Guild Wars 2

Problems that severe for me sometimes meant bad hardware. Not sure what the odds are that integrated video could fail like that though – seems unlikely, but I am not an electonics engineer.

Any chance you are overheating or some such? Is it happening all the time?

I never had good luck with Asus’ OC tools. I manually overclocked. My first step wouled be to try 100 Mhz over stock by setting the multipler 1 over stock with stock BIOS settings otherwise. If stock boost is 3.5 Ghz, then try a multipler of 36. In my experience you should be able to overclock by 100 Mhz with no other adjustments.

You could report back here if a simpler 100 Mhz does not work, but I don’t know what I would suggest then. I am not sure if that indicates a power supply issue, a very poorly OCing CPU, or some other issue.

No over voltage? No BCLK boost? You are only upping multiplier? Did you try one 100 Mhz increment at a time?

yes. click on character. Right click on icon to get list of choices on selected dude. Report, choose bot.

Everyone I know runs the game without crashing (3 people.) I would guess most people run the game without crashing. It may not look like that if you read this forum, but people without issues are not posting here.

So that begs the question whether it’s software or hardware. I don’t think it’s out of the question that it’s your computer even though every other game runs fine. But I also don’t think it’s out of the question that there’s some software bug that only effects certain computers.

It’s annoying but true, that games are complex and game companies have limited resources. Which is why gamers are usually the people who have to do the work to solve their own problems (providing a support ticket submission did not solve it.)

I have this theory…for awhile the even numbered Star Trek movies are better. Lately, the odd numbered Windoze released have been better. I may be able to wait for Windoze 9, on this one, but as you say, sometimes you are forced into a change.

I did not want to pollute the topic, but I was curious what Windows 8 using gamers think?

I have used almost every version of Windows they put out, and I hate change as it frustrates me to re-learn just for the sake of change. I can see I will instantly hate the start screen and probably be angry about it for months until I assimilated it. So knowing this, is there actually anything positive about Win 8? (You may love the new start screen, and I might learn to like it, just saying I KNOW I will hate it because it’s a change, and I hate change unless there’s compelling reasons for it)

Loved Windows 7, by the way. But this seems too different for no good reason, and it seems like you can’t set the setting to boot to the desktop. I STILL hate the new control panel, as I can’t find something in 2 seconds like I could with the old one (to give you an idea of how much I hate change, as the “new” control panel has been around quite a long time now.)

Almost impossible to control all the variables. I would think many people want to know one thing – if their PC can play the game, or if they are already playing, if their PC is not performing as it should.

Are you looking at specific cores, or the total CPU util? The game only uses a few cores at high util.

If you have 2 displays, look at taskmgr, perfomance, resource monitor, CPU for some details.

Hardware Spec:
i73770 @ 4532 Mhz (103 × 44)
EVGA 670 x2 (SLI); latest WHQL
Asus P8Z77 V
16 GB
Win 7 64 bits
256 GB SSD system drive; game installed on 1 TB WD Black data drive
Max settings except for reflections which is set to terrain and sky
1080p
Graphic Settings
FPS Value:
PVE : 100+
Cities : 60+
Wvw: 60+ (with maybe some drops during battles; I won’t do much WvW to be precise)

Yes, you can run it at any standard 4:3 or 16:9 rez I am aware of.

I would vsync if you can mostly maintain fps over the refresh rate. If not, some articles claim you could end up with lower fps due to the way frame buffering works

As usual, try it both ways and see which works better.

As some people have said, there’s no advantage to higher than refresh fps, but some people claim vsync might add some input lag ( never experienced that.)

Even if your “computer is boss” you are going to see an fps drop there. I also see a drop in parts of Caledon.

sabotaged? Are you implying Arena, for unknown reasons, put code in to run slower on AMD? That makes no sense to me.

I am using some Corsair closed loop cooler (not sure which model,) and I run stable at around 4.5 Ghz. i7 3770k (Ivy.) It does overhear briefly sometimes as I don’t think the pump starts soon enough sometimes (my theory.) But it fixes itself in seconds, and nothing bad seems to happen.

I did not spend much time on overvoltage. Bumped it a bit, and called it a day.

Laptop? Some sort of power setting limiting performance? Does it vary whether it’s plugged in or not?

One thing to remember is that development started 2+ years ago. Devs are (usually) only somewhat responsible for real world performance testing. So what might have run fine on their dev PC a few years ago, may run into some real world issues such as a heavily loaded WvW area.

