Poor performances. I am providing videos and data.

[Arcades Saboth.5139]

Hello,

this post is for ArenaNet staff, I think other users are not interested so you can ignore this (probably I will be ignored entirely), however, due to an old discussion of a month ago, some other users are experiencing my problem and if that is the case, join me, let me know if you experience this same issue.

 

Since October 5 or 6 patch (I can't remember, I know it's one of those patch because, the same day, I posted this issue) I am experiencing severe performance problems and those problems appeared just after the patch. The day before the game was running perfectly fine and smooth with my settings in the range from high to ultra, now I have low FPS in the low to medium range.

 

I recorded a video and I asked a friend of mine to record a video to have a comparison. Our PCs have similar specs however I have a better video card while he has a better CPU, although, for this tests, I asked if he could downclock his CPU to meet my settings. I'll show you there is something very wrong with me but I can't figure out why is affecting just me.

 

Note, ArenaNet: I am not going to give all the information about us and our PC specs to the public (just a few) but if you require I can provide all the info you need.

Specifically I have both our DxDiag files, which includes our specs, and also during the test we profiled the game with Very Sleepy CS, because I believe it's a CPU issue. Of course we don't have any symbols so Very Sleep can't provide any information to us, but can be useful for you.

 

So for the tests we had these two specs :

# My spec

* Nvidia GTX 980

* Intel i5-6600k

* 16GB RAM

* Game installed in a SSD

# My friend spec:

* Nvidia GTX 970

* Intel i7-6700k¹

* 16GB RAM

* Game installed in a SSD

¹ my friend CPU is, of course, better than mine so he downclocked to meet my frequency of 3.5Ghz. He forgot to disable the HyperThreading so to compensate this he set the processor affinity only to the odd core numbers, so the game was running only on the physical cores. With this changes the only big difference is the clock boost and his L3 Cache is 2MB better, but I can't believe this leads to such a huge difference in performances.

 

Game settings for **both** users:

* We made a new character fresh: a Charr Thief. He skipped the customization while I spent a bit and changed something (because I wanted to keep this character, after the test)

* We set the game to **Best Appareance**, Full Screen 1920x1800, as you can see from both videos

* We set the Field of View to roughly the same (we don't have a number to test it so we set the slider as close each other as we can).

* We set the Collision precision to roughly the same.

* We moved our character **in the same position, looking at the same point** (of course roughly the same), in the first Instance of the tutorial

* We closed any other process in the background, in my case I also disabled my anti-virus.

* The shoot has been recorded with Nvidia ShadowPlay.

 

You can see from my video that my base FPS are lower then his but I have **huge spikes when moving the camera**, if I strafe the FPS doesn't change much.

I believe that the patch from 5th of October (or the 6th) changed something that is now ruining my performance.

 

Here are the videos...

[My Shoot](

)

[His Shoot](

)

 

Again, I made this post because this ruined my gameplay by far. At the moment I can't go to the new zones without changing the settings to the lowest possible. I was experiencing lower FPS in those zones but not to the point that I was under 30, now I can't go above.

 

I will make a ticket linking this post. I hope I can be listened and that this can help ArenaNet to address this issue.

Thank you.

 

_Additional Notes:_

We have different Nvidia Drivers however I am experiencing this issue since a month, and my friend has a older version than my drivers (but a month ago I had this driver, then I updated).

I was experiencing this problem in Windows 7, I recently updated to Windows 10, nothing has changed.

[Zantal.4798]

Please look into this, he won't stop bitching around that his fps are crap!

[innocens.1582]

reflections, shadows, character model limit and quality. turn those down a bit and your fps will rise.

[Zantal.4798]

Innocens, I will talk for my friend here (I did the comparison video in the post)

 

the issue does not go away when setting the options to min, something odd is going on here and it definitely looks like you didn't read the post entirely, this needs to be looked into from someone at arenanet since it might be a very odd hardware incompatibility that manifested itself with one of the latest patches,

 

so please

 

If any of you reading this post have the same issues write here (possibly with a video shot in 60fps so you can clearly see the stuttering)

[Bloodstealer.5978]

Are you and your friends on the same isp, are your connections behaving the same, are your background processes running identical?

