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Poor performance on modern hardware (unplayable framerates)


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Hi all.So I decided to play Guild Wars 2 again after a long time and I've been having horrible performance to the point where it's literally unplayable. I'm one of these 'so-called' 60FPS or no buy players but the game drops to 20FPS and below and that just isn't a pleasant experience.

My setup:Core i7-4790k 4.8GhzNvidia RTX 2070 1700Mhz16Gb DDR 3 ram 1333Mhz (4x4)Samsung 840 Evo SSDWindows 10 64-bitUsing latest Windows & stable GPU driver updates

So basically the game becomes a slideshow a lot of times. I cannot reach 60FPS ever even on low (have posted screenshots at the end of this thread).I have removed my overclock settings and put everything back to default 'factory' settings and no improvements.I have tried both fullscreen, windowed & windowed full screen settings and no improvements.I've disabled all my overlays, antivirus, firewall, ... no improvements.I've did a clean install of latest stable GPU driver and no improvements.

In the included screenshots I took them with both the ingame grapich menu showing the FPS & also with my RTSS overlay showing the GPU/CPU/Ram, etc usage. What I find odd is that when I actually lower the settings the performance becomes even worse and the game will use less system recourses.In the Nvidia controll panel I've set to Guild Wars 2 to 'maximum performance' but this has not changed anything and the performance stays poor.

On higher settings I can 'play' but the issue is that the framerate is constantly jumping around like 44 > 23 > 54 > 7 > 34 > 18 > etc, every second it just bounces around. Also whenever I activate a skill or somebody or an enemy uses a flashy attack the frame rate drips below 20 for a split second then ramping back up and down.It's so bad that it's actually causing me a headache

On my office laptop rocking an i3-5010 2.1Ghz (dualcore) and a little 920M grapich controller & 6Gb system ram and there I can actually play with an average of 50FPS with a few settings even turned to medium and high.

Are there any manual .ini tweaks I can do to actually put this game in a playable state?All helps is appreciated.

(I build this desktop back in 2015, 6 months ago I upgraded the GPU to an RTX 2070, I've been playing several different games both indie to tipple A eye candy games and I've never had any issues and all games have been running in 60FPS with little to no drops, so I think it's safe to say it's not really my hardware itself but certain settings of the game?)

Using Ultra settings:8vUQcZn.png

Using Low settings:GEg68hz.png

This really isn't fun.

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@"Fhaerron.8604" 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM is not what I'd call "modern hardware". My current main PC (bought at the end of 2017) is:

  • i7 7820X (Skylake X, 8 cores, two threads per core, stock clocks)
  • MSI Raider X299 mobo (proper Intel ethernet, none of this Realtek rubbish)
  • 64GB 3000 MHz DDR4 (stock clocks, 8 sticks of 8GB)
  • NVidia GTX 1080 (stock clocks)
  • Twin 60Hz 4K screens

Unless there's something "noisy" going on, I can easily get beyond 75 fps on max 4K graphics, and even in noisy stuff (big fights, Effect Animation Central), it's still fairly smooth, er, by my standards, that is. Bear in mind that I played for ages on a machine I built in 2011, one that was on the slow side even then, so I'm by no means a "60 FPS or go home" gamer. But I don't think I've seen it get actually visibly choppy, not like, say, Nier: Automata on the old machine, where I normally got 3-5 fps, and certain types of scenery would reduce it to seconds per frame...(1)

My vote in general would be that there's something in what @megal.6275 says, that the GPU isn't working hard enough to build any enthusiasm.

(1) Indeed, that, combined with 5K euros won in a random side-draw from the Euromillions lottery, was what drove me to buy the new PC.

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looking at screenshots... wait... what? your FPS went down on lowest settings? :lol:

The settings arent very clear on which one is utilised by CPU and which one is utilised by GPU

The one setting that will make a huge difference is Character Model Limit, this will reduce the amount of instructions need to be calculated by the CPUI wish Anet can make an even lower level 'Targeted Only', which will squeeze even more FPS for better experience.

In terms of GPU load, few settings testing what I founded with my GTX 1080 Ti monitoring using MSI Afterburner; bit lazy to test other settings, all set to the mediumReflection: Terrian & Sky +14% Load, All +32% LoadTexture: Medium +3% Load, High +12% LoadRender Sampling: Native +16% Load, Supersampling +16% Load (no load difference vs Native)

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town fps is expected to be lower than the max fps that your client can get.

if you want to know your max fps, go in a map (e.g. PvE) and make sure that all you see is your character.

you can do autodetect..

or

if you're not satisfied with your current fps (even after autodetecting), you can customize accordingly to ++ your fps.

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Did you recently upgrade your graphics card, and did you do a full removal of your old drivers when you did (using DDU)? If not, I'd recommend running that and doing a clean install of your graphics drivers, and see if that helps.

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@steki.1478 said:Search for d912pxy on gw2 reddit.Unfortunatly that didn't help as the game still didn't utilized my GPU/CPU, etc properly.

@megal.6275 said:RTX decides that there is not enough load to pull up its clocks from idle values. Workaround: set forced maximum power in drivers.Maybe anet or nvidia fix this problem someday.It's set it back to default and then back to max power and nothing has changed.

