Frame drops on a high end computer

[DioWolf.7418]

Well not super high end but high enough to warrant a higher frame rate.

I recently jumped back into GW2 and I'm experiencing multiple frame drops. I'll usually get around 40 to 45fps in most areas but it's dependent on where I'm looking. Right now I'm at the Asura starting area just after the big Golem boss. My current Graphic settings in-game can be seen here https://puu.sh/AInF1/c481d98818.png

I've tried disabling NVIDIA Shadowplay and reverted my Nvidia driver to 385.85 but nothing has seemed to work so far, so any advice would be appreciated.

My computer specs are as follows:Processor: Intel Core i7-2600 CPU 3.40GHz (8 CPUs) ~3.8GHzRAM: 8GBVideo Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

Two things to check:

1. Does turning down the character model limit to the lowest setting help?
2. Can you look at the All Cores view in task manager and tell us if one of them is running 100 percent busy or close to it while you experience the frame rate drop?

[gem.9038]

Unfortunately this is a problem for everyone. GW2 engine is heavily reliant on the CPU and doesn't utilize it very well. So even if you have the best CPU in the world, it's only going to help you so much due to how the game processes certain things. Unlocking your cores won't help either since the game engine doesn't use all of them. It would help greatly if it did but unfortunately doesn't. GW2 engine is a modified GW1 engine. And while this is not uncommon in video games, for whatever reason this particular engine has difficulty rendering many objects at once (such as players).

The best solution I have for this is to turn model limit and quality to low. Model limit makes it so you see less players and npcs at one time. Model quality means how many players will be rendered with their actual skins. Turning shadows to low can also greatly help, but it will look a bit more blah. Changing reflections to terrain and sky can somewhat help as well. You can however bump shaders, terrain and LOD distance up to high as they require GPU more than your CPU. Also if you prefer a sharper image, you can change your anti-aliasing to SMAA High. SMAA is a more advanced version similar to FXAA with nearly no cost on frame rate.

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

@"circuitnerd.5863" said:Unfortunately this is a problem for everyone. GW2 engine is heavily reliant on the CPU and doesn't utilize it very well. So even if you have the best CPU in the world, it's only going to help you so much due to how the game processes certain things.

Yeah, single threaded CPU performance is the bottleneck if you eliminate everything else. In part because it uses four cores, but every CPU in the universe has at least four of them now.

Unlocking your cores won't help either since the game engine doesn't use all of them. It would help greatly if it did but unfortunately doesn't.

It doesn't help because it is not a real problem, so the "fix" can't do anything a placebo can't, assuming you mean "unparking" the cores. If not, I'm not clear what you mean here.

GW2 engine is a modified GW1 engine. And while this is not uncommon in video games, for whatever reason this particular engine has difficulty rendering many objects at once (such as players).

It's that single thread: it handles, among other things, character model positioning. That is why, when it becomes the bottleneck, turning down character model count can help -- less work means less bottleneck.

The best solution I have for this is to turn model limit and quality to low. Model limit makes it so you see less players and npcs at one time. Model quality means how many players will be rendered with their actual skins. Turning shadows to low can also greatly help, but it will look a bit more blah.

I personally prefer shadows off to low, from a visual standpoint. The performance difference is minuscule, though, and I do it because aesthetics.

Changing reflections to terrain and sky can somewhat help as well. You can however bump shaders, terrain and LOD distance up to high as they require GPU more than your CPU. Also if you prefer a sharper image, you can change your anti-aliasing to SMAA High. SMAA is a more advanced version similar to FXAA with nearly no cost on frame rate.

Yah. If you have a powerful enough GPU, you can even ditch the anti-aliasing and use super-sampled rendering, and take advantage of the extra quality that brings, since it doesn't increase the CPU cost at all, just the GPU cost.

[alphafert.6730]

I had this issue show up & was getting drops as low as 5fps never going over 50fps. I have a mxi 1080, i7 & on win 10. Turning off shadow play completely fixed it. I now get between 90-120fps on max settings.