Guild Wars 2

That’s why I had him run Furmark to check for artifacts while it stresses the gpu.

Ah sorry, I’ve been elsewhere, I’m not tech support of any kind for the company behind this game. They have a lack of personnel answering this forum it seems.

Have you tried the latest drivers available for that card?

What are your computer specs?

Also, if you don’t already use the lowest settings, set everything at the lowest possible setting and adjust for testing purposes simply to see if things improve.

Actually tested it last night, GW2 got to 900~ MB VRAM usage measured through MSI Afterburner(Win7 x64 btw) @ 1920×1080 (Haven’t tested the game on my 2560×1440 panels), that didn’t last too long, but the point is it showed up on the graph. Right now after running around a few minutes for example it’s sitting at a steady 593, which is where I tend to see it, but the spikes up to 1GB are certainly there. This has reacted the same @ 1920×1080 on both an MSI GTX 680 Lightning as well as Galaxy GTX780 HoF.

kanderous.7512:

sobe.4157:

Sabastian.7126:

Thank you BASED alter.net

Sobe, lets just blame OBAMA… okay?!

You can blame anyone you’d like for your issues, lol, if you dislike Obama that’s your deal, this isn’t a political hate-thread. I’ll just keep enjoying the NO packet loss that Level 3 offers.

I see. Your opinion is biased and is therefore invalid.

Actually the person above me just proved my point, your own opinion is biased and has been invalid since you blamed Level3 for an issue non-related to them. Try playing on a EU server instead of being so spiteful towards something you have proven you have no comprehension of. Nice try though

Sabastian.7126:

Thank you BASED alter.net

Sobe, lets just blame OBAMA… okay?!

You can blame anyone you’d like for your issues, lol, if you dislike Obama that’s your deal, this isn’t a political hate-thread. I’ll just keep enjoying the NO packet loss that Level 3 offers.

Yea, your temps are way too kitten hot.

Might just be your laptop getting too hot and throttling itself as Behellagh pointed out. Get a monitor prog like CPUID HWMonitor to be able to monitor everything. If it’s getting too hot, it’s POSSIBLE that a notebook cooling pad MAY help. It’s not guaranteed, but it could help and is generally not a bad idea to have one for a laptop when playing games anyway.

Please list your current hardware specs along with verifying you have the latest drivers and updates for your vid card, motherboard(INF, RST, LAN, etc.), sound card, and Windows.

He asked about listing your hardware, not saying “Yea it’s good”. If you list what you have, we can determine if it’s worthwhile to begin with and at the very least see what to work with.

Download and run Furmark and see if it crashes or if it artifacts.

Might also want to remove the game completely, redownload/reinstall, and see if that fixes your screen res adjustment. Your current 1024×768 @ 70Hz, keep it at the Native monitor resolution: 1440 × 900 @ 60Hz.

7 Years without an upgrade? I feel you need to better budget your money if you want to play more modern games to begin with. Just a suggestion as far as creating a “upgrade my pc fund” type of budget just as you would for a car, or whatever other purchase.

Have you tested your RAM to make sure it’s not defective? Run Memtest+
Or were you referring to 1GB of memory on GW2 being your video memory? If you meant video memory then that would be your issue, your vid card is a 1GB card, it can’t perform higher than that.

What CPU do you have?

4 Hours of waiting for posts when you could have spent under an hour downloading it and playing it already… If I remember right it took me 40min to download, so IMO, just download it again or when you go to sleep let it download if you have slow net.

Difference between Z75 and Z77 is negligible outside of no support for more than 2 vid cards to be used. Zerk is referring to the ASRock Pro3 Z75

According to that graph and what kanderous has stated before, Alter is showing 100% packet loss on their “network”. So now we need to start a witch hunt after Alter.net!

But in all seriousness I’ve stopped paying attention here, no offense to kand or anyone else who wants to think Level3 is at fault, but there isn’t much left here except for blaming something across the world for an issue happening in-between nodes that’s not even on “Level3’s network”.