@"Sako.7609" said:First of all turn off the "Framerate limiter" and set "Refresh rate" to highest possible.Thank you for this suggestion, I'll try this out later.

@crepuscular.9047 said:looking at screenshots... wait... what? your FPS went down on lowest settings? :lol:

The settings arent very clear on which one is utilised by CPU and which one is utilised by GPU

The one setting that will make a huge difference is Character Model Limit, this will reduce the amount of instructions need to be calculated by the CPUI wish Anet can make an even lower level 'Targeted Only', which will squeeze even more FPS for better experience.

In terms of GPU load, few settings testing what I founded with my GTX 1080 Ti monitoring using MSI Afterburner; bit lazy to test other settings, all set to the mediumReflection: Terrian & Sky +14% Load, All +32% LoadTexture: Medium +3% Load, High +12% LoadRender Sampling: Native +16% Load, Supersampling +16% Load (no load difference vs Native)Well, as you can see my CPU/GPU utilization goes down as I lower my settings. This also happens when I set framelimit to 30.To the Rder Sampling, I think it mainly ramps up the Vram usage of the GPU, right? In any case I've never hit the full 8Gb of Vram my card has.

@IWAY.8231 said:town fps is expected to be lower than the max fps that your client can get.

if you want to know your max fps, go in a map (e.g. PvE) and make sure that all you see is your character.

you can do autodetect..

or

if you're not satisfied with your current fps (even after autodetecting), you can customize accordingly to ++ your fps.The main issue is stability with totally unexcusable extreme cases as shown in my screenshot.Out in the open I almost never hit 60FPS, the framerate keeps jumping around 23 > 40 > 54 > 17 > 26 > 34 > 42 > 28 > etc, every second it keeps jumping around like this.I can live with not having 60FPS in towns but I mainly want stability (with higher framerates) especially when I'm doing combat.

@Blocki.4931 said:There are some great performance guides around that might help you. Other than that I firmly believe it must be something with your hardware and/or settings for them because even though while not extremely optimized it shouldn't be this bad.Yes, I do remember many years ago I found some .ini manual tweaks, also there was this thread on the Nvidia forums with some tips and also GW2 Guru but that has been shut down unfortunatly.Back in 2012 during beta and WvW stress tests I actually had better performance then now (with much less powerfull hardware, I was using a GTX 260, I don't really recall my other hardware back then) and that was with all memory leaks and stuff going on back then. > Also with the .ini tweaks I was able to play with pretty stable performance.

Last time I upgraded was back in December upgrading to an RTX 2070 and I haven't had any issues with it, the only thing that could cause some crazy things is the 2 ram dims of 4Gb I added, they where cheap 1333Mhz 4Gb each, while I have 2 other corsair dims of 4Gb with higher clock speeds, however I downklocked my original corsair dims to 1333Mhz to match the new kingston dims I have and I haven't ran into any issue.I cannot upgrade my ram dims because, my i7 4790K is one of the last CPU's to use DDR3 ram, DDR3 ram is not being made anymore and the stock is very low cauzing prices to be very high, especially for higher clockspeed models.And the i7 4790K while being 'old' at this point was a crazy beast at it's time, and it's still plently powerfull for 60FPS/1080P gaming.I realise that GW2 uses a different engine then most other games I play, however I have no issues with any games I played.Some examples include:Tom Clancy's The Division 1Tom Clancy's The Division 2Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,Resident Evil 2 remakeRage 2Far Cry 5Final Fantasy XV

All of these games at 1080p (Well 1200P in my case since I got widescreen FHD) / 60FPS at nearly ultra settings in all games.Even Final Fantasy XV which is probably the highest powerhungry game I have I have all but (Hairworks and another gameworks feature I don't really recall now turned off) turned on & at ultra settings and I almost never get a stutter or anything, average of 60FPS.

And some other MMO's I play are Guild Wars 1, Final Fantasy XIV, (also tested on ESO, WoW & SW:ToR) and no poor performance there, all 60 fps with ultra settings

In the 6Months of I have this GPU now I never had a blue screen, crash or game crash, freeze or anything else.

@"Jemmi.6058" said:Did you recently upgrade your graphics card, and did you do a full removal of your old drivers when you did (using DDU)? If not, I'd recommend running that and doing a clean install of your graphics drivers, and see if that helps.Quote "I build this desktop back in 2015, 6 months ago I upgraded the GPU to an RTX 2070". I don't think 6 months is recently?Anyhow, yes, downloading latest Driver manually, remove eterhnet cable and safe mode DDU to remove all Nvidia stuff then back normal windows mode and install driver and then put back eterhnet cable.Also this PC has had a clean W10 install during these 6 months as well.

So I tried it again by removing Drivers and doing clean install of driver, reinstalling GW2 as adding -repair in the target field didn't do anything.I ran a CPU stress test on all 8 threads & a GPU stress test at the same time for +8 hours before I left to work, when I came back home the PC was still running fine (65C degrees max) and still running.I also did a memtest with *4 passes and all my ram dims are working fine too.

