Guild Wars 2

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1_rick

Supreme [H]ardness
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Anyone out there playing this with a fast Intel CPU, preferably something like a 9900K with an all-core close to 5GHz, and also something like an RTX 2070?

According to lore, the game's renderer is somewhat single-threaded. In particular, if you get into a crowded world boss fight with 50+ players all throwing flashy attacks, the framerate can drop. Back when I had a 1060, I'd see lows of ~10fps, as reported by the game. I upgraded to a 2070, and now I'm seeing mininums of ~18fps, which is nice, but I've been wondering if something faster than a Ryzen 3600X would give me higher minimums (HWInfo64 generally shows a couple of cores at ~4.2GHz at these times.)

Overall I'm really happy with this CPU, but I wonder if I can get enough performance increase in this admittedly limited scenario to be worth going to the effort of upgrading CPU, motherboard, etc., etc. (Oh--also, I run a modded Minecraft setup (Enigmatica 2, if anyone cares) that takes around 5-10 solid minutes to start up because it's doing so much work, and I kinda wonder if that could be improved with, say, a 9900K overclocked.)
 
1_rick said:
Anyone out there playing this with a fast Intel CPU, preferably something like a 9900K with an all-core close to 5GHz, and also something like an RTX 2070?

According to lore, the game's renderer is somewhat single-threaded. In particular, if you get into a crowded world boss fight with 50+ players all throwing flashy attacks, the framerate can drop. Back when I had a 1060, I'd see lows of ~10fps, as reported by the game. I upgraded to a 2070, and now I'm seeing mininums of ~18fps, which is nice, but I've been wondering if something faster than a Ryzen 3600X would give me higher minimums (HWInfo64 generally shows a couple of cores at ~4.2GHz at these times.)

Overall I'm really happy with this CPU, but I wonder if I can get enough performance increase in this admittedly limited scenario to be worth going to the effort of upgrading CPU, motherboard, etc., etc. (Oh--also, I run a modded Minecraft setup (Enigmatica 2, if anyone cares) that takes around 5-10 solid minutes to start up because it's doing so much work, and I kinda wonder if that could be improved with, say, a 9900K overclocked.)
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I've played GW2 since the beta.

I can't tell you how many threads I've seen where people go buy a shiny new AMD PC and come away bitterly disappointed.

Simply put, GW2 hates AMD, it's indifferent to how many cores you have and barely takes notice of your GPU.

Above maybe a GTX1080 or RTX2070, even at high resolutions, your GPU won't matter much, if any.

You want a 5.0Ghz (+++) Intel CPU - that's it. The game is CPU bound and also network bound.

A better GPU will give you higher frames on the upper end in the low population areas like dungeons and fractals and most open world stuff but the CPU is king.
 
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DoubleTap said:
I can't tell you how many threads I've seen where people go buy a shiny new AMD PC and come away bitterly disappointed.
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All I can say is that outside of big world boss battles--you know what I'm talking about: first Svanir Shaman or Megadestroyer after reset--I have no complaints about framerate or graphics quality. I have it turned up nearly to max and it's fine except for the situation where I mentioned. I'll admit that trying to improve low framerates in these battles is a silly thing, but this is [H]ardforum, not witchforum.

I have a 2070, and I'm happy with it--the game is beautiful on my PC 98% of the time.

If I DO switch to Intel over this I'll probably wait until the 10th-gen chips come out.

Thanks, btw!
 
1_rick said:
All I can say is that outside of big world boss battles--you know what I'm talking about: first Svanir Shaman or Megadestroyer after reset--I have no complaints about framerate or graphics quality. I have it turned up nearly to max and it's fine except for the situation where I mentioned. I'll admit that trying to improve low framerates in these battles is a silly thing, but this is [H]ardforum, not witchforum.

I have a 2070, and I'm happy with it--the game is beautiful on my PC 98% of the time.

If I DO switch to Intel over this I'll probably wait until the 10th-gen chips come out.

Thanks, btw!
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I agree that 98% of the time, it's not an issue, but I've seen a lot of people "upgrade" to try to address those high density fights, but not read the community recommendations that spell out the case for intel. I doubt very many games or normal applications have this much of a disparity, GW2 is the most extreme example I'm aware of.
 
DoubleTap said:
I agree that 98% of the time, it's not an issue, but I've seen a lot of people "upgrade" to try to address those high density fights, but not read the community recommendations that spell out the case for intel. I doubt very many games or normal applications have this much of a disparity, GW2 is the most extreme example I'm aware of.
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Thanks for the info,

I didn't play for super long, leveled a necromancer until like 40 or something .. but those world boss fights, are they the only parts where the game becomes unplayable?
 
blackmomba said:
Thanks for the info,

I didn't play for super long, leveled a necromancer until like 40 or something .. but those world boss fights, are they the only parts where the game becomes unplayable?
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Basically yes. There are a couple of other limited places where it may happen. From what I remember of forum threads a year or so ago, the basic problem is character rendering. The more players being drawn, the slower it gets. You can sort of see this anecdotally by opening the options dialog & watching the framerate, then going to one of the crowded world bosses, preferably where everyone's packed in close, like the Svanir Shaman, when there's 50-100 people, and then watching the FPS counter nosedive. If you turn around so you can't see the people, the framerate goes back up. There's also a couple of graphical options that stops rendering individual skins, turning people into untextured default-class models and that only renders a small number of characters at all, and also see the framerate go up. So if you are, say, in Divinity's Reach on the start of Wintersday when half the server's in that one city, that can slow things down, but basically it's just the world bosses.

In my case, the game's still playable, I'm just annoyed by it. What I'd love to know without spending the money is how much more FPS I could get if I replaced my CPU with a top-speed Intel one. Would I go from worst-case 18fps to 25? 40? I mean, 18fps is kind of janky but as I said, still playable for me.
 
1_rick said:
Basically yes. There are a couple of other limited places where it may happen. From what I remember of forum threads a year or so ago, the basic problem is character rendering. The more players being drawn, the slower it gets. You can sort of see this anecdotally by opening the options dialog & watching the framerate, then going to one of the crowded world bosses, preferably where everyone's packed in close, like the Svanir Shaman, when there's 50-100 people, and then watching the FPS counter nosedive. If you turn around so you can't see the people, the framerate goes back up. There's also a couple of graphical options that stops rendering individual skins, turning people into untextured default-class models and that only renders a small number of characters at all, and also see the framerate go up. So if you are, say, in Divinity's Reach on the start of Wintersday when half the server's in that one city, that can slow things down, but basically it's just the world bosses.

In my case, the game's still playable, I'm just annoyed by it. What I'd love to know without spending the money is how much more FPS I could get if I replaced my CPU with a top-speed Intel one. Would I go from worst-case 18fps to 25? 40? I mean, 18fps is kind of janky but as I said, still playable for me.
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Thanks man,

I had a good time with the game while I'll played. I think I'll reinstall.

Indeed I remember something about setting a limit on character models that helped

Running a 2700x
 
YW. And yeah, the limit on characters helps.

Apropos of nothing, they put giant cats outside the cities.
 
blackmomba said:
Thanks for the info,

I didn't play for super long, leveled a necromancer until like 40 or something .. but those world boss fights, are they the only parts where the game becomes unplayable?
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The game is a lot bigger than it used to be and most of the big boss fights are (or at least, were, two years ago) pro forma and easy. You can turn down the number of visible players which helps a lot.

Aside from very large WVW battles and big boss fights, most of the game will give you medium to high frame rates.

The big cities are more medium where as open world events and instanced content (dungeons, raids, fractals, story instances) are very smooth and high fps.
 
Trying to get through the stories, still haven't got a mount yet lol been playing for the past couple of hours. Playing a necromancer atm. I don't care too much about the build cause it doesn't seem like I'm anywhere close to end game. Ive been playing on and off for like 6 years

I was well into WoW retail, ran a resto drood but Working out a good build in GW2 seems a lot more involved than it was for WoW

Happy to see population looks great, plenty of folks running around.

Anyone have a guild that's looking for new members ?
 
Sharing a project that I found that helps boost performance quite a bit from what I've seen so far

d912pxy is a way to make games that use DirectX 9 use DirectX 12 instead, without changing any gam code.
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https://github.com/megai2/d912pxy

gw001.jpg

32 FPS isn't anything to really be happy about, but I swear this did a really good job stabilizing frametimes and minimums.
 
1_rick said:
What's your gpu? I tried this with a 2070 and it didn't seem to make much difference.
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1080ti and I saw a world of difference, especially in frametimes and minimums, almost night and day

The usual areas are still a little rough like in my screen shot above, but everything is so much smoother. I haven't got much turned down/off either so I'm very impressed

When I started the game for the first time after installing this tool, I was able to get a little fps graph overlay with ctrl N or something, confirming the tool was running. Doesn't seem to want to work anymore

There are some issues with portraits on the character select screen though that I noticed, but haven't had any other issues so far
 
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