Your signal travels between several nodes and substations before hitting “servers” for hops, too many variables to account for. Obviously something is hitting your connection, but it’s more likely it is hitting a small town or so before it hits Level3 that has an inferior cablehood or overloaded node that Comast, Cox, Charter, Verizon, or even a city-ISP has not responded to.

I’ve said it already before, Level3 has such an extensive client portfolio, for them to have a long standing issue like you claim, would cause them to lose many high value clients to alternative companies. If an issue DID pop up with Level3, it would have been resolved already… But since Level3 isn’t having these issues, largely recognized companies such as SoftLayer (Formerly ThePlanet) still use them, I feel safe in saying, yet again… L3 is not the issue

Don’t listen to the above, it will be a lot smoother in the end if you understand the individual parts and you can diagnose issues yourself. Stick with building your pc, don’t buy a prebuilt.

The AMD cpu is more or less the cpu going into a build on a lower budget. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t great when compared to Intel’s offerings. The 4770k beats it in single threaded performance by quite a decent margin.

Don’t know why you have a 1kw PSU for this setup lol, but overall you won’t see a drastic increase in FPS if that is what you were hoping for. If you do any rendering/modeling or anything of the sort you should notice an improvement.

Seems like just a generic vid driver crash,

Follow every step :
Step 1: Download and install the latest ati graphic driver.AND DONT TURN OFF OR RESTART YOUR COMPUTER AFTER INSTALLATION

Step 2: Then go to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers and rename atikmdag.sys to atikmdag.sys.old.

Step 3: Go to ati directory (usually in C:\ATI) and find the file atikmdag.sy_.

Step 4: Copy the file to your Desktop directory.

Step 5: Open cmd.exe by going to Start → type ‘cmd’ in the search box and hit enter.
(without quotes)

Step 6: Change the directory to Desktop by typing ‘chdir Desktop’.
(without quotes)

Step 7: Then, type ‘EXPAND.EXE atikmdag.sy_ atikmdag.sys.’ Or,

‘expand -r atikmdag.sy_ atikmdag.sys’
(Without quotes)

Step 8: When the expansion is complete, copy the new atikmdag.sys from your Desktop to

C:\Windows\System32\Drivers

Step 9: Restart your computer

A bluescreen will actually tell you what your issue most of the time. Next time you bluescreen, remember the error code, primarily the last 4 – 6 digits (0x and then the following), for example “0×124”, “0×1E”, “0×3B”.

Please list your system specs, and also, have you overclocked the CPU, GPU, or RAM?

An i7 offers many benefit over an i5, but when it comes to games not so much. Definitely worth the price depending on what you do.

Having said that, you need to post your specs, not post that you have an i5 or “RAM is maxed out”… That tells us nothing really. Do you have an i5-2500k? i5-2300? i5-3330? i5 3570k? Do you have 4GB of RAM? 8GB of RAM? 16GB of RAM?

Your i5 should be more than enough for GW2 though, be sure to update your vid card drivers to the latest WHQL NVIDIA drivers or try the Beta drivers and see if there is any improvement.

Meh, you are right, after checking for the past couple days myself, a trace produces limited to no packetloss on any Level3 server I ping across, but L3 is at fault regardless….

My logic never stated their network was at play, as you fail to comprehend how the hops work(apparently as well as reading…) I will spell it out again:
“You aren’t accounting for the several substations/nodes it hits between which are out of Level3 control”

Too many variables in between server hops, I mean you don’t think it’s a single line run direct to each with nothing hit in between do you…..

If we’re going by that logic, your Philippines network is at play here too affecting your entire route. ANet, Level 3, your ISP, and any local PH node you hit before connecting to the states is at fault

Honestly if you actually take a look at it, in both graphs the hops all seem rather clean. You just get stuck with a lot of overhead due to the distance and in between those level3 hops is what gets you, it’s not about Level3, Level3 are the servers you are hitting… You aren’t account for the several substations/nodes it hits between

Your issue is nothing to do with Level3, but the route your net takes to get there as the issue with overhead from that.

