Guild Wars 2

WatchTheShow.7203:

spacecraft.4968:

WatchTheShow.7203:

The system is fine as it is now. Before, you had to buy the armor for $10. If you deleted it or wanted it on another character, you had to pay ANOTHER $10. If you wanted it on a third character, that’ll be another $10. So for 3 characters to have a gemstore outfit, it would cost you $30.

With the new and improved system, you buy the outfit once for $10, then either buy, or use map completion to get transmutation charges to put the outfit on whoever you want.

Black Lion keys are easy to get. You can average 1 key every 20 minutes if you do the human personal storyline up to level 20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yAy4eENhDE

Here is the Wooden Potatoes guide to get you started.

Better than an incredibly bad system does not make it “fine”.

And I don’t know where you get the “You can average 1 key every 20 minutes if you do the human personal storyline up to level 20.” part. I’m doing that story right now and I’m level 17 and have gotten one key.

Look no other game that has a “transmog” type system makes you pay or grind out currency to change every single piece of gear. It’s a really, REALLY bad way to treat your customers. All it does it make me feel like I don’t own the full game.

You must not have watched the video. Anyway, you have to remake and delete a human character every time you want another key to keep redoing the human personal story. So save 1 character slot for key farming. Simple enough.

Yes there are games much, MUCH worse in the fashion department. Let me tell you a story about Maple Story. It was one of the first free to play games to hit American shores. It came out in ‘04 or ’05 (can’t remember). Anyway, if you want fashionable armor you have to buy individual pieces with REAL LIFE MONEY to cover up your ugly stat armor. Oh, and the best part is, the cash shop armor is deleted after 90 days. Yes, you read that correctly. You buy the armor with real money, and then it disappears after 90 days and you have to re buy every. Single. Piece. Again. OH and these pieces are not cheap! Most tops in the game are around $8. Hats are about $3, gloves are $3-5, shoes are $3-5, pants can be $4-8, capes/mounts/facial eyewear/makeup/pets can be anywhere from $5-$20. Oh and these all expire after 90 days as well.

Some classes (Evan, the dragon master class) requires that you buy his core skills with real money, or you can’t progress. You seriously can not play this class until you buy his skills with real life money. You will die because his only and most important defense skill (magic guard) is blocked behind kitten wall. There are 2 more skills at level 70 you must buy (each are $5 as well, so total of $15 for the whole class) otherwise you simply will stink and die and it is impossible to progress until you pay up.

Maple Story offers no conversions between in game currency (mesos) and real life money. So it’s credit card only. Pay up.

So before you make wild accusations about how awful this game is ripping you off, please go try Maple Story. It will not only open your eyes, but it will blow your mind. The stuff that Nexon (their publisher) gets away with is criminal. I was double-charged on my credit card from that game, and it took 3 months for a GM to answer my ticket. One of my accounts was hacked, and it took 3 years, 3 YEARS before a GM closed the ticket. That’s right, they never answered it, they outright CLOSED the sucker. Now THAT is a game that wants your money and offers no support or customer service, yet has 92 million players, with 6 million of those being here in the U.S. It’s mostly popular in asia, with China and South Korea being its biggest supporters. After playing that game, this game is a godsend.

“You must not have watched the video. Anyway, you have to remake and delete a human character every time you want another key to keep redoing the human personal story. So save 1 character slot for key farming. Simple enough.’

Having to farm keys by deleting and remaking a character just shows how stupid this system is.

And saying the cash shop in this game is good because it’s better than Maple Story is like saying that malaria is great because it doesn’t kill as many people as the bubonic plague did.

WatchTheShow.7203:

The system is fine as it is now. Before, you had to buy the armor for $10. If you deleted it or wanted it on another character, you had to pay ANOTHER $10. If you wanted it on a third character, that’ll be another $10. So for 3 characters to have a gemstore outfit, it would cost you $30.

With the new and improved system, you buy the outfit once for $10, then either buy, or use map completion to get transmutation charges to put the outfit on whoever you want.

Black Lion keys are easy to get. You can average 1 key every 20 minutes if you do the human personal storyline up to level 20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yAy4eENhDE

Here is the Wooden Potatoes guide to get you started.

