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Why is my graphic performance so bad?
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You asked for help and my advice was rational and born from experience building, reparing and consulting on computer systems and issues.
My first pc was a 286 my first built pc was a 386sx 25mhz.
I have had and helped with many problems in computers, people think that because one game works or most games work this new one should, PC gaming software development is very complex and PC hardware configuration can be hell.
The rational of my advice was very simple and based on simple diagnostic principles.
A stutter like that can actually come from many things, wierdly a sound card issue or hd sata channel load or overheat and power drain, hell even memory can do wierd things.
The important thing to realise is most problems like this are pc related not game engine related and easily fixable if you follow a diagnostic aproach.
I never asked you to re-install windows and no build of windows that I know would require that for what I asked you to do.
By removing the extra monitors and card, by running best drivers and ticking the "clean install" then rebooting your pc
You would with an hours work at most find out for certain what was not causing it IF it still happened.
Now lets say my advice fixed it, then from that point we slowly add back first the four monitors that a single card (yes it is not efficient) to see if GW is glitching specifically because of multi monitor and if that works fine then you stick in the other card and see if it occurs.
Then we would move on to other ideas, I know for a fact a PCI express sound card can cause issues like this and in the past a single game was causing issues like this and it turned out one of his sata connections for HD was glitchy moving it over one fixed it.
Choice is yours, I am taking time out of my day to help.
Exactly Gaia, the advice should have contained warnings to those problems. The advice given was not up to rational standards, but in my perhaps too idealistic faith in others, I followed the advice regardless. And though I may have been let down, I'm still glad I gave you guys a chance.
Once more, I've already played the game without the card, and it was the same, and I tried playing with a single monitor way back as well. It would be irrational to try it again.
I believe he was speaking ill of you... there is pretty much never a need to reinstal an os becuase of card instals ... more so with safemode and multiple graphic cards to gte one that lets you change settings... no reason to reinstal windows.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
If any one in their right mind is believing all this crap, just check post history, hence I just stopped posting advice. its not going to get any where, he should discuss this with support. Also I do not think he has a 690, because you can run 3d max performance with a 690 with 3 monitors and run one on the side.
Just sayin
Changing a graphics card does not require a windows reinstall or will cause the hard drive to lose its information.
Also you didn't follow the advice which was to remove the 7800GTX, update the drivers and only run with the GTX690.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Again my young padawan, that's surround mode, not max 3d performance.
As I had already played the game without an extra graphics card before, that aspect of the advice had already been completed. What was left was to play on updated drivers, a feat which I achieved, but to no improvement in graphic performance.
And it's this kind of ignorance that installing a card doesn't require a reinstall which is the problem. My ignorance is acceptable as I'm the one asking for advice, but as a giver of advice it is your responsibility to be knowledgeable of the things you speak. In a way, you among others are personally responsible for the issues with my computer due to this.
If you're talking about a texture that stores which areas of immovable objects are in shadows cast by other immovable objects as a result of immovable light sources and which aren't, then that would have been computed on some workstation months or years ago. (If either the object casting the shadow or the object upon which the shadow is cast can move, or if the light source can move, then you can't prerender the shadow textures unless you're willing for them to be wildly wrong--which you might be.) You just load it from your hard drive and use it.
Furthermore, it would be loaded whenever any other textures for the object are loaded into video memory, and for the same reasons. Having to pass large amounts of data into video memory is slow, so you don't delete it as soon as the player rotates the camera away. If games did do that, then you could readily create graphical artifacting by spinning the camera around fast. And Guild Wars 2 likes to whip the camera around for inscrutable reasons of its own as it is.
In order to do something at a video driver level, it needs to be something that you can do without needing to understand the details of what the various shaders are doing. You can do post-processing effects that way by taking a completed image (and perhaps also the depth buffer) and doing something or other to it, without needing to care how the image was produced. It does mean, however, that you're trying to do shadows with no knowledge of the geometry of the scene--which is why, if you look closely, they're invariably bad fakes. Any postprocessing ambient occlusion effect will draw something that looks like shadows, but it will be wildly wrong shadows for the geometry of the scene, because it has to make something up with no knowledge of the geometry.
The other place in the rendering pipeline where things can be done at the driver level is at the rasterization stage. 3D graphics has gotten a lot more versatile in recent years, but still forces you to produce a bunch of primitives that get broken into a bunch of pixels in a particular fixed-function manner at a particular place in the pipeline. That's where driver-based anti-aliasing effects do their work: by changing how the card will break primitives into pixels in an intelligent manner.
It's not a hack. It's the way 3D graphics is done. There is a mix of programmable and fixed-function stages. And for a DirectX 9.0c game, it's mostly fixed-function pipeline stages.