Looks good to me, PSU is a decent performing unit and that vid card should be one nice improvement for you. (Think Battlefield 3 or 4, Bioshock Infinite, etc.)

I’ll be honest, that one is perplexing as far as the PCI-E lanes… I mean you aren’t going to lose much in performance as if it WERE running at 3.0, but the fact that it is pushing it to 2.0 is what I find weird.

As far as xfire, there’s a reason I’ve stuck with just getting a single high end card through the years, xfire/sli solutions tend to have slower patches in games, slower driver work, etc. etc. And on top of that, many games have issues with dual cards.

He has a dual core with 2 physical cores and 4 logical cores, there is no unparking to do here. His cpu is on the lower end of things perhaps, but more than enough to play GW2.

What GPU do you have in that laptop?

GettCouped.7846:

Great points. I would certainly look into a power supply as well. As far as upgrading to a newer CPU, that will net you only marginal increase. Keeping your current MB and getting something like a i5-2500K and overclocking it would be the best way to maximize performance looking down the road (if they are still available). Right now it’s clock speed not architecture that is making the most difference from 2000-4000 series Intel CPU.

However, if you run at 1080p resolution getting better power supply (that fits your Micro ATX case) and an HD 7870-7950 would be your best bet, in the near future. Many of the new Radeon R7-R9 GPUs are simply tweaked 7000 series.

This site is great for professional opinion at any price segment. Keep in mind that the October edition should be out soon and would probably significantly different because of all the price changes with Nvidia and AMD. I would wait for that.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html

His motherboard will not allow him to overclock, which is why he needs more than just a cpu upgrade. And if he is buying new, unless it’s a MicroCenter with severe reduced price, a 2500k or 3570k would be only a marginal price difference from the newest 1150 socket offering 4670k.

Be weary of Toms, they have been known to be bias

Bread.7516:

sobe.4157:

so since you refuse to play on a server that’s closer to you, it isn’t even A-Net’s fault, it’s the fault of people not understanding a closer server should provide better and more efficient latency.

There are no other servers except US and EU. China hasn’t opened and there is no Oceanic and SEA server.

If they say “oh we’re doing good with money” which they have, they need to spend more on servers and networking

And now, you are getting somewhere Instead of focusing complaining about something that is NOT at fault, focusing it where it could not only improve A-Net’s member base, but also increase profit for them by extending into new regions that would benefit from having a server.

I think if enough members band together and ask (be it a petition, or whatever), A-Net will see that profit can be made from expanding.

Xystus.3241:

Just for fun:

A quick distance calculation between points on a map Malaysia->Seattle->LA->Denver->Dallas is going to be over 10,000 miles. Which, would give you an absolute best possible ping of about 53ms. Or ~106ms round trip per packet. Add in all the overhead, it could easily be close to 200ms round trip.

Exactly, I mean I think it’s great we have people worldwide who want to come to our servers, this happens in just about every game out there. But, you have to realize, if you live on the other side of the world…. You aren’t going to get good ping, much less amazing ping, so since you refuse to play on a server that’s closer to you, it isn’t even A-Net’s fault, it’s the fault of people not understanding a closer server should provide better and more efficient latency.

I don’t have issues myself either, but I see a lot of people whining about Level3, it’s not just your thread about it. I just think if they were truly at fault, that would deem them somewhat unreliable as a backbone solution to several companies be it webservers or game servers or any other type of data server through them, and yet…. Level3 remains at the top and keeping their clientele.

If there comes an issue with a patch, or a server in need of upgrade via A-Net’s hardware location (be it direct hardware, switch upgrade, router upgrade, etc.), then of course they need to fix whatever might be causing slowdown or sporadic behavior. But that lies on them.