Better than an incredibly bad system does not make it “fine”.

And I don’t know where you get the “You can average 1 key every 20 minutes if you do the human personal storyline up to level 20.” part. I’m doing that story right now and I’m level 17 and have gotten one key.

Look no other game that has a “transmog” type system makes you pay or grind out currency to change every single piece of gear. It’s a really, REALLY bad way to treat your customers. All it does it make me feel like I don’t own the full game.

Stars.2179:

Tsk tsk. Before April 15, you could only have one of that skin on one character. People pushes it, ANET let you now have as many copies of that skin as you want for transmutation charges. Now people want it for FREE. So demanding and entitlement. You bought it once. It’s already unlocked, and you have 1 free use of the skin. Just earn the transmutation charges. It’s not that hard to get. I’m sitting on a few hundreds by just playing.

The system is fine as is.

It is not “fine as is”. Not even remotely. I’ve got items from launch (namely the cool hat) that I can’t use because I don’t have any charges and I don’t seem to be earning them from anything. I just came back to the game after taking more than a year off. I bought the HUGE collector’s edition at launch and what do I have to show for it in-game? A golem banker that lasts for two weeks.

The cash shop in this game is just as bad now as games with zero entrance price like TERA. But even TERA gives you cool items for being a founder. This gives literally just the “veteran” title.

Edit: And I know I’m bumping an old thread. It’s either that or get yelled at from forum wanna be moderators for starting a new thread when old threads exist.

Avelos.6798:

Run with a single card; problem solved

Even with a single card the performance isn’t very good. And I want both cards being used to keep me over 100 FPS.

I should be able to use both of my GPUs. Games with fraction of the budget Anet had for GW2 have proper SLI support.

I haven’t played this game for almost a year now and I cannot believe it still runs like trash. I haven’t had an issue with micro stutter in any game for a really, really long time now and it’s still just horrible in GW2. I can keep over 100 FPS most of the time with everything on max, but it feels like 30 FPS in other games. And before you say anything, I use a 144Hz monitor so yes those frames above 60 FPS are very, very significant.

Even without the micro stutter I get spikes up and down of 50+ FPS while turning. That is insane.

So why is there still such poor SLI support? Why does the game still run like beta? What gives?

i5 2500k @ 4.5Ghz
16GB DDR3
2x GTX 670 FTW
128GB SSD

Yeah I’ve just come to accept that they will never say anything about the horrible performance and that arenanet really isn’t the company I thought it was. We’re not going to see improvements, all we’re going to see is more junk added to the gem store.

A game like guild wars 2 needs a monthly subscription. Micro transactions don’t work for a game of this scale.

Gankfest.4965:

They already said in a podcast that a few people are working on recoding the entire engine… You can use Google to look it up yourselves!

There are so many podcasts from a bunch of different guild wars fan sites. At least tel us the website you heard this podcast on?

Iruwen.3164:

loseridoit.2756:

spacecraft.4968:

I just wish they would give us some kind of an update. Something along the lines of “We are working on the performance issues. We hope to have DX11 patched in this year.” Even that would be enough.

DX11 is not a silver bullet.

I agree, DX11 wouldn’t really solve anything. That’s just uninformed claims, just like when people call for a 64 bit client. It would be nice to have for a few reasons, but far from being high priority.
I only wonder how they managed to build such an engine for a game that’s focused on epic scale battles. It should have come to their mind that maybe more than 10 people will be in one place in an MMORPG… didn’t those problems occur in the BWEs?

DX11 DOES make better use of newer GPUs. Don’t act like it’s nothing because it can be pretty significant.

But yeah they really need to get the CPU usage fixed first.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

something to note, the in game supersampling isnt AA its just higher res textures….just as sub sampling is very low res textures.

Supersampling is basically rendering the game at a higher resolution than your monitor. Native is your resolution and sub is below your resolution.

I just wish they would give us some kind of an update. Something along the lines of “We are working on the performance issues. We hope to have DX11 patched in this year.” Even that would be enough.