It’s amazing what issues crop up late in the dev. cycle that are hard to forsee. So I suspect it has almost nothing to do with what machines the devs were using to do their dev. testing on (dev testing is NOT the same type of testing which the game went through during beta etc.)

40fps is pretty smooth in my experience. I have never seen a game guarantee frame rates.

Your PC “worth” is irrelevant to the discussion, IMO. 10 years ago I could have bought a PC “worth” $2000. Today it would be nearly worthless.

It’s more relevant to post your CPU and GPU IMO.

I can hold 60fps on my machine (pve only as I don’t do wvw.) I had to turn down reflections to terrain and sky. I have a 1080p monitor.

Yes, it drops a lot in some areas. As people state many times a day here, nothing can probably be done on our side. OCing did not help much.

The game is totally playable for me on highest settings ( except for reflections.) It’s very smooth in pve.

I did try wvw once. And it was fine when I did it. But once is hardly proof that a good enough machine can manage it.

Some of my friend’s PC are older than mine, and they do just fine – I asked.

So I think there’s hope for people with a decent machine that you can play.

Some people do have good performance. What really good graphics card and processor do you have Mako? What settings have you tried? Have you tried the various suggestions in the various low fps threads on here? For example, some people’s video cards were running in 1x PCI speed, and that was killing their performance.

You won’t know until you try.

You need to be more specific to get help. Saying that the game is ‘unstable’ is not enough information.

You say your fps is low. What settings do you use? What is your resolution? Have you filed a support ticket?

zerk.9701:

michaeljhuman.3940:

Does your budget permit an SSD? If so, you want one. I would go with 250 GB which costs about $200. And of course you still want the HD as 256 GB is not enough for all your needs.

Don’t know anything about that power supply. You might want to check around a bit. I bought mine, then learned some people did not care for it, and that the review said the behavior under load could have been a bit better. A lot of people seem to think Seasonic is good with power supplies. Anyway, it’s worth doing some research on them. Of course make sure any PSU you buy has the needed power connectors for any GPU you may buy in the near future.

Can’t comment on the GPU. Just make sure you compare all the ones in your price range, and check out a lot of reviews with benchmarks to ensure you are getting the best in your price class.

i5 is the ideal gamer’s CPU. i7 does not seem much improved for gaming, so that’s a great choice (I did buy the i7, but then I was chasing benchmarks, a silly goal

A blu-ray player/DVD reader-writer drive is pretty cheap if you want the option to play Blu-rays some day (sadly, the player software seems stupidly priced now) Maybe you are re-using that from another PC though.

Best of luck on your build.

That maid my brain hurt a SSD will not help performance at all just quicker load times, why would anybody need a blu-ray player to game with, he never said anything about a i7, and seasonic makes PSU’s for alot of other brands.

An SSD will help OVERALL system performance. Surely he is not buying this PC to only play GW 2, and will do nothing else ever? And it “may” help zone load times. Not sure why your brain hurts as this all seems pretty obvious to me.

Not sure what your confusion was about an i7. I was confirming that his choice to buy an i5 makes sense, as opposed to an i7.

As for a Blu-ray player, once again he may use his PC for other things besides playing GW2. Maybe even watching Blu ray movies. And Blu-ray drives are cheap, hence the suggestion, perhaps looking to the future.

Does your budget permit an SSD? If so, you want one. I would go with 250 GB which costs about $200. And of course you still want the HD as 256 GB is not enough for all your needs.

Don’t know anything about that power supply. You might want to check around a bit. I bought mine, then learned some people did not care for it, and that the review said the behavior under load could have been a bit better. A lot of people seem to think Seasonic is good with power supplies. Anyway, it’s worth doing some research on them. Of course make sure any PSU you buy has the needed power connectors for any GPU you may buy in the near future.

Can’t comment on the GPU. Just make sure you compare all the ones in your price range, and check out a lot of reviews with benchmarks to ensure you are getting the best in your price class.

i5 is the ideal gamer’s CPU. i7 does not seem much improved for gaming, so that’s a great choice (I did buy the i7, but then I was chasing benchmarks, a silly goal

A blu-ray player/DVD reader-writer drive is pretty cheap if you want the option to play Blu-rays some day (sadly, the player software seems stupidly priced now) Maybe you are re-using that from another PC though.

Best of luck on your build.

The halloween patch was approx 600 MB. So yeah. It’s huge.

