Horrendous optimization

Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? Seriously I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason. I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

@james.4703 said:Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? Seriously I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason. I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

Then don't play on Ultra. Ultra settings aren't supposed to be optimized and honestly it's very rare to play a game that is really optimized on Ultra settings. Lower Character model limit and character model quality until the game is playable, those two settings hammer the CPU (you didn't say what CPU you are using) making single core CPU performance the bottleneck. If your GPU is the one causing the drop, set Render Sampling to Native. That's all you should need to make the game playable on a 1060, if you are still struggling then it's your CPU that causes it. When the game was released it didn't have all these graphic options, some were added much later, and some are only activated on the newer zones.

My CPU is quad core with with turbo boost.

Most of the settings you picked are reliant on your GPU, and if you have an integrated card there won't be necessarily much oomph to support. The game may not be as optimal on heavyweights, and the game still relies on one CPU despite being a 64-bit program. If the devteam can somehow utilise multiple cores, then the most severe of the bottlenecks will be alleviated; alas, so far it hasn't been the case.

@james.4703 said:My CPU is quad core with with turbo boost.

That says nothing. A brand new basic line laptop is not the same as a $2000+ desktop.

If you want help getting the best out of your computer and the game, posted all your specs helps. Windows actually will tell you everything in your systems menu. I'm pretty sure Mac does as well, but I'm not as familar with their OS anymore. I stopped back when 10.2 was out.

For our lord, Gates, praise DX9. Amen.

I have a...

Geforce GTX 1070Intel i7-8700k cpu @ 3.70GHz16 gigs of ramrunning on win 10

In istan or any other populated event, I have to turn char detail to lowest/char limit to lowest/textures to lowest/shadows at none just for 20-40 fps.

GW2 brings my system to it's knees.

@fixit.7189 said:I have a...

Geforce GTX 1070Intel i7-8700k cpu @ 3.70GHz16 gigs of ramrunning on win 10

In istan or any other populated event, I have to turn char detail to lowest/char limit to lowest/textures to lowest/shadows at none just for 20-40 fps.

GW2 brings my system to it's knees.

RAM at what speed? GW2's data set is big enough that it will overflow the CPU's cache and then you have to rely on the RAM, and if the RAM is slow, the game will be slow.

RAM Speed does not matter in GW2 case its the single core performace of the cpu that matters bring it up to 5 ghz and you will see results but big fights will still not be fluid unless you limit player models

@james.4703 said:My CPU is quad core with with turbo boost.

This means nothing. There are quad core CPUs and quad core CPUs. If you are using Windows 10 go to Settings and then About and you can see your exact CPU model.

@fixit.7189 said:I have a...

Geforce GTX 1070Intel i7-8700k cpu @ 3.70GHz16 gigs of ramrunning on win 10

In istan or any other populated event, I have to turn char detail to lowest/char limit to lowest/textures to lowest/shadows at none just for 20-40 fps.

GW2 brings my system to it's knees.

Try setting Character Model Limit to medium/low and Character Model Quality to high/medium and see the difference, those are the settings that should affect your system the most. Your 1070 is enough to run the game at near Ultra settings (without Supersampling probably), but a 3.7GHz CPU might cause bottlenecks with high model settings and loads of players around. Unfortunately, more players = more draw calls and the draw calls in this game are performed by a single CPU core, which causes the bottleneck.

Open the Performance Monitor to see if any of your CPU cores are getting close to 100% usage with each setting, try to find a setting that is at 80-90% maximum and you will be fine.

@james.4703 said:Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? Seriously I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason. I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

Reduce shadow setting. It does not work well on nVidia cards at the highest settings. Not even on a GTX1080 Ti. Also, you may want to reduce the Character Model Limit to keep the game a bit playable at massive (boss/WvW) battles. Keep in mind this is not your average FPS (shooter) game. A MMO like GW2 has highly customizable characters and massive battles which are far more taxing on your system. For most players, the CPU will be the bottle neck and not the GPU. However, on ultra detail, you can also use your GPU to the max.

@TheQuickFox.3826 said:

@james.4703 said:Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? Seriously I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason. I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

Works just fine on my 1080Ti.