And what ever happened to DX11? They said it would be coming out later on down the road? Is it going to be YEARS? We have no idea since there is zero communication with the community.

Gambit.8425:

My comp is a i5-2500K OC’d to 4.4 GHz with a old nvidia GTX 460, and I have no lag whatsoever (max settings) in WvW zergs or other intense situations. I did have some weird crashing issues with the Geforce 306.97 drivers, so I re-installed a older one that didn’t upset(?) the game. Maybe a driver change to somewhere near GW2 release helps, latest isn’t always the best. Same goes for chipset and sound drivers.

Are you deleting the Local.dat file (in My Documents/Guild Wars 2) before it gets too large (it stores the login-, graphics- and sound settings and grow over time)? The sound bug is probably related to the size of that file, but imo it also affect the performance quite a bit).

I had the feeling that AMD have more problems than Intel in GW2, but maybe that isn’t the case. Anyway, this game has far from the worst optimization in recent MMO’s. ANet are slow at squashing bugs though, maybe that’s why they’ve had the hiring ad up on the front page since forever.

I’ve got an i5 2500k at 4.3GHz, two 670s in SLI, and 16GB RAM and the game turns into a slide show during dragon fights and stuff.

I don’t know how you could possibly have no lag on max settings in huge events.

This game is FAR from optimized. Look at this:

Here I’m getting 55 FPS:
http://i.imgur.com/oDXRBUB.png

And here I’m getting 100 FPS:
http://i.imgur.com/3fvynKM.png

Can’t see anything way out in the distance, yet it dropped my FPS by half. And this is with nothing going on outside.
….

Feb 26th patch notes!!

Performance

• Optimized engine for standard PC hardware.

I can dream.

Yeah name change is something I would gladly buy gems for.

I have seriously never felt more burned by a developer. I bought the full collector’s edition, I followed every bit of news I could find, I even helped buy anet cupcakes. Then we get this AMAZING game ruined because of performance issues. Every month or two I launch GW2 and download the updates hoping that performance will be better, and it is always awful.

I have a $2000 gaming machine and I bog down heavily when there are lots of AOE effects or lots of players.

I really feel like it’s never going to get any better.

Why in the world can you not just buy the card through amazon and get the code? I live 30 minutes from Anet and I’d still have to pay $6.00 to get a card shipped to me. (The only reason I’m getting a card through Amazon is that I have an amazon gift card.)

Maybe set it up so it’ll give a code? Or lower the shipping cost. It should only be the cost of a stamp.

Treeline.3865:

Disabling core parking, might help you further on fps (But again increase load on the cpu.). Try googling it, but do with care.

I’ve never seen any of my cores get parked, so I’m not sure that will make any difference.

So I deleted my GW2 folder in My Documents, deleted the temp and data file in the GW2 folder and re-downloaded the game. Now I’m getting *much * better FPS and my CPU usage is around 35% where it was 95% before. I mean the FPS could be a LOT better considering I get 35-50% usage from both GPUs and 35-50% usage from the CPU now, but I’ll take what I can get.

hoegarden.4287:

Guess you overclocked your CPU. Maybe it is a little to much. And it would worry me more if the cpu wasn’t running at 95% while gaming. If he was running at 50% then you would have a little problem (1 core broken or something)

Overclocking it hasn’t had anything but a beneficial impact in every other game. Oh and when I removed the overclock GW2 was still running at high CPU usage. And no, the game shouldn’t be using a lot of the CPU. The GPUs do a much better job at most everything you see in the game. Games that are properly optimized I see high GPU usage (80-90%) and low CPU usage (30-40%).

I’m still expecting Anet to announce a version of GW2 for the xbox 360. That would explain why the game seems to be optimized for CPU only.

Squall Leonhart.2075:

install service pack 1.

Already have it.

Bump. Something is wrong here. This cannot be just because of how poorly optimized GW2 is. And 61 FPS with everything on completely low with my hardware sure isn’t right.

No matter what my settings are my CPU is always around 90-95% usage. Here is a screenshot http://i.imgur.com/ZMR5s.png

Look how low my GPUs are and how high the CPU is. That is ridiculous. Nothing is running in the background and other games run perfectly fine.