How can we know that your PC's are setup and behaving the same.. what drivers are you both using on your GPU, what motherboards are you both using, do they have the same drivers for the various on board controllers, does the Nvid GTX 970 and GTX980 behave the same, are you using stock GPU's or are they o/c'ed. What GPU and CPU temps are you both getting as heat can be a factor. Are all your GPU fans, PC fans clean and clear is the pc setup the same in this regard.

 

There are many factors that can affect your FPS.. just because you have a similar GPU doesn't mean your going to get the same in game results.

 

One thing I have mentioned in previous posts is the Microsoft Win 10 Fall update - have you both updated your OS to it .. I personally am getting a weird drop down to a sudden solid 30FPS at times, half of what I normally get.. I run with vsync and FS Windowed.. a quick ALT -TAB to desktop and back tends to fix it until it happens again.. PITA I know but updates can cause some funny things... hopefully ANET or Microsoft will get it sorted, if that is indeed the cause.

[Arcades Saboth.5139]

Bloodstealer. You first sentence makes so much nonsense I am having an hard time trying to be diplomatic. But I'll try to explain:

FPS and Ping are totally unrelated. You can have low FPS but high Ping and vice-versa. A very High Ping **can** be affected by a very low FPS (like... 1~5) **only in very extreme cases**, like when the application is slowing down so much it has to drop packets. And that case is not mine, as you can see from the video..

 

Of course we don't have the same setup, we live in the PC world so there is no way you have the same setup _for this exact reason_ I asked my friend to downclock his processor and disable the hyperthreading (artificially, but again, we can't have the same setup).

This problem **happened suddenly since a patch**, a specific patch: the one from October 5th, as I state on my post. At that time I was with Windows 7, my friend with Win10 and both me and my friend had the same driver. Then I upgraded to Windows 10 and we had the same driver. Then I updated the driver but my friend doesn't. We had many occasion in which we had a similar setup. **I had double my actual FPS before that patch**, no hardware change.

 

Also I didn't made a record of my temperature but I had everything under control with Afterburner, so no throttling was happening. I setup the power manager to achieve maximum performance.

I won't comment the rest, as it is irrelevant.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

duh.. I know what they are.. I was merely making the point that saying the two pc's should do exactly the same is pretty unlikely given the variables.. FPS and PING were just examples to say that they might be identical but things can still behave differently, I did not say that PING was affecting your FPS.

 

And yes.. if your both running different GPU driver builds then FPS may just be an issue.. in fact 2 Nvidia updates back my pc began to see some FPS drop and also elevated temps.. the latest driver update from Nvidia seems to have sorted that out, however the Win 10 Fall update seems to have caused something to go a little off beat again... off course to you that's kind of "irrelevant" as you liked to say.

So maybe it's best we just let you answer your own thread as it's clear you know all the answers, nothing more anyone can do with that kind of attitude.

[moonstarmac.4603]

The difference is your CPU. The i7 6700k has a much higher single core performance over the i6 6600k. Additionally, if you are running at stock speeds, or even drop his i7 to your speeds, the i7's hyperthreading still gives it an edge. This game is extremely CPU heavy.

 

Other things to consider, your antivirus or any background tasks that may be running.

[PaxTheGreatOne.9472]

2 other things:

Put your Nvidia card on max performance (nvidia tool), and

make sure you are on a PCI-e 3.0 bus. and not v2.0 it's double the throughput...

 

and the Nvidia settings will make sure your card isn't put in any powersaving mode, destroying FPS.

 

Does your GTX 980 CPU-bottleneck your system?

Other background programs trying to load, using CPU or reducing network bandwith...

 

This game now uses 3 threads if you have 2 background programs both using a core you will suffer framedrops. Been like this since the launch of PoF

[Arcades Saboth.5139]

Guys, you didn't read my post:

@"moonstarmac.4603" as I wrote: yes, they are different CPU that's why my friend **downclocked the CPU and disabled the HyperThread**. And yes, **I disabled the antivirus and closed any backgroudn thread and any useless service**.

@"PaxTheGreatOne.9472" as I wrote: I already set it to max performance.

 

I had higher FPS before a patch, then suddenly a huge drop. Normally me and my friend had similar FPS, sometimes I had higher (due to a better GPU, so I could have higher Shader and Shadow settings), sometimes he had (due to a better CPU, so he could afford more characters on screen).

 

[Caedmon.6798]

> @PaxTheGreatOne.9472 said:

> 2 other things:

> Put your Nvidia card on max performance (nvidia tool), and

> make sure you are on a PCI-e 3.0 bus. and not v2.0 it's double the throughput...

>

> and the Nvidia settings will make sure your card isn't put in any powersaving mode, destroying FPS.

>

> Does your GTX 980 CPU-bottleneck your system?

> Other background programs trying to load, using CPU or reducing network bandwith...

>

> This game now uses 3 threads if you have 2 background programs both using a core you will suffer framedrops. Been like this since the launch of PoF

 

Pcie 2 vs pcie 3 is about 1 - 2 fps difference,you can google this easily.And im not talking about benchmarks that dont reflect actual pc usage,im talking about gaming difference.

 

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/07/18/pci_express_20_vs_30_gpu_gaming_performance_review/2

 

 

@ OP

 

Put your Character model limit And Quality at Low, its super heavy on the cpu.

Put super sample to Native

Reflections to Terrain only

And most of all Shadows to High or Preferably Medium ( Ultra has been bugged since launch )

 

This should boost your fps big time

 

Also check if your gpu is running at x16 with http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/nvidia-inspector-download,4.html and not at x4,had the same issue some while back that just happend out of nowhere.

[Arcades Saboth.5139]

> @Caedmon.6798 said:

>

> @ OP

>

> Put your Character model limit And Quality at Low, its super heavy on the cpu.

> Put super sample to Native

> Reflections to Terrain only

> And most of all Shadows to High or Preferably Medium ( Ultra has been bugged since launch )

>

> This should boost your fps big time

Of course I can improve FPS by decreasing quality, I already do that. But first of all have you watched the video? The difference is about 30 FPS, not 5 or even 10: 30! There is something very wrong.

Anyway I used the Best Appearance to be sure we both have the same setting and to exacerbate the problem. Even at Best Performance I was about at 110 but when I move it decreases to 70~80. The problem is when I move the camera, this is the main point: if I strafe the FPS doesn't change (much).

 

> @Caedmon.6798 said:

> Also check if your gpu is running at x16 with http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/nvidia-inspector-download,4.html and not at x4,had the same issue some while back that just happend out of nowhere.

This is the first interesting comment and I thank you for that. I will check this when I'll be back at home. However it is most likely that the GPU is not bound at all, neither in speed nor in bandwidth and it's more a CPU problem. However the profiler effectively shown a lot for a Wait for Present, so it is possible.

[Healix.5819]

If your system drive is nearly full (<1GB), Windows will try to compensate, which will slow everything.

 

Stuttering, especially while moving the camera, can be caused by shader caching. You can toggle it under the NVIDIA Control Panel > 3D Settings > Shader Cache.

 

Already mentioned, check the interface speed of the GPU (gpu-z / inspector). You may not notice it in other games, but if the GPU is operating at x1, it will easily cut GW2's FPS in half. This can happen when the GPU is slanted / not slotted properly.

[Arcades Saboth.5139]

> @Caedmon.6798 said:

> Also check if your gpu is running at x16 with http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/nvidia-inspector-download,4.html and not at x4,had the same issue some while back that just happend out of nowhere.

 

You won. Definitely. That was exactly the problem. I had my PCIe stuck at x1, I detached the card, cleaned the contacts and reattached and it's now running at x16.

Now I have back my FPS. In the new zones I had like 15 fps, now I am back to 50.

 

Thank you very much Caedom. I didn't think at all about the PCI speed.

 

 

[Caedmon.6798]

> @"Arcades Saboth.5139" said:

> > @Caedmon.6798 said:

> > Also check if your gpu is running at x16 with http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/nvidia-inspector-download,4.html and not at x4,had the same issue some while back that just happend out of nowhere.

>

> You won. Definitely. That was exactly the problem. I had my PCIe stuck at x1, I detached the card, cleaned the contacts and reattached and it's now running at x16.

> Now I have back my FPS. In the new zones I had like 15 fps, now I am back to 50.

>

> Thank you very much Caedom. I didn't think at all about the PCI speed.

>

>

 

Thats great to hear !