@wanya.1697 said:RAM Speed does not matter in GW2 case its the single core performace of the cpu that matters bring it up to 5 ghz and you will see results but big fights will still not be fluid unless you limit player models

RAM speed matters because the CPU must fetch data from memory and write it back, unless the CPU cache is more monstrously huge than any current CPU has. If the RAM is slow, the CPU will sit around waiting for it. If you boost the CPU's clock speed, all that will happens is that the CPU waits quickly, but it still waits.

task manager says my ram speed is 2400 MHz.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@wanya.1697 said:RAM Speed does not matter in GW2 case its the single core performace of the cpu that matters bring it up to 5 ghz and you will see results but big fights will still not be fluid unless you limit player models

You are being subjective especially when mentioning this slow ram concept.Oh! Being subjective does not help much. :)

Don't worry, OP, the game is insanely badly optimized. Running a 1700x with 1070 and16gb ddr 4 (3200mhz) here, and i get around 28-32 fps in town, and even lower on the battlefield (max settings, tried both 1080p and 1440p). So, unless you want to play at low/medium, I suggest setting this game aside, or building a legacy computer.

@Maze.3825 said:

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@wanya.1697 said:RAM Speed does not matter in GW2 case its the single core performace of the cpu that matters bring it up to 5 ghz and you will see results but big fights will still not be fluid unless you limit player models

Do you have a justification for why you think I'm wrong?

@james.4703 said:Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? Seriously I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason. I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

I know my Ryzen 1600X @ 3.5GHz, 16GB DDR4 3000, RX 470 4GB on Windows 10 64 runs smooth in Ultra/High. I pull 15-20FPS in WB Zergs.

I know you say you have a quad core with turbo, but that means virtually nothing these days. For example, if you have a first generation i5 quad core with turbo speed it will bottleneck the GTX 1060 beyond belief. Also, did you get the 6GB GTX 1060 or the 3GB GTX 1060? There is a huge difference between these two...being the 6GB model has 6GB GDDR5 and the 3GB model is DDR3 or 4. Yes, as in the same type of memory the computer uses, making it much slower.

Unfortunately a lot of players have been duped by the cheaper variants of the GTX 1050 and 1060, which use DDR3 or DDR4 not GDDR5 like normal video cards.

@Flash.7465 said:Don't worry, OP, the game is insanely badly optimized. Running a 1700x with 1070 and16gb ddr 4 (3200mhz) here, and i get around 28-32 fps in town, and even lower on the battlefield (max settings, tried both 1080p and 1440p). So, unless you want to play at low/medium, I suggest setting this game aside, or building a legacy computer.

I noticed few people saying this, especially with 1070 graphic card and bad fps. I don't understand how though.My pc is i7 7700k / gtx 1070 / 8gb of ram. Playing on 1080p with almost max settings and my fps is 60-120. 60 in crowded cities and in less populated maps goes over 120.Are your drivers up to date? Or could it be some virus or something. I just don't understand how people with similar pcs have huge difference in performance.

@"james.4703" said:Like what's up with the optimizationof this game? SeriouslyIt's a modified Guild Wars 1 (2004) engine. Of course the performance/visuals ratio is poor. The engine is outdated.

I believe that when this game came up it was better than it is now for some reason.It wasn't better. Just compare the visuals of the core maps with HoT and PoF maps. the graphics became a lot better over the years and so the performance became worse.

I have a 1060 and my FPS drops so low when I turn everything to ultra. This shouldn't happen with a game this old no offence. No it's definitely not my pc as its brand new gaming pc.

My CPU is quad core with with turbo boost.A brand new PC should not include a quad core. Quad Cores are outdated since the Ryzen1 / Coffee Lake Release in 2017.

"Turbo Boost" is a marketing catchword and nothing more. Every CPU since 2012 has a Turbo Mode.

But anyway there does not exist a CPU that runs this game at 60 fps @ max details in every possible scenario.