My hardware:

i5 2500k @ 4.3GHz
16GB DDR3
2 670 GTX in SLI (Have tried with SLI disabled, no change)
Crucial M4 120GB SSD
Windows 7 x64

Nitro.4732:

could be that the intel hd graphics is being used by the game instead of the SLi, most likely why the cpu is at 95%

Integrated GPU is automatically disabled when a discrete GPU is installed.

Iyeru.5240:

spacecraft.4968:

Something special must be happening for me. I just lowered my graphics a little bit more and I’m still seeing CPU usage push 95%. This is with a quad core running over 4GHz. That CAN’T be right. I even set the priority for GW2 to high and there is no improvement in FPS.

If it’s not a 3770k, then that’s the reason.

What is the reason? The priority I set it to? I’m playing again right now with it on default and still seeing around 95% CPU and really low GPU. Considering GW2 doesn’t make use of hypertheading, my CPU should be overkill.

Something special must be happening for me. I just lowered my graphics a little bit more and I’m still seeing CPU usage push 95%. This is with a quad core running over 4GHz. That CAN’T be right. I even set the priority for GW2 to high and there is no improvement in FPS.

I come back to this game every couple of weeks hoping to see that it runs better on my computer. Every time I am sorely disappointed.

i5 2500k @ 4.3GHz
16GB DDR3
2x GTX 670 SLI

The game performs just as it did when it was released (maybe worse.) Still have massive lag when first loading the surrounding world (spinning the camera) and overall a low FPS. 40 FPS in blazeridge steppes with everything maxed. The game is using maybe 90% of my CPU and 40% of my GPUs. Compared to a PC optimized game where I get REALLY high FPS and 99% GPU usage and 20-30% CPU usage.

I just don’t understand this. The game was optimized first and foremost for PC right? Then why is it so heavily CPU bound like a console port? How have they not fixed this yet? Is it ever going to change?

Fozee.1083:

Do you have SLI enabled while the game is on? Don’t do that. 30-40 being the low-end of performance is generally considered entirely playable for an MMORPG, though I understand the wish for it to be higher.

Well the problem is that the game usually runs at around 60 FPS, but it drops into the 30s enough to be really jarring. When you’re playing at 60 FPS dropping to 30 feels awful.

I was expecting the performance issues to be ironed out by now. I still get low FPS in certain areas (30-40) and major lag when loading into a new zone. At most I’ll see 60% CPU usage and 50-60% GPU usage.

My hardware:

i5 2500k @ 4.3GHz
Two GTX 670 FTW SLI (most recent drivers as of 12/18/12)
16GB DDR3
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Windows 7 x64

Why is this game still running like it was ported over from a console?

dacooli.6712:

Not lying. My highest is 160.

You don’t know the difference between “average” and “highest”? You said you average 120 FPS which is more than techspot did with a better CPU and a 680.

You power your PC on magic?

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

Maffia 2 isn’t borderlands. I’m always 80-100% cpu usage in borderlands 2. that game requires alot of cpu, so does this game.

I hit maybe 80% CPU in borderlands 2 as well. I have PhysX set to GPU and I average probably 80-90 FPS with everything maxed out.

Anyone that argues using CPU for PhysX over an nvidia GPU is either using an AMD card or they have no idea what they’re saying.

I didn’t say that physx is cpu heavy gosh.. I run around 120 average in that game man. but i can dip to 40-60 in worst cases

Borderlands isn’t that CPU heavy lol. Oh and I call BS at your 120 FPS “average”. Did you mean your highest? Because no benchmarks show that game hitting 120 FPS average. In this techspot test their i7-3960X Extreme Edition and a 680 averaged 75 FPS. (http://www.techspot.com/review/577-borderlands-2-performance/)

That set up is way better than what you have and you claim 120 average FPS. You’re just making things up.

Anyways we are WAY off topic now and I don’t argue with liars. I hope the OP had his question answered.

dacooli.6712:

Maffia 2 isn’t borderlands. I’m always 80-100% cpu usage in borderlands 2. that game requires alot of cpu, so does this game.

