Framerate drops slowly from 60 to sub 5 after an hour of play.

[Koos]

Hey everyone!

I started my free trial last week and instantly fell in love with the game. I bought the Collector's Edition and have been playing it nonstop. The only problem I'm having with the game so far is a very very glaringly bad technical issue. After around an hour of play, my framerate which sits at a constant 60 will quickly drop to 55 then back up. The spiking gets progressively worse every 10 seconds or so until after a few minutes, it's down to sub 5 and the game becomes completely available. Here is my current system:

- Windows 7
- Intel i7-4770k (overclocked to 4.0GHz)
- (2) EVGA GTX 980 ACX 2.0 in SLI (On 347.88 latest drivers)
- 16GB Corsair 1600MHz RAM
- Installed on a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB

Restarting the game fixes the framerate for another hour or so but I would really like to fix this issue. I did some digging around and found out that some people have had a memory leak issue. While watching my memory usage, the application never seems to rise higher than 680MB which seems fine to me. Obviously when watching my GPU monitor, the spiking shows my GPU's drop to 0 when they occur. I'm not sure if that is the root cause of the issue or if it's something else. Just as well, I've tried running the game on a single 980 and still get the framerate drop after a while.

If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it!

[Vurtney]

Do you have the LOD options enabled? Some cards, especially AMD, don't work properly without these options on. I have almost the same setup as yours and no issues.

[Koos]

I'll give it a try when I get home. So, I'm assuming I need to disable literally everything that has the term LOD in it? =P

[Train88]

For something that severe, i would look at background applications. When your framerate starts dropping, hit windows button, write: "resmon" (for ressource monitor). Select processor tab and sort it by cpu use. See what's eating those framerates...

[Koos]

I have been monitoring my other processes while playing the game and there was nothing eating up any sort of resources. I'm not trying to say my system is infallible, but I have OVERKILL for this game. Even when in highly populated areas, my graphics cards are only sitting at around 50-60% usage and my CPU only has around a 20-30% load. And like I said above, the highest my memory usage ever gets for the application is around 680ish MB.

But again, I'll double check it tonight when I play more and such!

[Culfinrandir]

For something that severe, i would look at background applications. When your framerate starts dropping, hit windows button, write: "resmon" (for ressource monitor). Select processor tab and sort it by cpu use. See what's eating those framerates...

I don't know about Nvidia cards but with ATi cards (based on the latest chipsets) the fault is a memory leak between the game & the driver. It does indeed drop from 60fps to sub 5fps & then usually crashes. It's existed for a long time (2.3 is when it appeared for me) & nothing has ever been done.

[KisaiTenshi]

Hey everyone!

I started my free trial last week and instantly fell in love with the game. I bought the Collector's Edition and have been playing it nonstop. The only problem I'm having with the game so far is a very very glaringly bad technical issue. After around an hour of play, my framerate which sits at a constant 60 will quickly drop to 55 then back up. The spiking gets progressively worse every 10 seconds or so until after a few minutes, it's down to sub 5 and the game becomes completely available. Here is my current system:

- Windows 7
- Intel i7-4770k (overclocked to 4.0GHz)
- (2) EVGA GTX 980 ACX 2.0 in SLI (On 347.88 latest drivers)
- 16GB Corsair 1600MHz RAM
- Installed on a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB

Restarting the game fixes the framerate for another hour or so but I would really like to fix this issue. I did some digging around and found out that some people have had a memory leak issue. While watching my memory usage, the application never seems to rise higher than 680MB which seems fine to me. Obviously when watching my GPU monitor, the spiking shows my GPU's drop to 0 when they occur. I'm not sure if that is the root cause of the issue or if it's something else. Just as well, I've tried running the game on a single 980 and still get the framerate drop after a while.

If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it!

I have a single EVGA nVidia Geforce GTX 760 (2GB) on a i7-4770 (non-K) with 32GB of ram and I don't experience this problem. I've also had the game run for hours.

I previously had a Radeon 7770 on the same hardware.

Run GPU-Z and CPU-Z while the game is running and when the frame rate starts dropping, check the temperature. The symptoms are more typical of thermal throttle. GPU-Z has a "PerfCap Reason" you could also look at, but it's a crapshoot.

I've noticed you have a SSD however. SSD's have different characteristics when it comes to random read/write versus mechanical drives. I can't say for certain that would be the problem since you clearly have enough RAM for the game. (The game client is 32-bit, so it's not going to be able to use more than 4GB of ram.)

[Koos]

I have a single EVGA nVidia Geforce GTX 760 (2GB) on a i7-4770 (non-K) with 32GB of ram and I don't experience this problem. I've also had the game run for hours.

I previously had a Radeon 7770 on the same hardware.

Run GPU-Z and CPU-Z while the game is running and when the frame rate starts dropping, check the temperature. The symptoms are more typical of thermal throttle. GPU-Z has a "PerfCap Reason" you could also look at, but it's a crapshoot.

I've noticed you have a SSD however. SSD's have different characteristics when it comes to random read/write versus mechanical drives. I can't say for certain that would be the problem since you clearly have enough RAM for the game. (The game client is 32-bit, so it's not going to be able to use more than 4GB of ram.)

I'll definitely monitor my CPU temperatures tonight when I get home. I only had my GPU monitor displaying and I was only getting around 74c on my first card (since it has less heat dissipation due to SLI). My CPU rarely ever goes above 60c so we'll see if maybe that's the culprit? I'm not too sure though considering my load never rose above 25-30%.

[SongJoohee]

I have this exact same issue - it started in the past few weeks (no issues for a year since I switched to an Nvidia card). Exact same as you - my game runs fine, then it starts to stutter, and drop frames, eventually dropping to 1 FPS if I don't restart before that.

Tried absolutely everything to resolve it.

Windows 8.1
i7-4770k @4.3ghz
1x MSI GTX 770 (347.88)
8gb RAM, 1600mhz
Installed on SanDisk Extreme 128gb

Isn't an issue with the GPU - since other games run perfectly fine for infinite lengths of time. Tried running everything at Stock speeds too and the issue remains.

[Koos]

I have this exact same issue - it started in the past few weeks (no issues for a year since I switched to an Nvidia card). Exact same as you - my game runs fine, then it starts to stutter, and drop frames, eventually dropping to 1 FPS if I don't restart before that.

Tried absolutely everything to resolve it.

Windows 8.1
i7-4770k @4.3ghz
1x MSI GTX 770 (347.88)
8gb RAM, 1600mhz
Installed on SanDisk Extreme 128gb

Isn't an issue with the GPU - since other games run perfectly fine for infinite lengths of time. Tried running everything at Stock speeds too and the issue remains.

Yeah I definitely feel you, I have tried even more to resolve this to no avail:
- Reinstalled Nvidia Drivers
- Reinstalled the client on my WD 1TB 7200 RPM and also on my new Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
- Turning off the Steam overlay
- Running in Administrator Mode
- Turning all graphics down to the lowest settings (minus the LOD options that were mentioned to cause problems)

I did a bit more monitoring and I can confirm that my temperatures are completely normal. My 1st 980 sits at around 72-74 and me 2nd at around 61-63 throughout all of my gameplay. My CPU sits at around 60 as well and doesn't seem to budge.

If anyone has any other suggestions please let us know! I am really enjoying this game but this has easily been the hugest dampener in my experience. It will greatly hurt my potential for raiding if I'm going to have to restart my client every hour.