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Why is my graphic performance so bad?
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I see 4 ports there on the 690
nvm just checked post history
You can only use three in "Maximize 3D performance" mode.
Yea you use 3 on max performance and you set one for just a side monitor
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_690_review,7.html
You must look more closely my young padawan learner. That's the surround setting, not maxmium 3D performance.
Doing shadows properly is computationally intractible on current hardware, unless it's for a scene with very simple geometry. Yes, even on your hardware, and yes, I'm fully aware that the GeForce GTX 690 (or rather, two of them for quad SLI) was the video card of choice for maximum performance at any price gaming rigs not very long ago.
If a game is going to have shadows at all, it's basically a trade-off of how far wrong they want the shadows to be versus how big of a performance hit they want them to demand. And if you're not good at coding them, you can end up with a huge performance hit for very bad shadows.
I haven't experimented with Guild Wars 2's shadows to see how they work. I turn shadows off because they're ugly. Never mind the performance hit; the game looks better with shadows off. It's not a Guild Wars 2 thing; that's true of most games. The goal of tweaking settings is to make the game look nice, not to minimize your frame rates.
Also, if you're using SSAA, you should be aware that that brings an enormous performance hit, as well.
I don't know if it's something wrong with your system, or if ArenaNet merely philosophically feels that it's better to let players turn settings up as far as they want and live with the consequences, rather than cap settings well below what some gaming rigs could handle so that more people can be satisfied that they're running the game on maximum settings.
I also have no idea whether SLI is working properly on your rig. SLI, like CrossFire, is rather finicky, and it's not hard to imagine that having an extra video card in the system displaying some other monitor could throw things off.
Reflections are another thing that is computationally intractible, at least if you really want to run wild with them. Though even with reflections on, the only ones I've noticed are for the surface of the water, and having one reflection in the scene that doesn't need to be terribly accurate (because uneven surface of the water will break your intuition on exactly what it should look like, anyway) is more manageable.
Guild Wars 2 is very sensitive to memory bandwidth. But a GeForce GTX 690 has 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU, which should be plenty enough for good performance. 2 GB of video memory per GPU should also be plenty unless you've found some way to enable much higher resolution textures that I'm not aware of.
That's for PCI Express bandwidth, but I'm not sure how much of an issue that is. For starters, most X79 motherboards have two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots. Even having the second video card in the system should still leave you with the full PCI Express 3.0 x16 bandwidth for your main video card, unless you were stupid about which slots you used. (Consult your motherboard manual if you're not sure.)
Furthermore, while I'm not sure how SLI works internally, the only way that I could imagine that it could work without being specifically, intentionally implemented in each game (which doesn't happen) is if video drivers interpret all rendering commands as being sent to one particular GPU until a frame ends, then all rendering commands go to the other GPU until the next frame ends, and so forth. (Commands to buffer data and some other such things, on the other hand, would have to be sent to both GPUs.) If that's the case, then even if the PCI Express bandwidth is shared between both GPUs, you'll effectively only have one GPU using it at a time. I doubt that's a bottleneck on your system unless you find a creative way to sabotage it.
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Your card is effectively two GeForce GTX 680s on a single card, and then clocked lower. While that does mean that each GPU only gets half of the card's memory bandwidth, that "half" is as much as a full normal GeForce GTX 680 gets. And that's a lot.
AMD does do multi-monitors better than Nvidia. With appropriate AMD cards, you can have six completely separate surfaces each doing their own thing. With Nvidia, you can plug four monitors into a single card, but they can't be doing four completely independent things.
Nvidia will likely catch up in multi-monitor support with their Maxwell cards around the end of this year. AMD started on this years ago and kept it secret, so Nvidia didn't find out about it until shortly before the first AMD cards that already supported it launched. If something needs to be implemented in silicon to work properly, it takes years from the time you decide to do it to the time that it's available for consumers to buy.
If you're going to run games off of the GTX 690 and only stuff that isn't demanding on the other card, then you don't need a top end card to display several monitors. Any old card with a bunch of monitor ports will do.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125435
I apologize if this has been addressed already, I was excited to add because I had this problem with my 480 sli setup but found a solution that worked for me...so I am posting after only reading the first post.
Sorry!
I had ambient occlusion turned on. GW2 does not have very optimized AO. When I used nvidia inspector to switch to MW2's AO, my framerate went way up, to the point where I get 60 fps in PvE and 30 fps in huge wvw battles. To keep using AO you do have to keep reflections off, however, and that may have something else that fixed things for me.
If you have AO turned off, definitely fiddle with the settings to see which one makes your framerate tank. The shadows engine in the game has always been very poorly optimized, I believe it draws shadows immediately when objects appear on screen, and forgets them as soon as they are off-screen again.
Last bit of helpful advice I have: I was using the beta drivers and they for some reason absolutely destroy performance in GW2. I was getting the same old massive fps drops when turning. Reverting to WHQL drivers solved this.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: I saw you shortly after posted what drivers you have, and that turning shadows off is in fact what fixes your performance. I think it would be worthwhile to remove your old card and just leave the 690 in so you can try out the latest whql drivers and see how that addresses your performance. I definitely did get poor performance with shadows on ultra until a few drivers ago, but on the other hand I was always able to run the game well at medium shadows.
EDIT2: Also, overclock your CPU if you have not already. The i7s can oc like champs, and the performance boost is worth it. GW2 can definitely be a CPU bound game.
That doesn't sound like overheating, though it could be a case of something else besides the GPUs overheating. The GeForce GTX 590 had a severe case of this, though Nvidia seems to have tried to make the GTX 690 into a real card that people might actually want as opposed to the stupid marketing stunt that was the GTX 590.