I hit maybe 80% CPU in borderlands 2 as well. I have PhysX set to GPU and I average probably 80-90 FPS with everything maxed out.

Anyone that argues using CPU for PhysX over an nvidia GPU is either using an AMD card or they have no idea what they’re saying.

dacooli.6712:

Nvidia said that they can’t do anything else to optimize the game with drivers and that they recommend overclocking CPU since it’s very cpu heavy and not very GPU heavy. So yeah..

Except they improved performance with the most recent drivers and said to expect performance to improve again the next driver update. They even mentioned GW2 specific SLI support in the next update.

Nvidia would never say they couldn’t do anything more to optimize their drivers for a brand new game. And GW2 being CPU heavy is not intentional according to anet. Anyways not going to argue with you anymore. It’s clear to me now that you’re making stuff up.

OP, get the 670 or 660ti. Both are going to perform very well. The 680 and 690 will be overkill.

SolarNova.1052:

I said go cpu for physX becouse from my experiance with a 560ti, physX runs better with cpu.

This may not be the case for 600 series, in which case yea ok run from gpu.

Weird. Here is a Mafia II benchmark I found (post on overclock.net). This person has an i7 965 and a GTX 570.

CPU at 3.2GHz : 13 fps
CPU at 4.0Ghz : 17 fps
GTX570: 38 fps

Games with PhysX are supposed to run much better when you use a GPU that supports it.

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

yes, it gave 14 fps difference in Borderlands 2 and when i overclocked my i5 2500k from 3.3 to 4.2 i got 50 fps in gw2. It does affect certain games, and no gtx 670 and i5 2500k wont max all games, like witcher 2 with supersampling, GTA IV it will struggle with, it won’t max sleeping dogs with extreme AA, not metro either. so dont give false info.

Terrible choice of games to list friend.

Witcher 2 doesn’t run well on any config with ubersampling. Ubersampling is a joke.
GTA IV is the epitome of a bad port, everyone knows this.
Sleeping Dogs has a bug with the extreme AA setting, they’ve said so on the forums. Besides that, it’s almost the same thing as ubersampling which is not usable unless you’re running 2 690s in SLI rollseyes
Metro 2033 is also known for being a really poorly optimized game.

Even with my two 670s Metro doesn’t run amazingly, and I get maybe 30-40 FPS average in The Witcher 2 with ubersampling on. None of those games ever max out my CPU because the CPU isn’t bottlenecking.

I used to run a single 670 and my i5-2500k, and never had trouble with any games. That includes Guild Wars 2. "Unless he’s planning on using a 3D monitor, he doesn’t need to go above 60 FPS.

Listen, there are tons of “i5 vs i7” threads on tomshardware.com and the outcome is always the same; stick with the i5 if you’re gaming because the performance gains from the i7 are marginal if any. I’m not sure why you’re so set on getting the OP to waste his money.

I still dip to 20s in big zergs in WvW, so he can forget 60 FPS all the time.

Crazy because I really rarely ever dip that low in WvW or even huge world events. I am running two 670s, but if the i5 was the problem that wouldn’t matter. The i5 always keeps up just fine.

As I said, my small overclock gave me massive improvement, like 50 FPS in pve and alot of stability. so this game is very cpu dependent.

This is true, the game is very CPU dependent. It will not be that way forever though. A big part of it is bad GPU support, especially for the new 600 cards. They have said it’s going to be resolved at some point.

.. No they said that they’re lookin’ into it, SWTOR did aswell and it just got fixed like 2 weeks ago.

Anet is not Bioware lol. Nvidia also needs to improve drivers. These cards are using a new architecture, and it takes time to get drivers out that use the cards correctly. Same thing is going on with AMD’s 7000 cards.

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

yes, it gave 14 fps difference in Borderlands 2 and when i overclocked my i5 2500k from 3.3 to 4.2 i got 50 fps in gw2. It does affect certain games, and no gtx 670 and i5 2500k wont max all games, like witcher 2 with supersampling, GTA IV it will struggle with, it won’t max sleeping dogs with extreme AA, not metro either. so dont give false info.

