Having performance problems when there are huge amounts of players.

[Artkikus.2179]

Hey,
My game starts lagging when there are huge quantities of players. I've heard the game is really CPU-Heavy and is not utilizing multiple cores(or not doing it that good).
I have a Ryzen 7 5800X (So more cores with less power basically), but switching to another CPU just because this game is not running good with it is no option and would be absolutely crazy.
But I have no problem upgrading in the future(Any recommendations for a AMD CPU that would be an upgrade and would run GW2 good?)

But for now:
Do you guys have any tips or tricks, or is a update/upgrade planned for the game at some point? ^^

Also it's not unplayable, would just be nice to have a few more FPS and that without turning character limit to LOWEST.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Artkikus.2179
correction

[TheQuickFox.3826]

There are settings between lowest and highest. You absolutely try the different intermediate levels to see what brings a good compromise between graphics quality and performance.

It is true that GW2 is CPU heavy but it also requires a powerful graphics card to render everything that the CPU throws at it and a SSD is very much recommended to protect against stutters because the game constantly loads textures off the disk. Even when you have a lot of RAM.

Here is a good guide to tweak your GW2 graphics settings:

 

[Artkikus.2179]

22 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

There are settings between lowest and highest. You absolutely try the different intermediate levels to see what brings a good compromise between graphics quality and performance.

It is true that GW2 is CPU heavy but it also requires a powerful graphics card to render everything that the CPU throws at it and a SSD is very much recommended to protect against stutters because the game constantly loads textures off the disk. Even when you have a lot of RAM.

Here is a good guide to tweak your GW2 graphics settings:

 

Yes thank you, actually I already watched this video and optimized settings. The only problem I have is that when not around many players the game runs perfect and caps at 144 fps(how I want it). So turning down settings is annoying because it would only be needed when around many players.

I’m providing a bit more information now about my hardware specs:

Windows 11, RTX 3060TI, 32GB DDR4-3600MHz, and fast SSD.

I can run star citizen smooth without fps drops or anything. That makes me the most „annoyed“, because it’s crazy that it’s „not enough“ to run guild wars 2 smooth 😞

[TheQuickFox.3826]

144FPS with a lot of players and effects going will probably not be achievable. 60FPS is considered to be excellent on powerful hardware, high detail and a lot of action. You will often see dips below that in WvW battles and large PvE battles like world bosses. It's the nature of the game and genre with so many effects and detailed fully customizable player characters.

On powerful hardware: If a game just has to render 1000 copies of the same tree: No problem, even if they are high polygon. But here every player character is different so this is harder to parallelize in rendering. This is the primary reason why a game like GW2 is more CPU heavy. All these customizations need CPU assistance before they can be sent to the GPU to render them. You still need a powerful GPU as well.

[Artkikus.2179]

7 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

144FPS with a lot of players and effects going will probably not be achievable. 60FPS is considered to be excellent on powerful hardware, high detail and a lot of action. You will often see dips below that in WvW battles and large PvE battles like world bosses. It's the nature of the game and genre with so many effects and detailed fully customizable player characters.

On powerful hardware: If a game just has to render 1000 copies of the same tree: No problem, even if they are high polygon. But here every player character is different so this is harder to parallelize in rendering. This is the primary reason why a game like GW2 is more CPU heavy. All these customizations need CPU assistance before they can be sent to the GPU to render them. You still need a powerful GPU as well.

That’s right, thanks for the additional information.

I absolutely understand that it really is no easy task and there is a lot of stuff that needs to be processed, but other games have the same issue and have their way of handling it. There are solutions to this problem that could be done on the dev side, but don’t want to blame them. Just hope that at some point they will use some solutions for this. 

[Taniniver BlindDragon.9503]

There is nothing you can do other than turn down the character model limits and quality. The simple fact is, the game engine performs very poorly when there are lots of players around, it hugely bottlenecks on a single CPU thread, to the point where GPU use actually drops because the game isn't supplying frames fast enough. Even if you overclocked your CPU to 8 GHz using LN2 or something, it still wouldn't be fast enough to hit 144 FPS with lots of players around and the character limits on something other than lowest. No amount of CPU power is enough to fix it, it's just the code.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Taniniver BlindDragon.9503

[TheQuickFox.3826]

17 minutes ago, Taniniver BlindDragon.9503 said:

There is nothing you can do other than turn down the character model limits and quality. The simple fact is, the game engine performs very poorly when there are lots of players around, it hugely bottlenecks on a single CPU thread, to the point where GPU use actually drops because the game isn't supplying frames fast enough. Even if you overclocked your CPU to 8 GHz using LN2 or something, it still wouldn't be fast enough to hit 144 FPS with lots of players around and the character limits on something other than lowest. No amount of CPU power is enough to fix it, it's just the code.

The engine is multi threaded and scales on more than one core. But scaling is limited as not everything can be easily parallelized. But the saying that GW2 is single threaded is not true.

Edited August 14, 2023 by TheQuickFox.3826

[Chaba.5410]

Your newer hardware doesn't entirely matter.  This has been true of GW2 since launch that when there's more characters to render, the rendering pipeline slows down.  With the newer hardware, it just hits the game engine limitations faster than before.

The only practical tip I'd offer is lower your expectations, especially on FPS.  This game wasn't created on newer hardware.  It doesn't take advantage of all the new stuff.

The move from DX9 to DX11 wasn't just for future proofing the game.  It was also for improving the performance of the rendering pipeline (you can read about it here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/directx11-support-is-coming-to-guild-wars-2/).  There's still a main thread that has to wait which is why GW2 always performed better on CPUs that had good single-threading performance over those that didn't.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Taniniver BlindDragon.9503]

3 hours ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

The engine is multi threaded and scales on more than one core. But scaling is limited as not everything can be easily parallelized. But the saying that GW2 is single threaded is not true.

I didn't say or even imply it's single threaded. It certainly does use multiple cores. Nor do I consider parallelising an easy tasy. But something somewhere in the code as it exists now results in a single CPU thread becoming a major bottleneck when lots of players are around. It certainly can't use 16 cores for example.