I got meeself a de-gree in da k0mputer science. So sometimes I feel compelled to use it, heh It’s not easy to be correct. I have a physics PHD friend who loves to correct me in my use of words.

This minis are overpriced. Actually, everything on Black Lion seems overpriced. A lot of people make less than 10 bones per hour, and they want 10$ for 750 gems, and 500 gems for the mini kit.

That being said, and I think it needs to be said often, the ghost mini is quite cool. Was thinking of witch outfit, but too expensive.

To be nitpicky, big O of N^2 [O(N^2)] is different than O(2^N) which is exponential. Just in case it comes up on a test N^2 is polynomial time I believe (a specific example of polynomial time.)

Big O is how computer scientists quantify algorithim time. It’s a limit function as memory serves.

Not out of the question for them to make a mistake I think.

I don’t know that you need a ton of RAM. For windows 7 machines, and seeing how RAM is somewhat cheap these days, I would have 8 GB.

Not sure on what Vista was limited to for 32 bit. I would max that out though.

Halloween stuff cool so far. We worked fairly hard finding all the sites. I am proud that I only kind of cheated by looking at a POI list at one point to confirm or deny a theory. I never did find a ghost on my own…I thought they could have made that a bit easier somehow. The site clues were hard enough to make me think but not so hard I gave up and googled.

It was 600 MB. It was HUGE. Last night the servers were probably being nailed, but I still managed to download it in under an hour. We played math dice while we waited…lol.

I have seen very high fps with my SLI setup. Well over 100 fps.

There’s also areas where fps barely manages vsync rate of 60hz. Be interesting to know what’s going on in those areas. Someone suggested the middlware they use, called Umbra, could explain some of the low fps seen.

WvW and such would obviously call for a lot more CPU power, which is maybe where some systems can’t keep up no matter what the GPU.

I have no problems with a lot of players though. I just see a big drop due to the static scenary in complex areas (least I assume that, as it seems independent of characters, npcs and monsters.)

I noticed that the game won’t populate players in the Halloween costume battles at Lion’s. I would see just a few NPCs, then when I got close to forge, BAM, 20 player would pop onto my screen.

There’s quite a lot of evidence the game is CPU bound.

The antialising does not look bad to me. Not sure if you can blame the game, if it’s using the GPUs own anti-aliasing. But I am no expert on how the new versions of AA work.

I think the question on performance answers itself. They are commiting their resources elsewhere. I am sure the programmers are not sitting around doing nothing.

I honestly think people think software development is easier than it actually is. Coming from over 20 years in that profession, I can assure you that things often take longer than projected.

Also, you don’t know whether they are working on it or not. It could be complex and time consuming, and maybe someone is already working on it for a future release. How can we make assumptions on what’s being done without being there?

Hello, to anyone running this, their is some personal info logged. Not much. But the name of your machine is logged, as well as your user name. Also, there’s a list of active connections. That could be considered personal, as well, depending on whether it shows all open sockets.

Not trying to alarm anyone, just good to know what’s in there, in case you want to make some minor edits to remove personal info.

I don’t think it’s a CPU problem either. If only because my experience with similar problems is that it’s been an IO problem. Inability to load the needed data fast enough.

Maybe it’s only slightly appros, but I used to have this issue with a game called Midtown madness. One day, just to have a new toy, and to buy a bigger and better performing HD, I replaced the HD. Problem solved unintentionally.

Of course it could be for other reasons. But I would try simple solutions like de-fragging.

To CptBadger – in fact that worked for someone. Don’t be so quick to criticize. In that case it had nothing to do with optimization – it’s some other issue such a driver.

When you turn a camera in a game, and it’s slow, it’s highly likely it’s due to the inability of the game to load data fast enough.

There are possible solutions. You could get a faster HD. You could try defrag. You could try more RAM (not sure of that would help or not for you.)

Sometimes you can open the case and get some idea of what’s happening. Or using monitorting find out about fan speeds and temps of CPU and GPU.

If, for example, you isolate the situation to the GPU, you might find that the fans are kicked up high to cool it down because it’s under high load.

If it’s an overclocked GPU, factory or your own OC, you could try underclocking it.

Is you CPU or video cards overclocked? If so, put them at stock. I have read that problems like this are often due to your own system stability, and not the game. A lot of people don’t have this issue, so it’s hard be sure it’s their programming.

You don’t really expect a response to your post do you? Similar posts go unanswered by official reps. Your best bet is to file another ticket I think.

I realize you don’t want to hear this, but in my experience, problems like this often need to be addressed by the player.