Terrible choice of games to list friend.

Witcher 2 doesn’t run well on any config with ubersampling. Ubersampling is a joke.
GTA IV is the epitome of a bad port, everyone knows this.
Sleeping Dogs has a bug with the extreme AA setting, they’ve said so on the forums. Besides that, it’s almost the same thing as ubersampling which is not usable unless you’re running 2 690s in SLI rollseyes
Metro 2033 is also known for being a really poorly optimized game.

Even with my two 670s Metro doesn’t run amazingly, and I get maybe 30-40 FPS average in The Witcher 2 with ubersampling on. None of those games ever max out my CPU because the CPU isn’t bottlenecking.

I used to run a single 670 and my i5-2500k, and never had trouble with any games. That includes Guild Wars 2. "Unless he’s planning on using a 3D monitor, he doesn’t need to go above 60 FPS.

Listen, there are tons of “i5 vs i7” threads on tomshardware.com and the outcome is always the same; stick with the i5 if you’re gaming because the performance gains from the i7 are marginal if any. I’m not sure why you’re so set on getting the OP to waste his money.

I still dip to 20s in big zergs in WvW, so he can forget 60 FPS all the time.

Crazy because I really rarely ever dip that low in WvW or even huge world events. I am running two 670s, but if the i5 was the problem that wouldn’t matter. The i5 always keeps up just fine.

As I said, my small overclock gave me massive improvement, like 50 FPS in pve and alot of stability. so this game is very cpu dependent.

This is true, the game is very CPU dependent. It will not be that way forever though. A big part of it is bad GPU support, especially for the new 600 cards. They have said it’s going to be resolved at some point.

dacooli.6712:

spacecraft.4968:

dacooli.6712:

yes, it gave 14 fps difference in Borderlands 2 and when i overclocked my i5 2500k from 3.3 to 4.2 i got 50 fps in gw2. It does affect certain games, and no gtx 670 and i5 2500k wont max all games, like witcher 2 with supersampling, GTA IV it will struggle with, it won’t max sleeping dogs with extreme AA, not metro either. so dont give false info.

Terrible choice of games to list friend.

Witcher 2 doesn’t run well on any config with ubersampling. Ubersampling is a joke.
GTA IV is the epitome of a bad port, everyone knows this.
Sleeping Dogs has a bug with the extreme AA setting, they’ve said so on the forums. Besides that, it’s almost the same thing as ubersampling which is not usable unless you’re running 2 690s in SLI rollseyes
Metro 2033 is also known for being a really poorly optimized game.

Even with my two 670s Metro doesn’t run amazingly, and I get maybe 30-40 FPS average in The Witcher 2 with ubersampling on. None of those games ever max out my CPU because the CPU isn’t bottlenecking.

I used to run a single 670 and my i5-2500k, and never had trouble with any games. That includes Guild Wars 2. "Unless he’s planning on using a 3D monitor, he doesn’t need to go above 60 FPS.

Listen, there are tons of “i5 vs i7” threads on tomshardware.com and the outcome is always the same; stick with the i5 if you’re gaming because the performance gains from the i7 are marginal if any. I’m not sure why you’re so set on getting the OP to waste his money.

I still dip to 20s in big zergs in WvW, so he can forget 60 FPS all the time.

Crazy because I really rarely ever dip that low in WvW or even huge world events. I am running two 670s, but if the i5 was the problem that wouldn’t matter. The i5 always keeps up just fine.

dacooli.6712:

yes, it gave 14 fps difference in Borderlands 2 and when i overclocked my i5 2500k from 3.3 to 4.2 i got 50 fps in gw2. It does affect certain games, and no gtx 670 and i5 2500k wont max all games, like witcher 2 with supersampling, GTA IV it will struggle with, it won’t max sleeping dogs with extreme AA, not metro either. so dont give false info.

Terrible choice of games to list friend.

