My suggestion is to grab one of the utilities mentioned in the above comments to help you overclock. Optimization isn’t something you can work around but clock speed is.
Barring outside interference from other programs running on your machine, it is almost certainly a combination of clock speed and optimization for your CPU. CPU utilization is a programming issue and the percentage you’re seeing is normal most games aren’t designed to take advantage of all four cores at the same level, so what’s it’s _not_ taking advantage of results in your low utilization numbers (generally, games will use one core more than the three others and two of them hardly at all). Yours is fairly common however, it’s getting older and the clock isn’t the best. If it was your GPU, changing the settings would alter the width of your bottleneck, which you describe as not happening (FPS would go up substantially on lower settings). RAM can be thrown out you have enough and it has gaming-level clock speed (for reference, average is 1333, yours is 1800). Your issue, without a doubt, falls into three areas: processor, GPU, or RAM.
That said, an SSD is nice and one of the most noticeable upgrades you can get for a computer - just make sure you install GW2 on it. Aside from spell effects and character models, there isn’t a major difference between PvE and PvP in terms of your hard drive’s role. Furthermore, if your hard drive was struggling that much you would absolutely see it in PvE too. Most people don’t have SSDs and the game was almost certainly not designed to need one to function therefore, we can safely assume it was programmed and tested functional on 7200RPM drives like yours. That would give you hitching, as you mention, and, while it’s possible you _could_ see a FPS drop from load speed, it’s extremely unlikely here. This will be a little lengthy but it may help you and others in the future. I’d like to put to bed a few of the well intentioned but misguided suggestions being thrown out here. I have a good amount of technical know-how and have been building, testing, and repairing computers for a long time (I went through an A+ certification course a few years back, as well). I can set my settings as low as they will go or to ultra and I see ZERO difference in my FPS. This is what has me confused the most. Why am I not seeing any performance change between the two highest and lowest settings? I’m also concerned about the fact that my GPU is being underutilized. In massive fights it will only be 40% used, and sometimes my core clock and shader clock will throttle.  My CPU is only being 50-60% utilized. I see no reason for me to have any game-breaking lag at all.Īny help you can provide is appreciated. I added a video showing the issue happening after the jump. GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 – 1GB – EVGA Superclockedĭrivers: I have tried the 306.02 beta drivers, and the current stable release drivers. No difference. However, in WvW zones when there is any sort of battle going on my FPS will drop to 5-15 depending on the fight. It becomes unplayable, a slide show, and I get motion sickness.ĬPU: Intel® Coreâ„¢ i7 930 Processor (4x 2.80GHz/8MB 元 Cache) I can get around 50-60 FPS in the PvE world, and the game is actually quite smooth. In fact, I have no complaints about the PvE zones except for some random overheating and frame drops in places like Lion’s Arch or random zones. Generally speaking, I would say PvE is flawless. I spent the entire week changing settings, monitoring performance, changing drivers, pouring over forums, and trying to figure out what is causing my issues. I want to talk about my week-long efforts to figure out what is going on with my computer and Guild Wars 2. To give you a very quick summary, I’m having weird FPS issues and lots of instability with my hardware and the game.