running in the background? Something like a streaming media player? For example, if you have Hardware Accelleration turned on for youtube videos, it can force the GPU clock down to 300 or 400 MHz, instead of its normal gaming/performance speed.

It’s easiest to check this if you have dual monitors, but you can do it on one monitor. You just need a utility like “MSI Afterburner” ( think it’s called that) or the Catalyse Control Center that comes with the ATI drivers, and go to the “Performance” or “Overclocking” tab. It should show you your GPU clock speed. The catch, on single monitor computers, is that the GPU clock can change based on what program has focus, so switching away from GW2 can change the clock speed.

I think there are a couple of causes for this. I remember reading that there is a known issue with 32-bit Windows and nVidia drivers (not sure what version, though) that some people are having.

Another thing that many people are seeing is that GW2 doesn’t have a setting for texture quality on some systems, if the game thinks it cannot use High resolution textures. If you edit the Graphics Options and change the “Textures:” to Medium or Low, that might fix the issue.

The default keybinding for taking screenshots is “Print Screen”. You can check this, or change it, in the Controls page of the Options dialog. There is a Screenshot section that lets you have keybinds for Normal screenshots and Stereoscopic screenshots.

The screenshots are stored in “My Documents\Guild Wars 2\Screens”.

Have you updated DirectX on your computer? You should use the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website. It will check your DirectX files and update/patch them up to the most current version.

In theory, the specs you post should run GW2 very well. In reality, it’s hard to say. There are a lot of little factors in how your computer is setup (software, drivers, settings, etc) that can and will have a huge effect on your computer’s gaming performance.

If you’re willing to take the time to make sure things are properly setup, you’ll probably have a good experience.

You might want to check the Windows driver config and make sure that it’s configured to “Use Application Settings” for the various options. Sometimes, having other settings can cause artifacting and texture corruption. That may not be the issue in this case, since changing resolutions seems to fix the problem, but it’s something to look into.

As for drivers, you may never be able to install the generic ATI drivers on your Vaio. I have a Lenovo (IBM ThinkPad) laptop with an ATI graphics chip, and the ATI driver installer will not recognize the graphics chip. It seems that the only graphics drivers I can install are ones I get from IBM/Lenovo. So you might need to check Sony’s website for driver updates.

Did you download/install the display driver for your Sony TV or are you using the “generic display” driver that comes with Windows? Also, have you double-checked the refresh rate that the game is trying to use? It could be that the game is trying to set the TV to a mode it doesn’t support and causing it to choose the closest resolution/refresh rate it thinks it can do.

Just a thought, since the display device driver is sometimes overlooked when updating a computer.

I did a quick search, and the OP has a few posts in the “low FPS” thread. It’s almost amusing how it’s one of the most talked about subjects on the forum, and yet OP believes that Anet isn’t working on it.

I didn’t see where OP posted any system specs, so there doesn’t seem to be much info to use to help him. And since he doesn’t want to put any more effort into having his problem solved, I’m not going to spend any effort than I already have.

The last I read, someone on these forums said the names were going to be reserved for 1 month after launch. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it’s the last thing I saw.

A quick word on overclocking GPUs and VRAM: setting them to the max is not always guaranteed to give you the best performance.

Due to data transfer times, number of clock cycles required to complete operations and a lot of other technical stuff, there are optimum pairings between GPU clock and VRAM clock settings. If the pairing you chose didn’t have the right frequencies, then it could make your GPU performance worse than just using the default clock speeds because of all the wait states, data collisions, and delays it can cause.

You should probably check an overclocking website and see what they have to say. They should give a list of the fastest and most stable clock pairings for most graphics cards.

I have a Corsair 650 Watt PSU in my desktop PC.

and a few more specifics:
CPU: Core i7 920, 2.7GHz
mobo: Intel DX58SO
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 FLEX edition, 900 MHz GPU, 1050 MHz VRAM
Driver Version: 12.6