GW2 PC setup help

Hello fellow gamers. My mate has been playing GW2 and recently she has encountered FPS drops. She plays on Low settings (except Render Sampling is on supersample). When there are no players around she has 50-60 FPS, but when on World bosses, Meta events, cities (when the players use skills) the FPS drops to 8-15. I have been looking everywhere and didn't find anything unfortunately. Theoretically her setup should be much more than enough for medium settings. All drivers are up to date.

This is her setup:Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHzGraphics: Radeon RX 560RAM: 8 GBOS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64x SP1Direct X 11

Pretty tough to guess but since the CPU is from 2011 other parts of the computer could just be old. PSU is usually first to drop, it does not suddenly stop working totally, it will just lose power over time, and no power means no perfomance. There could be piles of dust inside the case preventing fans working properly and heat getting pushed out. Is the CPU cooler working properly? Are fans rotating? If the CPU is overclocked (I guess it is because of K in the name), it can easily overheat and drop clock speeds.

Finally, Win7 was so broken OS it had to be reinstalled from start every few months just to get rid of all the garbage it never removed or it just became slower and slower.

Thank you for the reply. All fans are working correctly, although I must admit it's all a little dusty inside :D PSU is the newest part of the machine bought a few months ago. It's the Corsair RM650x model.

Any Meta event's with large amount of players will kill any system in frames. Your best bet is to lower Player model count. (especially in meta events) if you want to keep things playable. Granted, you probably only see a few player models, and a ton of floating name tags, but should be playable.

Setting are in Options>Graphic Settings>Character Model Limit / Character Model Quality

@rwolf.9571 said:Any Meta event's with...

That's true but she wants to play the game without removing other player's characters. She plays it with the low model limit count, but it doesn't look nice and still lags.

@Elendias.9610 said:

@rwolf.9571 said:Any Meta event's with...

Nods* you could try lowering the display resolution to find more frames. If you haven't already, disable super sampling (as this effectively doubles the screen resolution the game needs to render). Ultimately there will be some compromise in graphics when doing populated meta events. Don't know if there is much more you can do outside of an upgrade. Gw2's game engine is old, and heavily reliant on single threaded performance.

@Elendias.9610 said:Thank you for the reply. All fans are working correctly, although I must admit it's all a little dusty inside :D PSU is the newest part of the machine bought a few months ago. It's the Corsair RM650x model.

Little dust does not usually make the PC that much worse, tho you could go over it with vacuum once it is open. Good PSU :)

From the hardware I would only look at the RAM then. Is that 1 module or 2, if 2 are they exact same model, and is the RAM working with speeds it is suppose to.

In the end, it sounds like everything except Motherboard + CPU is quite new so perhaps it is just time to upgrade these too.

Thank you everyone for the tips. My mate has supersampling on "because it looks terribly when off" so that is a no go. The MB is the oldest piece of HW there. RAM's are 2x4 Kingston of the same model of course. I plan to replace it along with the CPU. But that will come when we will have more money. Taking care of the dust will have to do for now.

No matter what you do with that hardware, you're going to be on the low/mid spectrum. The graphics card by itself is the equivalent of a GTX 1050, and even the stock 1060s have to sit on mid/high to achieve mostly 1080p @ 60. Even with that, you have to keep the models low with medium quality in population zergs, as it's the CPU load slows everything down. You might gain a few more frames and reduce lag by making sure the mouse's polling rate is set as low as possible (not to be confused with the mouse's DPI), as that also eats CPU.

When you’re using an older system, compromises have to be made unfortunately.I’ve found that lowering character models and quality (from ultra to High or Medium) worked, and put shaders on medium suffices for me atleast.My computer was built in 2012, and my game still looks fantastic with just minor tweaks, I don’t need to see other people’s characters in meta events. Frame rates do drop in larger events though, regardless.

@Haleydawn.3764 said:When you’re using an older system, compromises have to be made unfortunately.Though I am fairly sure that you'd still still experience < 60 fps on a 9900K with 2x2080Ti during meta events.

Anyway, if settings are already low theres not much to do. A 560 is a sub-budget card today. A 1050Ti is 15-30% faster alone and that is like one of the crappiest budget cards you can get for gaming.

@Elendias.9610 said:This is her setup:Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHzGraphics: Radeon RX 560RAM: 8 GBOS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64x SP1Direct X 11

Your friend needs a new CPU, the i5 2500 is 4 generations behind and GW2 like any other MMO is heavily depended on CPU. Performance might improve a bit though if she upgrades to win10 but don't expect anything spectacular.

I don't understand what's the point in running the game on low settings, then put the most demanding setting of them all (render sampling) on supersample.

take out super sampling. you'll save boatloads of fps to play from that point. you're basically just rendering "everything low" on higher resolutions which imo as others have said, is a waste. you'll get better eyecandy on higher settings at native or even lower sampling.