This isn’t the 1st thread I’ve forgotten about the power supply, SeaSonic SSR-650RM 650W will be a very solid and reliable offering for a good price that will be able to handle pretty much any single vid card setup you could throw at it with plenty of room for overclocking.

Beyond that though, yes your cpu would act as a partial bottleneck, but you should expect that though as it’s a lower-end i5. But, that i5 should be more than fine to last a bit until you get around to upgrading it. (At least with the current gen, Z87 chipset motherboard is what you will want to look at along with an i5-4670k for cpu)

My first move for that setup would be to a more modern vid card then. What is your budget for such an upgrade? If around the $200 mark look at a Radeon R9 270X or GTX 760

Assuming you have more to spend and wanting even more of a vid card, feel free to post so, lol

If you only use it for GW2 and movies I probably wouldn’t bother upgrading. Save the money

Bread.7516:

sobe.4157:

You want good ping on a U.S server instead of 200+? How about you live in the U.S

no thanks, i like money and it’s here where i live.

Steam servers for dota 2 gives me 60ms and im in the philippines (FYI i only team up and play with friends from the US).

Anet gives >230ms.

Ok, but where is A-Net’s server physically located? If it’s in a datacenter in Dallas, Texas, the jump from your location to Seattle, Washington alone kills your ping, then the extra hops inland just get to Dallas would be outrageous. Whereas DOTA 2 has a server on each side of the country (WA and VA), so it’s a single hop assuming conditions. But if you are making a hop to the U.S from philippines I honestly don’t see a 60 latency from the other side of the world….

Xystus.3241:

As you can see from Kanderous, as soon as he hits Level3, his ping goes to hell. You’re probably hitting Level3 in Denver as well and having the same issue. Sadly is a Level3 issue and nothing your ISP or Anet can do. Yet, we cannot be 100% sure without something to test it; right now AT&T is blocking the most simple method. Your ISP will only really cover you as far as to the next major backbone.

Again, its very hard to pinpoint; if this is a network lag issue; it could be anywhere. I know a lot of people are on my server and complaining about the lag; yet, I haven’t had any issues. This usually points to a common problem further upstream for a group of players. If it were everyone; then it would be Anet for sure.

Kanderous is null of this issue as he isn’t based in the states but in the Philippines….. So there’s valid reason behind the sudden jump from 29ms which is based in Santa Rosa, Philippines to Level3 in Seattle….. Considering the majority of servers of large corporations tend to be on Level3 (SoftLayer for instance), it’s not an issue with Level 3, as if it were, the company would have resolved it as soon as an issue popped up (if you consider the size of Level3 as a whole, they would lose too much from downtime or issue).

EDIT: Ok this is clearly stupid, the people you have listed under US West….. First 2 right off the bat, from the Philippines…. 3rd… from Panama… The 4th is from MALAYSIA… You want good ping on a U.S server instead of 200+? How about you live in the U.S…. Speaking of U.S, out of the 3 players you have listed as “U.S Players”, 2 of them are Canadian…. That would explain a jump from 40ms to 120ms once hitting the NY server.

“Yea, I live in Antarctica so when I connect to a server in Dallas, TX, If I dont get under 50 ping, then something is wrong with THAT server because I’m too much of a kitteng idiot to understand how this works”

Should I call out OP now? The temptation is far too strong

^ Didn’t even think about the PSU, be sure it can handle the new vid card

There’s still some life to be had from it, no worries. Just grab the 7870 or GTX 660 and go from there. Would DEFINITELY look at 8GB regardless though

A shot in the dark would be to make sure you have the latest BIOS revision for your Extreme4 along with turning off any PCI-E power saving features in the BIOS.

Avelos.6798:

elpsychodiablo.7168:

it makes no sence talking with you lol
haters gonna hate

It’s not our fault you don’t understand what Sobe’s talking about. I do. APIs are a problem.

All good, I figured he was probably an AMD fanboy trying his hardest to read more AMD ads or announcements instead of actually understanding what things do or how they work.