I realize it always seems like the patch caused the problem, but it’s also possible the problem always existed on your PC, and the patch exposed it.

Technically, GW 2 is not single threaded. It has quite a few threads actually. Only a handful seem to be performance crtitical though.

Have you read through the various threads, Home Style? There’s been a lot of things to be tried.

I assume you turned off vsync and/or frame limiters?

Making sure you are getting 8x or 16x PCI (can be checked with GPU Z.) Look at power/performance settings. Use driver sweep, then re-install the drivers.

Try only one 690 (turn off SLI.)

More drastic – pull one of the cards out of the system, then try that. Then put the card back in, pull the other card, then try that. Just in case one of the cards is causing the problem.

Hah…I can speak to the ease of modern games. I can beat many of them for example now. Back in the NES/SNES days, it was rare for me to ever beat a game.

Not having seen the code, and not being an expert in the field of game programming, I would never claim to know enough to say the game is poorly optimized. A lot of people say that, but where’s their proof?

I realize they compare GW2 to other games, and wonder why the fps is lower than they expect on high end GPUs, including multi-GPU setups.

I wonder the same thing. But I don’t pretend to have the answers.

I find it interesting that’s low fps is not necessarily population dependent. Some areas have low fps as has been mentioned before. My only theory is that the CPU is being used to do a lot of calculations in these areas.

kirito.4138:

michaeljhuman.3940:

Having more cores past a certain part also won’t help, because the game does not have that many threads (I think this is a common state of affairs with games.)

Actually gw2 uses about 50 threads and is using all cores available, but not efficiently. The problem is gw2 rely a lot on a single thread for doing certain task; probably the main game loop.

I used the program ‘ProcessExplorer’ and inspected gw2 thread CPU utilization. Of the 50 threads, one was using 22-24% CPU, the next one was 17% and third was 10%. The remaining 47 thread each used barely 0.25% of the CPU. This is why on my Quad core it only use 55-68% of my CPU total utilization. The big thread using 22-24% is already maxing out one of my core.

As you can see gw2 relies heavily on single thread performance, and only about 2-3 thread is actually doing the bulk of the work. Hence having more than 3+ core give little to no benefits. By overclocking people are improving there single thread performance and it is sad that people have to over lock a core i5/i7 just to get 30fps in WvWvW.

Good point. What I should have said, was that it only has a few threads which dictate the game performance.

It’s not unreasonable to assume it’s not easy or nearly impossible, to increase parallelism of the main thread(s).

While I am a software engineer, I admit I know little about making code highly parallel. But I can promise you it’s hard. Even when you mange to improve code by breaking the code into more threads, you almost always run into hard to find problems. Problems that may only repeat one in ten times. Or worse. Or deadlocks. And you may find that the improvement is small. After all, you still have resource contention or dependencies…not easy at all.

Arena.net did respond in this post. Of course the response was ‘we are looking into it’. So I think you got your wish already.

I would guess, what you would find, is that GW 2, no matter how many threads it might have, has only one or two performance critical threads.

For example in some applications I have worked on, there’s a lot of threads that wake up and run only periodically.

Based on that guess, a follow up guess would be that CPU clock speed, would be the limiter if GPU is fast enough. A possible re-design of the game could maybe split that into more threads, but it’s anybody’s guess if that would help performance (and that’s three guesses, making my whole post highly speculative.)

I tried this too. i73770k OCd to 4,6 Ghz. GTX 670×2. 1080p

Horizon level, zoomed all the way out. Tried to stand in same place.

(Note, it takes some time for fps to stabalize into a pattern – I am giving the typical low value of a range)

54 fps on max appearance
70 fps with reflections set to terrain and sky ( I recommend this setting)
100 fps max perf. (wow that looks awful, lol)

Not sure I would call the game broke. I would say ‘it could use some work’. As mentioned before, I only see a few areas where fps drops below 60 (at 1080p, on close to max settings.)

I have far less GPU power than homestyle, but as many say, the game is not GPU limited with a fast enough CPU. So throwing more GPU power at it does nothing. I would not characterize that as broke.

Having more cores past a certain part also won’t help, because the game does not have that many threads (I think this is a common state of affairs with games.)

That being said, some people have serious fps issues and sufficient hardware. Whether that’s a game bug, or an issue on their end I can’t say – if that was a common problem, I would lean towards calling the game fairly defective. I have no idea on how many people have the serious issues, and where their issue stems from.