I'll contact Anet support & will also search around the internet for tweaks and such like I did back in 2012 to have it on acceptable performance/stabilisation.

Sorry for the slow answers, I work full time and don't always have much time to check back here before I drop into bed.Thanks for the advice so far.

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Windows 10 does have a fair bit of background dross going on like the Gamebar stuff which can be totally switched off.. makes a little difference, at least to me.I've used a few different guides in the past, once for my old GTX550Ti.. added an extra 10-20fps to my game, though even on that old card I never really struggled with very low FPS, just the usual drops in heavy particle fights like WvW.On my GTX 1080Ti I am getting around 50-80 FPS on med/high settings and my CPU is old by current marks (i7-3970k) and generally always pretty stable at 60FPS when setting frame limiter. Of course we all get those FPS drops in those heavy or poorly optimised areas of the game and main city hubs like LA unfortunately fall into that category imo.Maybe your just trying to push the CPU to much with all those high/ultra setting.. especially character limits and shadows.. try setting them back for starters. I would rather have better and more stable FPS than a ultra pretty mass of particles, but that's just me.

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@Bloodstealer.5978 said:Windows 10 does have a fair bit of background dross going on like the Gamebar stuff which can be totally switched off.. makes a little difference, at least to me.I've used a few different guides in the past, once for my old GTX550Ti.. added an extra 10-20fps to my game, though even on that old card I never really struggled with very low FPS, just the usual drops in heavy particle fights like WvW.On my GTX 1080Ti I am getting around 50-80 FPS on med/high settings and my CPU is old by current marks (i7-3970k) and generally always pretty stable at 60FPS when setting frame limiter. Of course we all get those FPS drops in those heavy or poorly optimised areas of the game and main city hubs like LA unfortunately fall into that category imo.Maybe your just trying to push the CPU to much with all those high/ultra setting.. especially character limits and shadows.. try setting them back for starters. I would rather have better and more stable FPS than a ultra pretty mass of particles, but that's just me.

Gamebar is off, I have most of those 'nififty' Windows stuff disabled by default because I don't use it.

I'm sorry but have you read my entire first post? I did also say that I had low FPS on low settings.

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  • 5 months later...

Hello @Fhaerron.8604I'm in the same situation like you, I have decided to move from my GTX1050M 4GB integrated GPU to a RTX2060Super 8GB eGPU. I receive performance increase in benchmarking software of about 6x more than before but GW2 performance has been decreased, doesn't matter if I play low detail settings, my FPS fits between 10-20FPS.I have tested the purposed solutions like using d912pxy or manually using high power settings for GW2 but no improvements detected... do you find any solution to this behavior?Best regards!,

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@RazoX.8270 @Fhaerron.8604d912pxy has an option which forces gpu out of idle clocksunder [misc]nv_disable_throttle=1or use Alrais_gw2_8gbVRAM_16gbRAM_config.ini from configs folderand I use fps limit from RTSS instead of the ingame oneoh and in case of gw2 crashes directly at start when using RTSS it can help to reset its cache at bottom of rtss setup

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  • 2 weeks later...

i have the same problem as far as i can tell. Frame rate drops making the game unplayable.I tried updating all the drivers,checking if it was somehow on powersaving mode or if it was the integrated intel GPU working instead of the NVIDIA gtx1050 and i reinstalled the game .

Other games run fine and GW2 used to work during summer holidays.

This is not a connection problem : Gw2 works on another computer plugged on the same network (both with wifi and with a cable).

PS: pc is a Lenovo legion Y520

any other info needed?Can you help? Gw2 is my favorite game and i miss it

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Well this game uses dx 9 so thats why you are geting minor improvements with powerful gpus. Same with me, i have i7 4790k with 1080ti but this game is only one that plays like slideshow with comfortable 25 fps in big fights. Starter zones and low population zones im getting easy 70+fps.. Your best bet is to reduce strain on cpu by reducing player model count in settings. Other than that... Idk. Devs could start using dx12 or upgrade their engine or something..

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@"steki.1478" said:Search for d912pxy on gw2 reddit.

I am not using that and am still able to avoid "slide shows". ;)

@Fhaerron.8604, simply adjust the two player model settings to medium and low for normal gameplay and low and lowest for heavy group content (world bosse etc). Always solves the issue for me, and my hardware is from 2009 and 2015 (I've also recently added Win10 in addition to Win7 and have the same performance on both systems, but then again, I do configure all my operating systems properly for the best possible performance).

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Actually d912pxy did it for me. Although no long time experience yet, just used it for an hour.

New system, AMD 3700x and 5700XT, runs like hell, but in GW2 the GPU was bored. Hovered around one third of max frequency.And stuttering, stops for a second or two. Extremely annoying.Now its quite smooth despite everything set to max, no stuttering, no stops. And GPU really has to work now.Hope it keeps on working like this, too short for a final verdict, will update if I encounter difficulties.

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after many reinstall and research nothing worked and it probably is due to overheating. That would explain why it gets worse when i set my cpu to High performance or when i keep my laptop plugged on sector. In power saving mode unplugged and with a lot of aeration the problem gets a lot less frequent.

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