A guide for improving Guild Wars 2 performance and fixing problems
Hello there!
New year means time to freshen up your game settings, and that old PC. I made this guide for everyone looking to improve their performance/stability on their PC and in Guild Wars 2. With the DX9 renderer being deprecated, and DX11 blasting away it's as good a time as ever to have a look at making your PC, and by extension your game, run faster.
In this guide I will share some general tips and an easy to follow guide to improve your PC speed and stability, and some optimized settings in Guild Wars 2 for a smoother experience. It's a somewhat long writeup but I've tried to cover as much as possible and keeping it as simple as I can, so everyone can get a better gaming experience. Let's get into it!
Basic Tasks
First up make sure your PC is free of any virus or malware. For this I recommend using the free powerful software Malwarebytes; https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download run a scan and let it delete/quarantine any potential threats. Restart your PC, and you can safely delete the program after.
Now get your PC up to date with the latest drivers and operating system updates. (And maybe update to a newer operating system if you are one of the people still stuck in the past on Windows 7) Following will be some links for things to update:
Graphics card drivers (GPU);
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/drivers/
AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support
Chipset drivers (CPU);
AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support
INTEL: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download-center/home.html
VisualC Redistributable (direct Microsoft links, install both);
X86: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x86.exe
X64: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
Bonus download: HWinfo: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
for keeping track of all the temperatures in your system, just in case that is a problem for you. Anything under about 85c on desktop, 100c on laptop on your CPU and under 85c on your GPU is generally fine and shouldn't be a problem.
Guild Wars 2 Basics
Once you have made sure your PC is up to date and free of any potential virus or malware, it's time to do some basic Guild Wars 2 maintenance. First off clear your gw2 cache files:
Hit WinKey+R to open Run, type in %temp% and click OK. This is your Windows temporary folder. Everything in here is temporary files and can all safely be deleted. Any files that are currently open/used in processes you can simply skip. Another option is to only delete any gw2 file/folder inside the temp folder.
Now for a basic recreation of the gw2 folder. This isn't strictly needed but is a good idea if you have had the game installed for a long time and maybe haven't updated addons etc.
Open your Gw2 installation folder, and simply delete everything in here EXCEPT Gw2.dat (the 60+GB file) and Gw2-64.exe. Now go ahead and run the exe and all the files and folders you deleted will quickly be recreated by the launcher, and you now have a clean Guild Wars 2 installation folder.
Other basics
Run the Disk Clean-up utility which you can find by simply typing clean in Windows Start. Select your C drive, make sure everything is ticked and let it run. This clears up old windows files and updates, frees up space on your pc and deletes other cached files. Another more thorough app you can use for this is Wise Disk Cleaner: https://www.wisecleaner.com/wise-disk-cleaner.html I don't recommend using CCleaner anymore as its filled with ads and is just generally a bloated app.
If you have a weaker system I would recommend disabling any overlays you have running. Be it Xbox Game Overlay that comes with Windows, Discord overlay, GeForce Experience or any other 3rd party overlay you might be running, as they can slow down your game in certain scenarios. Xbox Game Overlay comes automatically with Windows now and can be annoying to fully remove. Here is a registry key that completely disables it for your convenience https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/848564924702523392/1067942127536975960/DisableGAMEBAR.reg
It can also be a good idea to check your Power Plan settings in Windows. I recommend having it on the balanced setting for laptops and the high performance setting for desktops. If your laptop is always connected to power, use high performance as well. To access these settings type Power Plan in Start.
Make sure you are not running any demanding applications in the background while gaming. These include game launchers like Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft Connect. Certain RGB software can also cause trouble. It might not seem like a big deal, but if they start updating a game, or perform any other actions while you are busy clearing a Raid, they might take up precious resources. To remove background apps you can simply search for “Startup Apps” in Start and you can remove any you don't need running all the time or that you just want to run manually after you boot Windows.
If you are one of the people who still haven't updated to an SSD or you are for some reason running the game from an HDD I'd highly recommend you move it to an SSD. Not only does it give you superior loading speeds, but you also might notice that certain textures and effects in the game just wont load at all if you have the game running on an HDD.
If you are often having issues logging in, or your trading post and/or gemstore is not connecting properly I suggest swapping to a better DNS service. This can also improve your internet browsing experience in other places depending on how fast/stable your current service provider DNS server is. Here are the 2 most popular options:
Cloudflare DNS;
https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/windows/
Google DNS;
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using#windows
Settings in Guild Wars 2.
There are plenty of guides already on what to adjust here and I recommend watching MightyTeapot’s video explaining these settings here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnlarTYXjI
In Guild Wars 2 you will most often be CPU bottlenecked, simply because of the multiplayer nature of the game. Everything that relates to other players requires CPU calculations, which is why settings that seem like they would require a beefy graphics card, simply end up being restricted by your CPU. Keep in mind this doesn't mean that your CPU is bad, just that the game is rather single-threaded, meaning that it cant take advantage of a huge amount of cores like some PC’s have these days.
The most impactful settings by far are Reflections, Shadows, Character Model Limit, Character Model Quality and Effect LOD.
Reflections are quite demanding in Guild Wars 2 simply because they use a technique that renders the scene twice, once for the world, once for the reflection. Here I recommend either turning them off completely or if you simply cannot live without those delicious reflections set it to Terrain and Sky.
Shadows can also be very demanding, especially if you have lots of players around you. Here I recommend either turning them off in framerate critical places like raids/fractals/strikes or using medium or high at most. Ultra is extremely demanding and doesn't give you much of a visual benefit overall.
Character Model Limit is an extremely important setting for most content in the game, as it limits how many characters the game will render around you. In the Open World or in WvW scenarios you can very quickly make your PC beg for mercy if you run on higher settings. This is simply because the game cannot efficiently render that many characters at once. Here I recommend going low or medium at most. Be a bit careful with low settings as in some Raids or Strikes it might not render certain mechanics or effects (greens and oils on Deimos) as they count as characters.
Character Model Quality changes how many characters around you render in their fully skinned glory, or the bland and boring looking standard skins. This can have a big effect if you are in areas with a lot of shiny people, as those effects can be rather heavy for the game to render. Here I recommend using low or lowest if you don't get too distracted by the ugly looking people everywhere, and you just want the max framerate possible.
Keep in mind that both of the Character settings might be relevant to bump up or down depending on what content you are enjoying.
As a bonus lowering Character Model Limit and Character Model Quality also improves your loading speeds, simply because when loading any map the game has to wait for characters to render in.
Effect LOD is an extraordinarily important setting in Guild Wars 2 as it limits how many skill and AOE effects the game renders in. Turning it off lets the game run wild and render everything. I recommend leaving it ticked on at all times (except PvP). If you disable this setting your eyes might start bleeding and your game turns into a PowerPoint presentation.
It's a good idea to turn this setting off in PvP though, as you can otherwise miss certain skills being cast.
If you have a weaker system I also recommend unticking the “Show All Names” options as all the fonts moving around on your screen can be quite taxing on lower end hardware.
Those are the main culprits in Guild Wars 2. You can mess around with the other settings as your PC, or your preferences, demand.
That concludes my basic guide on how to improve your Guild Wars 2 gaming experience. Let me know if you have questions, and if any of these tips helped you and most importantly happy gaming!