Increasing your FPS (tips)

[Raye]

So I'm shamelessly stealing some of these suggestions from reddit, but I also will add some of my own. Feel free to add any others you've found work for you. :3

In no particular order:

• Always keep your drivers up to date, sometimes there's special GW2 fixes.
  
• If you have an nvidia card, the -cuda command seems to gain you some 5-10 FPS, it depends on your machine though.
  
• Switch between Fullscreen and Fullscreen Windowed. Sometimes one has better performance over the other, though it seems to be dependent on your graphics card, so just try both options out and pick the best one \o/
  
• For those of you who don't really care about the prettiness, and are mostly concerned with performance, there's always the option of just running everything in the lowest settings. I care about prettyness too much to do that <_<
  
• If you turn everything to low, and leave the Render Sampling option on Native, it'll look generally acceptable.
  
• Conversely, if you leave everything on high, and turn Render Sampling to Subsample, you'll get a ****ton of FPS, at the price of your character being all blurry. It is generally good to go to subsample in places where the particle effects are starting to affect performance. For me that's places like zering in WvW. *edit a few days later to add: apparently this doesn't work for everyone, it might look crazy... I'm not sure why it works for me but not for shadowhand*
  
• If you're looking to gain FPS without losing too much prettiness, I'd turn off Shadows completely, followed by Reflections.
  
• If you don't care for having some sharpy-edges (as opposed to nicely blended ones) you can turn off FXAA, though I personally have not found that to improve FPS too much.
  
• Lowering LOD distance to medium can work wonders.
  
• Post-processing, now that's a big one. I don't like to turn that off at all, it makes everything more dark and dull, but it will gain you a noticeable amount of FPS.
  
• You can try to turn off Depth Blur as well.
  
• Turn off vertical sync. Really, unless you're having tons of problems with that, seriously all it does is take away FPS.
  
• However, if you have an nvidia card, you can go to the nvidia control panel under GW2's profile set it to Adaptive Vsync, and that'll help if you have turned vertical sync off. (I haven't tried this myself, but I have no issues with vertical sync, so that's why <_<)
  
• There is also a program called SweetFX, which is supposed to make everything look good without a noticeable decrease of performance. I cannot say I've tried it, but I've seen it recommended a lot.

Anyway, hopefully this helps some people! lalalala I want pie.

[Sharkinu]

• Post-processing, now that's a big one. I don't like to turn that off at all, it makes everything more dark and dull, but it will gain you a noticeable amount of FPS.

I'm pretty sure you are confusing Shaders details with Post-processing. Shaders details is the setting that makes everything dark. I know that I had Shaders on Low and I was wondering why the hell my FDS has no effect in the dark room from Sharkmaw's Caverns in LA. So yes, if you don't hold your shaders on medium or high, light emitting items(torches, FDS and Mad King book etc.) are useless.

Post processing affects screen effects like the screen blur when you're drunk.

Edit: Well, apparently is just a random bug. After checking it a 2nd time it doesn't happen o.O
Low/Medium

[Raye]

I think that it's possible that shaders also have that effect, and in a more significant way... but I just tested post-processing. When it's off, it's like the light goes out of my screen, but not necessarily making it darker. I guess it's that the character just becomes dull and less shiny, and that's just so much not awesome. =(

I guess I just suck at explaining some things >__________>

[shadowhand]

Well... About setting the render sampling to native, this is how that looks on my pc with everything else set to max:

(gah, photobucket resized the image, but you get the point I hope.)

This only happens if you turn the camera to the side and lower the viewing angle a bit but if you're anything like me, you'll do that a lot.

It seems to be a new-ish issue though. I was using the current whql driver from nvidia (310.90 I believe.) on my gtx 680.

However, changing render sampling to supersample fixes it. And weirdly enough also gives me a 5 to 10 fps boost. I have no clue why.

[Raye]

Whoaaaa... that's crazy... mine definitely does not look like that.

[shadowhand]

Yeah at first I thought it was a hardware error, but it only shows up in GW2 with those exact settings. And I ran some diagnostic software to make sure. Not my graphics card.

Still it's a simple fix. Just wish I'd thought of it before spending a few hours looking for a solution elsewhere.

[MisterB]

Post-processing adds a lot of image distortion and incorrect color and contrast settings.

[Raye]

I think we ended up taking the post-processing conversation to chat at some point... I forgot to update the thread after that. I guess Sharkinu figured out it was actually a bug... sometimes it changed the lighting, sometimes it didn't =X

[shadowhand]

Yeah, I found out what was causing the really weird clipping that I had. It's mentioned in the "known issues" of the last few nvidia drivers.

If you have Ambient Occlusion enabled in your driver control panel (or nvidia inspector.) then Guild Wars 2 may experience this exact problem. So, either disable it for GW2.exe in the driver/nvidia inspector or disable it completely.

At least until either Nvidia or Arenanet fixes it.

[jeptharussell]

Whoaaaa... that's crazy... mine definitely does not look like that.

I would consider this as a good source of information and a simple tips on how to increase your FPS. Although, there are many process on how to do this, always make sure that the most important things for increasing the FPS is your ability and knowledge on this certain matter.