Witcher 2 doesn’t run well on any config with ubersampling. Ubersampling is a joke.
GTA IV is the epitome of a bad port, everyone knows this. Despite that, I ran it very well on my i5 2500k first with a 6950, then dual 6950s, then a 670 and then dual 670s.
Sleeping Dogs has a bug with the extreme AA setting, they’ve said so on the forums. Besides that, it’s almost the same thing as ubersampling which is not usable unless you’re running 2 690s in SLI rollseyes
Metro 2033 is also known for being a really poorly optimized game.

Even with my two 670s Metro doesn’t run amazingly, and I get maybe 30-40 FPS average in The Witcher 2 with ubersampling on. None of those games ever max out my CPU because the CPU isn’t bottlenecking.

I used to run a single 670 and my i5-2500k, and never had trouble with any games. That includes Guild Wars 2. "Unless he’s planning on using a 3D monitor, he doesn’t need to go above 60 FPS.

Listen, there are tons of “i5 vs i7” threads on tomshardware.com and the outcome is always the same; stick with the i5 if you’re gaming because the performance gains from the i7 are marginal if any. I’m not sure why you’re so set on getting the OP to waste his money.

If you were having trouble running games with your i5 and a 670/680, you were doing something wrong.

dacooli.6712:

Brimlor.8741:

Hi all,

I want to buy the new PC in the next few days.
Can i get recommendations regarding the best GFX card that will support mainly this game but also others ( currently Borderlands2 & XCOM) ?

Thanks

I got gtx 680 and I got issues in this game but overall it’s amazing, for games like Borderlands 2. I get for the most part 90-150 FPS there but can dip even to 40 ive seen, but my normal drops is reasonable enough, 50-70 (note that these 40s drops are only in big physx explosive combat fights). It’s a beautiful game, but with the ati card you won’t be able to play with physx, without a good processor. I would recommend the GTX card in this case AND a good processor since i7 3770 gave 14 more fps than i5 2500 in benchmarks, stock, but if you clock the i5 2500 to 4,5 it will perform like a 3,9 3770 in gaming. Good luck with Borderlands 2, it’s a really great game!

Your CPU claims are really wrong. i7 3770 does not give that much of a performance gain in games. At best in games you MIGHT see a 10% increase in FPS. Where it does make a difference is in applications that take advantage of hyperthreading, which no games do.

If you’re just gaming, I’d say go with the i5 2500k. It will save you money and is overkill for any game on the market. Put that money you’re saving into a better GPU.

The 670 will also handle anything you throw at it, and has decent overclocking headroom. Go 670 and i5-2500k and you’re going to run any game on max settings and save $200+ over going with the i7-3770k and the 680. Hell the 670 might be overkill too. You could save even more by getting the 660ti and having marginally worse performance.

If you want to do any video recording or streaming, an i7 is going to perform a bit better. I however have had no issues streaming/recording 1080 or editing 1080 footage on my i5 2500k and dual 670s.

SolarNova.1052:

Even though GW2 is having issues with people 600 series cards i would recommend team green (Nvidia). There cards although more expensive are overall better.

As for that physX thing. Have your physx set to cpu, you get better performance than trying it run it of you gpu. Specialy if you have a OC i5 or i7.
I personaly would choose a Sandybridge – E over an Ivybridge ..since they overclokc better, their top end speeds are insane….but they do cost more.

Oh my goodness, no. Do not set PhysX to run on the CPU. Even with an i5 or i7, the GPU will handle it better than the CPU.

Clem.2963:

Eochaidh.4106:

I really would rather see them spend time and money on actual content for the game.

Yep, there’s plenty more important things to do rather than spending time on support for an inferior (for this genre) input device.

If you don’t want it, nobody should have it. rollseyes And yeah there are urgent problems they need to fix, but we’re already past game breaking bugs and more into balancing updates. Balancing is never going to stop. And I’m sure with a staff of around 300 people, they can probably work on several things at once. :P

There are a lot of people that would like native controller support. Just google “guild wars 2 360 controller”. There are lots of people creating profiles for xpadder/pinnacle and stuff like that.

Oh and if you had actually tried a 360 controller you would see that the game works perfectly with one. The current xpadder profile I’m using is extremely easy to play with. The only place it doesn’t perform as well in is ground targeting, to which there is a nice workaround that is accurate and fast, just not as fast as using a mouse.

