What do i need to upgrade in order to play gw2 smoothly?

[Imperial Hellkite.9374]

Hi,

 

My PC is pretty old, but still it somehow meets the system requirements of gw2:

 

System requirements (minimum)

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better.

OS: Windows® 7 or better (64 bit only)

VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS, ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT.

FREE DISK SPACE: 50 GB.

 

My PC

Intel® Core™ i3-2100 Processor (3M Cache, 3.10 GHz)

GTX 750 ti - video card (its actually new, i bought it as a replacement for ATI Radeon HD 5770 )

4 gb - ram

Windows 10

 

I have been to lazy to buy a new PC, but right now the game is borderline unplayable (huge fps drops) even on the "best performance" settings.

Can someone advise me if i should just buy a new video card and what kind of PC build do i need in order to run this game 100% smoothly? I am ready to buy a brand new PC if required.

Also what are the real system requirements of this game to run it smoothly?

 

Best Regards

 

[Martimus.6027]

I mean no offense, but a GTX 750ti is an _extremely_ outdated card. Just getting a new graphics card alone will give you a tremendous bump in framerates, my god...

 

I suggest _at least_ 8 gigs of ram nowadays, leaning more towards 16.

 

As someone who helps and sometimes builds gaming PCs for people in his spare time, i suggest giving a look at iBuyPower. Alienware you are basically paying for the 'brand.'

 

But yea, if you can, buy more RAM, buy a much better graphics card like a 980ti or a 1070 or something, and if you want to get a new PC altogether I would go with ibuypower. If you want to build one from scratch, just gut your tower, buy the necessary items from newegg or tigerdirect, and install it all. (obviously much easier said than done, gotta have the correct motherboard for your tower, proper power supply for your rig, and sufficient cooling system for it as well).

 

You can always just sell your old cards/memory/PC to offset your current costs of upgrading.

[moonstarmac.4603]

Is your computer a custom build or branded unit (Dell, HP, etc)?

 

Your i3 is a bit of a bottleneck, GW2 is very taxing on a CPU. For 2nd gen, if you have a custom you can get a higher i5 or i7 easily, but being 2nd gen it is a bit dated.

 

4GB of RAM on Windows 10 is barely enough to run the OS and a handful of programs. W10 uses 2.7-3G of RAM easy. If you have a 64bit OS, as Martimus stated, go for at least 8GB of RAM.

 

The 750TI isn't that great. I wouldn't go as far as pairing a GTX 1xxx card with an i3 2nd gen...it would be a waste.

 

Forewarning though...depending on what you consider 'smooth' I will state that even players with 6th, 7th, and 8th gen i5/i7s, GTX 1080TIs, Ryzen 1s have had some hiccups. In 1440p I get 50-60fps in most areas. 20-30 in world bosses and zergs. If you are looking at cranking out insane FPS and ultra smooth gameplay, it is something that isn't easily accomplished in this game.

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

The graphics card isn't that big a deal. I could get reasonable performance on an i5-750 (4 single-thread cores, 2.8GHz) and an NVidia GT **430**. No, it wasn't top-rated, but it was acceptable, even in effects-busy WvW and world-boss event scenarios. (For entirely other reasons, I replaced the machine with something ... more capable, let's say, and on the same settings, I was getting well over 100 fps instead of mid-20s.)

 

But yeah, upgrading RAM from 4GB to 8GB is the first step. The 64-bit GW2 client can easily eat 3.5GB of RAM which will set the machine paging between RAM and the disk like a mad thing, which will, indeed, wreck performance.

[Ashantara.8731]

Have you already unparked all CPU cores and activated hyper-threading?

 

--> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/467900#Comment_467900

[Despond.2174]

Just so you know, nothing is really going to stop large frame drops on full maps with everyone spamming spells in a meta but it will drastically improve it from a sliding show to just slow lag. My PC is only about 1 year old, and a full Teq it will still drop as low as 20-30 fps. GW2 engine doesn't fully utilize the new CPUs I think as well. But outside of mega metas it's all smooth.

 

As for RAM, 16gb is pretty much standard. RAM is so cheap so there's really no reason other than a system/mobo that can't support it to not get 16gb. If you're starting to replace too many individual parts then maybe consider ordering part and making a new system, Time to cost ratio will probably be a lot better.

[mercury ranique.2170]

To be honest, not many people on this thread are answering your question. There is no golden answer.

My main question is bout what you are experiencing and when. Is the game running good in solo, but bad with others around? What game formats?

The minimum requirements are based on the start of the game before mega servers and massive meta events. If you go back to queensdale ( shaemoor) the game should run reasonable smoothly. If it isn’t you might reconsider reinstalling windows and all drivers and the game. If that doesn’t change, it you might have faulty hardware.

 

If you have issues in highly populated format or formats with loads of screen clutter, this issue is with the actual stats, both the cpu and and the gpu are the cause. So consider upgrading both, Justin the gpu might cause improvement, but it is hard to say. Likely both needs to be upgraded.