About the supersampling: Yeah I know it would help a lot but she says the game is unplayable and looks like minecraft to her, which is not acceptable for her in any way unfortunately :(

Also what CPU can you suggest? I found that i7-7700 is 2 times better than the current one and it costs 400€ which is the most I can afford with my salary. Do you think the setup would work? Or do I need a newer MB too.

If you think other CPUs are better/cheaper please I'd love to read all of your suggestions as I am currently desperate to find the solution.

Also as a side note, she doesn't want 60 FPS, just 35 STABLE FPS in metas and cities instead of the 10 she drops onto.

if was before PoF came out, that setup should be capable of handling the game having everything on lowbut since PoF it seems there's more load on the CPU and GPU even if it is old open world content

@Elendias.9610 said:Also what CPU can you suggest? I found that i7-7700 is 2 times better than the current one and it costs 400€ which is the most I can afford with my salary. Do you think the setup would work? Or do I need a newer MB too.

If you think other CPUs are better/cheaper please I'd love to read all of your suggestions as I am currently desperate to find the solution.

Also as a side note, she doesn't want 60 FPS, just 35 STABLE FPS in metas and cities instead of the 10 she drops onto.

Upgrading PC components is not that easy as swapping out CPU and magically the game runs twice as fast.

First of, if you read about CPU 1 being 2 times better when compared to CPU 2, these becnhmarks are being run with fastest possible video card to make sure GPU is not interfering with results. While it shows comparable result, it is not actually something you can expect with real-world PC setups. Because you do not match 300EUR CPU with 2000EUR GPU, normally you try to match the components so 300EUR CPU works with GPU that also costs about same. And in such case your video card (GPU) may be the limiting factor so upgrading just the CPU could give very little improvements, or even none if the bottleneck is GPU.

Basically, if you want to upgrade your CPU, you also need new motherboard and new DDR4 memory (notice that i7-7700 is using different socket and can not be installed into i5-2500k motherboard anyway). Again, if you plan to buy top-end CPU (i7 series), you should not install it into cheapest possible motherboard, or your expectations about perfomance increase may be not achieved. Intel Z chipset motheroboards go for 100+EUR but these are more useful when you plan to overclock CPU (only possible with CPUs with K in the end), B series motherboards sell for somewhere around 70EUR. 8 GB of DDR4 takes another 80EUR, but if you are going to upgrade anyway, 8 GB is now minimum amount, and you may as well get 16 GB for somewhere around 150 EUR.

Next thing to consider is cooling. If the CPU/GPU are overheating, they will automatically start to slow down to avoid burning down. Some PC cases are pretty much closed metal boxes with very little airflow, so even good CPU/GPU could struggle to reach proper speeds inside these. Your case fans should be working and pushing cold air in and hot air out properly, make sure there are holes in the case and when PC is on you should feel the air moving. Well designed PC case with good airflow and silent fans can easily cost 100-150+EUR.

Intel default CPU fans are not very good, and they do not even provide coolers anymore with all the CPUs, so extra CPU cooler for non-overclocked i7 CPU would cost another 30-40 EUR.

And finally, even with upgrades, the perfomance also depends on the software. Win 7 should not be used in 2018 anymore. And it also depends what other programs you are running same time with the game, browsers alone with multiple tabs can eat up plenty of RAM, while you could also have steam and twitter and discord and all the other programs running in the background. All of these take up CPU perfomance and reduce FPS in the game.

Wow, and I though my PC from 2012 is ancient... At least I have 16GB RAM and an i7. I usually have 20-60 fps depending on new/old maps and population.

you could try to overclock the cpu to 4 Ghz or morehttps://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=152318.0

@Elendias.9610 said:About the supersampling: Yeah I know it would help a lot but she says the game is unplayable and looks like minecraft to her, which is not acceptable for her in any way unfortunately :(

Then increase the other settings instead of adding supersampling. Most notable settings to increase: texture quality, model quality (not the limit, keep that low), shader on medium. The game will look amazing, far superior to ultra low with supersampling. And obviously the resolution.

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:Wow, and I though my PC from 2012 is ancient... At least I have 16GB RAM and an i7. I usually have 20-60 fps depending on new/old maps and population.

Well I live in a country where I must feed the family and household with 600€ a month so buying expensive computers is impossible for me. I can buy only one part a year when I save enough money little by little to it. The graphic card and the PSU are the last two upgrades I made this year.

@"wanya.1697" said:you could try to overclock the cpu to 4 Ghz or morehttps://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=152318.0

Won't overclocking decrease the lifetime of the CPU in the long run?

dont think so and the cpu is already over 7 years old anyway 4 ghz should be pretty easy to get without too much voltage increaseat least it was for the I7 of that generation