A while ago someone found a bunch of images that looked to be controller buttons icons. A lot of people speculate that it is for native controller support. There was a post from someone at anet where they said there wouldn’t be controller support at launch, but probably something later on. So I’m assuming they have the basic framework to implement this fairly easily already.

I’d love an official word on their plans for this.

Yeah target selecting will never be as fast, but I’m not a big PVPer and a controller works great in PVE. Right now my controller targets whatever I’m looking at (after I attack it) so I can swap between enemies without the d-pad pretty fast. Enough for casual pvp probably. If I ever got into competitive pvp I’d use my m+kb

Many people play using their controllers with xpadder or other software, and a lot of us feel like the game is more fun with the controller. TERA had incredible controller support.

Example 1: http://i.imgur.com/ckcmv.png (Clicking doesn’t work in these forums for some reason. Need to copy the url. wtf?)
Example 2

Xpadder and alternatives work pretty well, but they’re just not good enough for full time use. GW2 already feels like it was made with a controller in mind.

I’ve heard from numerous websites that anet is developing GW2 for consoles. If this is true, is there a possibility we could see official xbox 360 controller support on PC?

Tekla.2139:

As mentioned by someone else, use Vsync from the ingame menu.
Also, instead of the default one try to use this SLI compatibility bits 0×02C0680D i found that it help a little on crowded area, mostly big events.

I don’t have that string listed under my compatibility bits. Can’t just enter it manually either. Hmm.

deltaconnected.4058:

Shadows is nvidia’s problem (works on all the HD7000 devices we have).
Threaded Optimization deals with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476891%28v=vs.85%29.aspx, DX11 only.
SLI does work, but for the moment the game relies solely on single-threaded CPU performance.

My understanding was that the i5 can handle 2 threads per core, so 8 threads. Are you saying that GW2 uses a single thread on each core, or one core? I really don’t understand the technical workings of the CPU as well as I would like.

Wow dropping shadows from ultra to high made a huge difference. My FPS is still around 75 or so but I’m not having it dip constantly. Still have crappy GPU usage, but it’s a relief to see that it’s not micro stutter. I sure hope Anet patches in proper SLI support soon and really takes advantage of GPUs. 90+% CPU and 40% GPU is not cool.

I used to play with just one 670 and the game still ran like crap.

I am usually about 60+ FPS occasionally hitting 90-100, but the game still feels like crap. Spinning the camera will drop me into the 30s. 30 FPS may be playable, but when you’re going from 60 to 30 it makes the game feel awful. Some zones I will get into the mid 50s but it feels like 30 FPS. I’m not sure if I’m getting mico stuttering due to my SLI GPUs or if it’s something with the game.

I’m playing with all the settings maxed and supersampling turned on. Even with supersampling off, I still get huge FPS drops.

With my hardware, I should never be dipping below 60 FPS. This is stupid.

i5 2500k @ 4.4GHz
2 x GTX 670 FTW SLI
8GB DDR3
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Windows 7 x64
Nvidia drivers 306.23 (Most current)

Newest nvidia beta drivers seem to have boosted the FPS a little for me. Haven’t played GW2 in a week so I’m not sure if credit is due to nvidia or arenanet for that. Still WAY worse performance than I should be getting with my rig.

i5 2500k @ 4.3GHz
8GB DDR3
2 GTX 670 FTW in SLI
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Windows 7 x64

I get maybe 50 FPS on average, dipping into the low 30s, some zones I bump over 100 FPS. However I still need to keep supersampling off at all times. While that sounds like a totally playable framerate, it doesn’t feel like 30+ FPS. Jumping all over the place gives a really crappy experience.

30-45 FPS (jumps around quite a lot) in Lion’s Arch with everything maxed and supersampling on. Figure I should be at a constant 60 FPS with vsync enabled.

Quick look:
i5 2500k @ 4.4GHz
8GB DDR3
2 GTX 670 in SLI
Windows 7 x64
Crucial M4 128GB SSD

Dxdiag: