Massive FPS drop in West/SW Istan

Especially round Champions Dawn. PoF usually bring me between 35-60 depending where I am and the detail. This area drops fps to 21 and keep it there. I'm not seeing anything that particularly is causing it - usually the bone wall areas are taxing for my PC, but there isn't really any of that round the big rock or the graveyard. Rest of Istan is fine, but that little corner is almost unplayable,. I keep most of my specs on a low-medium setting, with a couple on high as default (environ/animation)

I actually have the exact same issue. Just about anywhere on PoF (Barring Amnoon) I can usually hit anywhere from 45 to 60 frames per second on mixed settings. (Leaning towards medium-high.)My system isint a super powerful one, but here are it's specs, which are able to run the game at (or near) 30fps on any situation, no matter how taxing it might be.Core i5 2500k clocked at 4.3ghzRX-570 4gb from MSI. Stock8gb of RAM running at 1600mhzAnd I'm running the game itself from a SATA 3 SSD.

It just seems to be this area which is barely playable. Even in massive events where the fps drops to 25 or less, I'm able to feel like the camera moves smooth enough to act and I don't notice the drop affect my gameplay, but here...it's just unbearable.

I don't have a super powerful PC either, I just find it strange a section of the map has such abominable performance vs the rest

I believe it's either a shader and/or texutre thing. Because I tried messing around with the settings which brought my framerate from 21 up to 30, which was playable but a rather glaring graphical downgrade, one which I would gladly do without. Having to downgrade my graphics across the board for a one small area that guts the framerate.

I usually get around 40-60 or so FPS on mostly high settings with medium shaders, but in Champion's Dawn I drop to 5-10 FPS. When I put all of my settings on lowest, I get around 8-13 fps. I suspect that it's more of a problem with CPU than it is GPU. Whatever it is, they need to fix it, because a lot of Istan is pretty much unplayable for me.

Same issue.. i5 7500 and rx 470 4 GB. None of my four cores goes above 48% usage but my GPU instantly get 100% usage in this area. Where in other parts of the game the usage rarely gets above 48% (with hardly 1 GB of video memory usage)

I really think ArenaNet forgets that they have a very old game engine. They are trying to do stuff in the game that the game client is not capable of doing! It does not even have DX11 support lol.

@elrin.4750 said:I really think ArenaNet forgets that they have a very old game engine. They are trying to do stuff in the game that the game client is not capable of doing! It does not even have DX11 support lol.

That may be a part of the answer. However what graphic's API the game uses is not that big of a deal. There was a Reddit post from A-net themselves that explained that changing from DirectX9 (Lmao I know, right?) to something like DX10 or 11 wont net them any increased performance if the engine isint then optimised to make use of the API. It also had something about feeding pipelines, and lack of parallelisation or something like that.

A better solution I think would be to simply lower the texture resolution around Champion's Dawn and cut back on the Shaders, if they can. (Since I was able to gain some FPS by turning down textures and shaders)

Or maybe they cant, and we'll just have to suck it up and deal with it. Which suuuucks.

I've created a thread in "Bugs: Game, Forum, Website" and someone asked me to add feedback here as well.

So about the feedback to GW2 devs - I think you got a bit too carried away when making the new Living World map, Istan. I know that you want to go very big, create these massive locations for players, make mounts even more natural etc etc. That's perfectly fine with me. But after playing on Istan for a couple of minutes, and then spending twice as much time in the options menu, all I can say is - the performance is just terrible.

Guild Wars 2 chugs when I'm trying to explore this location. I have 2 fairly powerful PCs with different configurations in my home - none of them are able to keep reasonable framerate on this map. Turning the camera around my character in Astralarium reduces the game to powerpoint slide show even at lowest settings. Updating drivers, turning off unnecessary apps in the background - nothing like that works either. I know that i5-4670K or R9 290 are electronics that already have a few years, but I still fully expect them to get at least unshaken 30 frames per second on lowest possible details. Especially since exactly the same computers are perfectly able to run newest games at medium/high at 60 FPS.

You guys need to think next time where is the line between getting more fireworks and sacrificing too much performace. I dunno, ask the Kodan so they could teach you about Balance or something.

And now the question to the community here - I've already asked multiple times on map chat and it seems like many people are experiencing the same problem on Istan (with my favourite comment being "So what, 10 FPS is the true cinematic experience, right?"), but would be nice to know if members of this forum also have similar issues.

I got used to some performance drops in this game, but so far those were appearing under specific circumstances or in small parts of the map. Istan took this problem to a completely new level.

Just replied in "Bugs: Game, Forum, Website". Having the same problem in SW Istan.

Near the WP get down and look north, then just look south. I'm getting massive FPS drop while looking south.

EDIT 1: Adding my specs and more info

• i7 4770k
• 16GB RAM
• VGA R9 280X 3GB (Crimson ReLive Edition 17.11.1)
• Running GW2 on a SSD
• Windows 10 64 (SSD)

Was talking with some friends with the same issue and they all have AMD, while others using Nvidia can see a FPS drop but not so drastic.

Are you guys using AMD as well?

I have FPS drops at Champions Dawn too.

Intel Core i5 4670 @ 3.40GHz12,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)     8192MB ATI Radeon RX 480 Graphics (XFX Pine Group)

I have the same issue. Dropping from ~50-60 to below 20. Only around area Champions Dawn.

Same issue's I cant do the story at the Astralarium due to my fps 1-5 and even my input is lagging.

Same. Very low fps in SW corner.

Graphics settings are all High... FXAA antialiasing... Native (1920x1080) render sampling... All reflections... bottom boxes are all checked.

Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.40GHz2x Asus GTX 660 SLI driver: 388.31Windows 10 Home x64 v. 17098 GB DDR3 RAMSamsung 850 evo SSD64-bit Gw2 game client

Yes, poorly optimized. I wonder if anet team actually runs through the map once with their supposedly minimum requirements or not.

So, today I was testing some graphics config and got a result by disabling Best Texture Filtering. It was better but still bad FPS, so I've removed the AMD driver and installed the "optional" 17.11.4 version. Got to say it got a lot better, not preety but playable.

Don't know now if the new driver helped or if it was just the remove/install that helped, combined of course with the disabling of Best Texture Filtering.

Can you guys report back if disabling that option works for you?

Thanks KuroiShin. I'll try that in a few minutes. I tried putting everything to low... then med... looked terrible though. If one change could bring fps up to a reasonable level without destroying the great looks that would be awesome.

Edit: Unchecked "Best Texture Filtering" but didn't help much.

I posted this in the general discussion forum:

"Anet really needs to remove/reduce the level of detail in this huge bone wall. I wouldn't care if it was made completely flat with a few skulls here and there. Not sure how much the flames add to the problem. Nobody's looking at the thing anyways. All it's doing is tanking framerates. Smooth gameplay is priority."

*The bonfires and smoke atop the wall might actually be the culprit. Fire and smoke are known to kill framerates.

I'm also getting a lot of small freezes and just got a permanent freeze after a series of shorter ones. Had to ctrl-alt-del, sign out and back in. All this is unprecedented in my experience of this game over the last 5+ years.

@Heisenberg.1482 said:Thanks KuroiShin. I'll try that in a few minutes. I tried putting everything to low... then med... looked terrible though. If one change could bring fps up to a reasonable level without destroying the great looks that would be awesome.

Edit: Unchecked "Best Texture Filtering" but didn't help much.

I posted this in the general discussion forum:

"Anet really needs to remove/reduce the level of detail in this huge bone wall. I wouldn't care if it was made completely flat with a few skulls here and there. Not sure how much the flames add to the problem. Nobody's looking at the thing anyways. All it's doing is tanking framerates. Smooth gameplay is priority."

I'm also getting a lot of small freezes and just got a permanent freeze after a series of shorter ones. Had to ctrl-alt-del, sign out and back in. All this is unprecedented in my experience of this game over the last 5+ years.

Yeah I'm getting those freezes as well, mostly while cruising with the griffon and not only on PoF maps. I also had to ctr-alt-del to close the gw2 task and log back in...this started happening after Season 4 patch.

I see you have a Nvidia VGA, got to say that other ppl I've been talking to about this issue are AMD users so I thought only AMD VGAs were being affected by this. Have you tried to uninstall your driver and install it back again?

Ok, I've got something interesting here. I just ran MSI Afterburner while I was in the Istan map and it showed some odd cpu clock activity while in the Champion's Dawn section. The cpu clocks were normal (constant 3800 MHz @ full load) at the Chalon Docks area where the volatile magic vendor is. But when I waypoint to Champion's Dawn the cpu clock starts clocking down to its standby speed (1600 MHz) and back up to its full load speed (3800 MHz) and back down. The clock alternates rapidly back and forth between these speeds while in this area. That can't be normal. I believe the cpu should always be running at full load clock speed while in a game. I wanted to paste the afterburner image here but I can't. Also, the GPU usage was at 100% while in champion's dawn area and much lower at Chalon docks.

Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.40GHz2x Asus GTX 660 SLI driver: 388.31Windows 10 Home x64 v. 17098 GB DDR3 RAMSamsung 850 evo SSD64-bit Gw2 game client

@KuroiShin.2504 said:

@Heisenberg.1482 said:Thanks KuroiShin. I'll try that in a few minutes. I tried putting everything to low... then med... looked terrible though. If one change could bring fps up to a reasonable level without destroying the great looks that would be awesome.

Edit: Unchecked "Best Texture Filtering" but didn't help much.

I posted this in the general discussion forum:

"Anet really needs to remove/reduce the level of detail in this huge bone wall. I wouldn't care if it was made completely flat with a few skulls here and there. Not sure how much the flames add to the problem. Nobody's looking at the thing anyways. All it's doing is tanking framerates. Smooth gameplay is priority."

I'm also getting a lot of small freezes and just got a permanent freeze after a series of shorter ones. Had to ctrl-alt-del, sign out and back in. All this is unprecedented in my experience of this game over the last 5+ years.

I tried new nvidia drivers to no avail with the problem at hand

@Randulf.7614 said:I tried new nvidia drivers to no avail with the problem at hand

Hmm, I tried a few other things without testing it separately so it will be hard to pinpoint what exactly solved the issue (by solved I actually mean helped).

• Full removal of VGA driver software
• Full install of VGA driver (testing version of AMD driver)
• Disabled ReLive (streaming and recording AMD software, I believe for Nvidia you use ShadowPlay right?)
• Did a full reinstall of GW2 (you could try to repair it 1st by adding the -repair argument in GW2 shortcut, it will take a while)
• Disabled Best Texture Filtering (my settings are all high with fullscreen 1920x1080 and native resolution)

I'm not getting 60+ FPS around Champions Dawn, but it is above 24~ FPS so I'm able to walk around that area without a problem (way better than the 10 fps I was getting).

Here are my settings on gw2:

graphics_options.png

I have FPS drops at Champions Dawn too. Gtx970 after go there and back i have still lower fps on Istan . Restarting client helps.

I just did that part of the story and there is definetly something wrong in the SW area that hogs fps. We see a similar effect on DBL when stealth fog is up, instant tanking of fps compared to no fog (why Anet dont just delete it remain beyond me) so I suspect a particle effect/shader is the issue.

I wouldnt bother repairing the client or trying to reinstall video drivers.

@Dawdler.8521 said:I just did that part of the story and there is definetly something wrong in the SW area that hogs fps. We see a similar effect on DBL when stealth fog is up, instant tanking of fps compared to no fog (why Anet dont just delete it remain beyond me) so I suspect a particle effect/shader is the issue.

I wouldnt bother repairing the client or trying to reinstall video drivers.

I don't know what's behind Joko's wall to the west but it's a massive resource hog. That or it's the wall itself/whatever shaders/particle effects are associated with it.

Anyway, going to western Istan and putting that wall even slightly on my screen makes the game unplayable at <10fps

Yes. It's flat out rough and abysmal there (area of Champion's Dawn)*Nothing like a "new product"