Guild Wars 2 is CPU intense as it's geometry (=draw call) heavy in the newer maps, has poorly optimised reflection- and shadow-performance (turn these two off for more CPU performance!) and on top of that does a lot of multiplayer calculations in the background. You gain performance benefits up to 6 threads, then usually the game is limited by a single mainthread, which means single core performance and clockspeed of your CPU are the only factors to further improve CPU performance.

The demands for a graphics card are still pretty low to todays standards. A GTX 1060 is more than enough for 1080p/60. But enabling supersampling can even kill this card on newer maps.

@Flash.7465 said:Don't worry, OP, the game is insanely badly optimized. Running a 1700x with 1070 and16gb ddr 4 (3200mhz) here, and i get around 28-32 fps in town, and even lower on the battlefield (max settings, tried both 1080p and 1440p). So, unless you want to play at low/medium, I suggest setting this game aside, or building a legacy computer.

The 1700x runs only at 3.4GHz and this game depends heavily on single thread performance. With 4GHz and above you can go to ultra settings without many problems (maybe some tweaks with character model limit/quality)

@james.4703 said:My CPU is quad core with with turbo boost.

Games aren't scientific or synthetic stress test programs where calculation are independent and linear to have calculations done independently of each other to utilise the maximum potential of the CPU

Real word gaming calculation are non-linear and interdependent, otherwise you'll be getting crashes every 5min

@"XenoSpyro.1780" said:For our lord, Gates, praise DX9. Amen.

here we go again... switching away from DX9 isn't going to fix the CPU bottleneck

DX9, openGL, Vulkan are all rendering API, that means they make things look pretty on your screen through GPU; that's why you see the backers are often associated with GPU manufacturers for driver support, but not from CPU manufacturershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#Features

However, there are dependencies on CPU because the CPU gotta tell the GPU what to render, and this is where GW2's engine, and most MMO's engine fell behind because multi-threading is difficult due to the nature of real-world gaming instructions are non-linear

This is why you will see massive FPS improvement when reducing the number of models on your screen, because there are less player movement and skill actions calculations to be done by the CPU; I wish Anet could just let me turn off every single player character model and skill actions so I can see boss and it's skills actions and giving smooth FPS all the time, rather than a big blob of flashing white bubble

@crepuscular.9047 said:However, there are dependencies on CPU because the CPU gotta tell the GPU what to render, and this is where GW2's engine, and most MMO's engine fell behind because multi-threading is difficult due to the nature of real-world gaming instructions are non-linear

To be fair the game engine is from ~2004 (updated GW1 engine) and during that time we were expecting faster and faster CPUs instead of more and more cores. Even game companies with graphically impressive games fell in that trap, like for example the original Crysis which is a horribly CPU bound game and makes even an amazing 8700K cry in terror when playing it. However, those other engine companies managed to fix these issues by adding worker threads to the engine, so parts of the process go to different cores. As an example, Crysis 2 is a full multi-threaded game that eliminates the CPU bottleneck of its predecessor. To make the example even better, a third party company ported the original Crysis to the engine of Crysis 2, in order for it to be playable on consoles of the era (X360 and PS3) and that version of the game was indeed multi-threaded. It had the same assets as the PC version, but used the updated (multi-threaded) engine.

This all means having a multi-threaded is possible, and further that porting a game from one engine to another is also possible and doable. Arenanet could make another engine and port the entire GW2 game to the new one. Assets will be the same, textures, models, sounds, music, even materials and particle effects can remain the same. All they need to do is to look at Crytek's example and find out how they managed to port their entire game from one engine to the next version and do something similar.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@Maze.3825 said:

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@wanya.1697 said:RAM Speed does not matter in GW2 case its the single core performace of the cpu that matters bring it up to 5 ghz and you will see results but big fights will still not be fluid unless you limit player models

You're being very unclear is my point. You say fast ram, right? What does fast ram constitute for you and furthermore 'the client gw2.exe' that you claim can take advantage of fast ram & specifically?

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@fixit.7189 said:I have a...

Geforce GTX 1070Intel i7-8700k cpu @ 3.70GHz16 gigs of ramrunning on win 10

In istan or any other populated event, I have to turn char detail to lowest/char limit to lowest/textures to lowest/shadows at none just for 20-40 fps.

GW2 brings my system to it's knees.