As far as CryEngine goes, if Mantle fairs well, I don’t see why not use it since it only has to be coded by the people coding the engine. If Mantle actually works well in direct correlation with AMD’s console takeover, the games we see on PC could be a lot less console port crap and actually be worthwhile, while working superbly on both platforms. At least one could hope anyway.

I hate to say this, but I wouldn’t upgrade any specific part of that… I would start from scratch. I know it’s not what you may want to hear, but it’s not worth upgrading IMO.

As far as PCI-E 2.0 and 3.0, there is no big difference in the 2 aside from 3.0 doubling the amount of bandwidth. Meaning 2.0 and 3.0 CARDS, are fully compatible with both 2.0 and 3.0 slots and interchangeable.

elpsychodiablo.7168:

do you know whats software level api, hadware level api and osi model?

even nvidia make a low level api for steamos but thats different topic.

If you think you understand hardware level API, which I already mentioned Nvidia has had for years (years before SteamOS came to be), then you SHOULD understand that until it is actually out and we have hard numbers behind it, you are doing nothing but believing possibility only.

If you don’t understand the use of low-level hardware API, it allows developers to work more closely with the “silicon” so to speak and bypass much of the software required to normally do so through the likes of DirectX. That’s as simple as I can sum it up for you.

When it is actually out and IN USE, we can then judge it based on hard numbers, until then, anything you think you know is purely speculation.

Avelos.6798:

Lol, ‘mantle is our savior’ I don’t believe that. I do expect some nice things from it though.

Exactly. Mantle is not even slated for anything aside from Frostbite 3 and our first taste of it will be in December with the BF4 mantle patch. Until then, noone aside from AMD testers fully know what it is capable of. So we, as consumers have no idea yet, all we can do is speculate, but we certainly can’t say it will be good or bad, because we DON’T KNOW.

Since Mantle is not used in Battlefield 4 yet, I would say no. Not until reputable people like HardOCP get their hands on testing to backup any claims.

Or, you can just be sheep led by AMD in their all knowing and listen to anything they tell you, kinda like what Razer does with it’s moronic consumers.

Also, since 2 290X can run 4K displays, so can 2 780’s. So by saying that running 4K relies on Mantle, that would say that Nvidia already surpassed AMD in that regard not even needing Mantle, which would be an ignorant statement as it’s not true since a single card can run a 4K display from either camp.

We don’t even have a live demonstration of Mantle yet anyway(BF4 Mantle update won’t come until December), so the AMD fanboys screaming “MANTLE IS OUR SAVIORZ” are quite the misguided. Nvidia has had this same thing for several years, it relies on if the people coding the ENGINE want to add it, not people who code for the game itself.

Mantle may not even be all it’s cracked up to be, just wait for it to actually be released and used in games to then decide if it’s worthwhile your praising it.

Hold on a sec, the GTX 660 will use the same slot as the $50 card you just posted…. It IS compatible as it uses the SAME slot.

PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0, there honestly isn’t a huge difference in performance with using a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot. So I say stick with the GTX 660.

HOWEVER, considering that it used such a budget card to begin with, along with 4GB of RAM and you said it was purchased in 2012, what processor is currently in it? An ideal budget setup for you will use 8GB and a that GTX 660 you posted or a similar 7850 such as Mag posted above.

No no, I understood it from your first post, and honestly that’s really strange. Hopefully for you, just an anomaly.

That really sounds like more of an issue in your own setup than anything even remotely related to GuildWars. If GPUZ pulled it up as your card being in a 1x slot….. Well… The game doesn’t control your slot or things related.

1280×720 is 720p/i, it’s not about that res being a particular depth as the issue, it’s about CPU load vs GPU load, in which a res so low puts more work on the cpu and less on the gpu.

His cpu is a desktop chip, which is why it’s odd that he is using such a res in the first place. If you have a monitor with that as your native res, you need to spend more than $40 on your next monitor.