Dunno how it happened, but it did. When I pulled the 7800 out and tried to boot from the 690 alone, there was just a blue screen that literally said "You have to reinstall windows". Then I put the 8800 and tried to boot again, and Windows started to load but failed, and went to another blue screen that lets you choose repair options, none of which worked (They just brought me back to the screen saying to reinstall after they failed). And then I put the 7800 back in, but it had the same effect as the 8800, and then I put the 8800 back in again, because might as well reinstall windows with the better card.
And it's pretty apparent that Gaia was agreeing with me.
Such dogmatic certainty is not conductive to rational problem solving. Again, this is the issue with the advice.
1 hour to remove a 7800GTX and add a 8800GTX.
Instead of then adding the 7800GTX, one goes out to best buy and buy a copy of windows 8 and in between one somehow messes with the 4TB hard drive when windows would be installed in the SSD.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I didn't want to turn the case sideways, so I was trying to line up the giant 8800 with the slot in a packed case from an awkward angle. Crap took forever.
And then I tried to boot with the 690 alone, with the 8800, and with the 7800, and Windows itself told me to go to Best Buy, as detailed one or two posts of mine above.
And as to the 4tb drive, I was trying to get rid of a partition related to my previous Windows install, and accidentally converted it to a dynamic drive, wiping everything.
Hold on here. You bought a case for a GeForce GTX 690, but picked such a small case that some GeForce 8800 series card wouldn't fit? I think you're doing something wrong here. Where did you get your parts anyway? And did you ask for help in picking parts from someone who knew anything?
So you have a SSD but windows is installed on the mechanical hard drive?
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
He basically wants to blame the game and not take any responsibility.
My take is, many games DO NOT use dual garphics cards and it can actually degrade performance of the game. Also doing other things in the background will ALSO slow the game down. Shut all nonsense internet activity, etc. shut down one graphics card (you should be able to do that in the software) and then try the game. My gut instinct is something is majorly wrong with your hardware and that is your issue.
It was probably one of the things you listed. However, each of them may be considered a direct relation, as the graphics card was the catalyst of any action which lead to those mistakes.
Having an arbitrary object cast shadows on another arbitrary object with arbitrary light sources in real time is computationally intractible. There are some special cases that make it simpler, however.
For an opaque object casting shadows on itself, you can check the normal vectors against the direction of the light source to see whether it's on the lit side of the object or not. For an immobile object casting shadows on another immobile object due to light sources that will never move, you can prerender which areas are darker and just load that as a texture.
But neither of those are options if either of the objects can move or if the light source can move. Or rather, you can use them, but they'll be wildly wrong. Ambient occlusion gives you a very rough approximation to saying this area should get more light and that area should get less light. Things that can be done on present hardware can look like shadows, but they're not going to be terribly close to what it would look like if you could do shadows properly.
If you want to say that making this area brighter and that one darker because more light toward the latter is blocked than toward the former is something else and not shadows, then go ahead, but that's just arguing semantics.
It's not about the length, it's about the thickness of the cards, and the Alienware case is real small, only having 2 PCI-E slots, so there's not a space between the 690 and the 8800, making it difficult too see anything and line it up. Such is the reason I put the 7800 in the case over the 8800 in the first place, as it's a lot smaller.
No I reinstalled Windows on the SSD, but then I had installed games from the old Windows install still on the 4tb drive, so I wanted to wipe them and start fresh.
What motherboard do you have, anyway? What sort of idiot motherboard designer would build an X79 motherboard with only two PCI Express x16 slots, and then put them close enough that it's awkward to use both at once?
Actually, on second thought, I know the answer to that. Intel would.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121552
I got an Alienware PC, didn't make it myself; and good thing I didn't, for as you can see, if I had tried to make it myself, somehow Chernobyl would have happened all over again in my hosue.
I messed up the 4tb drive after having already reinstalled Windows. I did it from Disk Management.
It's a nameless custom Alienware one. I was pissed when I saw it only had 2 slots.
I think we've found the problem: you spent way too much for a goofy hardware configuration that can't do what you want, even though a much cheaper, less exotic hardware configuration would have worked great for your needs. I don't know if the problems you're having are of your own making or trying to fix problems that Dell created for you.
Have you tried calling Dell and complaining to them that the computer they sold you doesn't work right? If it's a recent purchase, you could also try returning it for a refund. Even if they charge a 15% restocking fee, you'd come out way, way ahead if you get back the other 85% and spend it on something better suited to your needs. For starters, if you want a lot of monitors, then you should pick a video card that is built to handle a lot of monitors.