Regardless, overheating usually makes performance throttle way back, not just give you 30 frames per second or some such. If you were seeing 5 frames per second, I'd suspect overheating. I suppose it could theoretically be the CPU overheating, but that would take quite a bit of doing when you're not actually pushing it very hard.
It's very, very unlikely that that is the problem. Basically, if CPU cores aren't being used, the processor will turn them off to save power. It will only do this if they're not in use. It is extremely unlikely that a game could trigger problems with this, at least if you're running Windows 7 or later.
Vista botched its handling of multi-core processors badly enough that it could be a problem there. Vista would intentionally move threads to cores that weren't in use, so that the thread would have to stop for a few milliseconds until the core could be turned back on. Or rather, in Vista's day, underclocking the cores as being idle was the more common problem; power gating to turn off a core entirely didn't come until later.
Let it go, people. The guy is not willing to drop his second, older card. He isn't going to do that type of problem solving to see if the 690 plays nice by itself as opposed to playing mean with others.
Move along now.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
A program normally doesn't tell the OS which CPU core to use. Rather, the program breaks work into a bunch of threads and lets the OS decide where to put them. While you can set affinity of a program to a particular core, it's usually a bad idea to do that.
Nonsense. Nvidia only allows SLI to work with two identical cards. At worst, if you have two of the same card with different clock speeds, it might clock one down to match the other. But they don't allow you to try SLI with two cards of different generations. The system in question is either using the two GPUs on the GTX 690 in SLI or only using one GPU to render games. The 7800 only handles other monitors.
AMD allows CrossFire to be a little more versatile, but generally requires both cards to be based on the same GPU chip, unless it's the goofy asynchronous CrossFire that is so unreliable as to be stupid and pointless.
They probably genuinely did take out CPU-side testing code that was slowing the game down. And it might have made a performance difference of something like 1%. Don't expect miracle performance increases between beta testing and a game going live, as all that they can do is low-hanging fruit that should have been plucked years ago.
I didn't know they even made LGA 2011 motherboards that only had two PCI Express x16 slots. I checked New Egg, and there is such an motherboard made by Intel. But Intel motherboards are junk, and prone to have really weird problems caused by a flaky BIOS or some such. Intel motherboards also sometimes come with really goofy configurations, like an X79 chipset with only two PCI Express x16 slots.
Ambient occlusion is just a particular type of shadows. There are a ton of different ways to implement it, some of which are a lot more fake than others--and some of which bring a much bigger performance hit than others.
Your last sentence that I quoted is complete nonsense. If a 3D game is going to draw something at all, then it probably has to redraw it every single frame. There are some things that you can do by rendering to a texture, but if you're going to reuse the same texture created this way across multiple frames, then it can't change at all. For anything with 3D geometry in a 3D perspective viewpoint (as opposed to isometric) if the camera moves at all, then you have to redraw it from scratch every single frame.
Negative many games store shadow maps for as many things as possible, eating up GPU memory. I dont thing GW2 does this as it's gpu memory usage is really really really low. Had this issue with another game before, would help if I could remember which one but I can't atm. AO is not "just a particular type of shadows," if it is enabled at the driver level, it is essentially a hack forcing itself in. I always have fun finding the best type of AO to use in games, and GW2 works with the AO from all the infinity ward 3 and up engines if I remember correctly.
Also the more times I read what he wrote, I have to ask: Is he playing the game across 3 monitors? Judging from the performance hit from supersampling I would imagine that running it at high resolutions causes a disproportionate fps drop.
EDIT: Boy I like editing today. Quick google search provides link to explain what I was saying much better than I did: http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2008/12/cached-shadow-maps.html
As people keep asking you to do for a test remove the second card then do a clean install of newest drivers then try guildwars2 again, we are not forcing you to loose some of your precious monitors this is basic testing to lock down what is causing it.
Actually if you want to lock this down completely try this
unplug all monitors except primary
Unplug 7800
Install latest drivers
Reboot
Boot up GW2
Then you know for 100% it is not your multi monitor setup or extra card, it doesn't help to say XXX title works every game uses different software.
I refer to my above post. No point doing extra work and risk having to reinstall windows a second time for something I already know.
Hmm... completely smooth here. Probably some driver problem. But truth is while I can play completely fluid all maxed out wow, swtor, gw2, rift, .... have very bad perfonance lag with aoc, lotro, war, ... So I guess is also up to engine.
Try to run in windowed mode. Or full screen if you run in windowed. Not sure it will help but had this strange experience mainly with CO and partially with few others. I could barely move yet play in CO, no suggestion from support helped .... when I have discovered game runs completely fluid just switching from full screen to windowed (but zoomed to full screen of course). Guess again graphics card problem.
And again when we are with strange problems. Check for programs running in background you not really need at all times on. Check if i.e. you have Teamviewer running in background. I had this problem with CO where client would just not run at all. After month and hard work from support they sent me right suggestion.
About TSW game was crashing on freshly installed windows 7 every 10 to 30 minutes, performance bad .... helped like a hell switching to 64-bit version. No crashes at all. And now I'm enjoying smoother gameplay with all other games I play.
Or try old one - reinstall computer. :-)
Advice should only be followed when it meets rational standards. It's like not believing everything you hear. If we believed everything we heard the world would be chaos in form, and similarly so with following advice so blindly.
Once someone has to reinstall windows and lose their hard drive information because they removed a graphic card and replaced it with another you know something is wrong.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders