-Only- getting low fps in online games

[Eroge]

Games that play very well: Sims 3, Battlefield bad Company 2, Age of Empires 3, Left4Dead 2, need for speed hot pursuit, Spore, Just Cause 2, Alice madness returns, darkspore, assassins creed, batman, killing floor, farcry 2, magicka, torchlight, KoA: Reckoning

Games that give me low FPS even though Processor, RAM, and Video card aren't being stressed - Some of these games, even on lowest settings give me under 20fps in populated areas: Guild Wars 2, WoW, Sevencore, FlyFF, SWTOR, Tera Online, The Secret World, Gotham City Imposters, Maplestory

-network stuff-
Comcast Cable: 25down 3.5up low ping
NETGEAR - Wireless-N Router Model: WNR2000-100NAS SKU: 8998506 (My gaming PC is Wired in. Xbox 360 is wired in, and all other computers are wireless)
Motorola SURFboard SB5101U USB Cable Modem

-specs- I never overclocked anything and everything has stock cooling
CPU: AMD Athlon II x4 640 @3ghz
GPU: MSI GTX 460 SE twinfrzr2
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1333hz Ripjawz
Motherboard: Biostar TA785G3 HD
PSU: Thermaltake TR2-600w
Case: some NZXT that seems to keep things cool. HWmonitor shows cpu never going over 40c, and gpu never over 50c while gaming

What should I try because I feel like it is not my processor or graphics card? People with worse ones than me are getting higher FPS in MMORPGs. Not sure if it's a hard drive + motherboard problem, or something wrong with how my network is set up. Even when I'm the only person in my house using the internet, I still get low FPS despite my computer usage being low

Anti Virus: Microsoft Security Essentials
I defrag with Auslogics Disk Defrag
CCleaner to remove junk. I -never- used it on the registry assuming it could cause problems
Only thing I run while gaming is Steam. I even use gamebooster to close unnecessary services (zero FPS gain)

My computer seems super fast and responsive in everything outside of online Gaming.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Do you know if your service provider throttles certain traffic types based on time of day etc?

 

[Eroge]

I'm not sure but I get the same problem even now at 5am 🙁

 

[AntiZig]

well, seeing how all the games that are giving you problems are MMOs, I would think it's your CPU that is giving you problems. Point being is I have never seen an online video game where FPS would be tied to performance of the network. There's just no such thing.

Try this, log into the game, go to an unpopulated area. Check what your fps is at that point?
Then go to a populated area, did it drop a lot?

One problem with older games is that they aren't made for multi-core processors, so most of them run on 1 or 2 cores only, while the rest are idling. To confirm you can check your CPU utilization with a monitoring program like hwinfo/hwmonitor, etc

You could try overclocking if your board will let you, and see if that improves the situation. If not, then I'm afraid your options are to upgrade only.

Also, if you find out that CPU isn't the cause (which I doubt you will, but anyway) make sure you've got latest drivers for your motherboard and GPU. Make sure that you're running the game in full screen mode and make sure that your GPU isn't forcing some settings through the nvidia control panel. What resolution are you running at? have you tried lowering/raising it?

 

[Eroge]

Thank you so much for replying

Monitor is 27in 1920x1080
I tried lowering the resolution on a few games but all it did was make all text super fuzzy and made the game look really bad. I don't get how anyone could play a game at a resolution other than their monitors native. I got no significant boost in performance

My FPS does get even lower in a high populated area. A game will run 25-35fps when I'm alone, but if the training zone has other people fighting, I drop below 20. PvP and 5 man dungeons in all games (other than WoW) is impossible. SWTOR, The Secret World, and Tera all gave me around 10fps in PvP and dungeons so I was forced to quit playing

I'm not going to upgrade my processor because I'm not happy with the results I'm seeing from any AMD processors and online gaming. I5 2500k seems like the minimum thing worth buying, and for that I'll wait until I have money for a whole new computer and just give this one to someone who doesn't play games

I have never tried overclocking, but I noticed my motherboard has an auto overclock feature. Says V6-Tech Engine. I enabled it and booted up my computer. CPUz showed my processor running at 3.3ghz (it was going up and down from 3.1-3.3 constantly) and my RAM was 700-something. I was too afraid to try playing a game with that enabled though so I set my BIOS back to default. Figured it wasn't worth enabling


One thing you could really help me with is finding my motherboard drivers. The only Driver I ever update manually is Nvidia one. Again my motherboard is Biostar TA785G3 HD, but I don't know what to download since Windows 7 kind of just made things work. I think it's possible my motherboard is being lazy sending Data because my video card and processor don't seem to stress enough when gaming. My Hard drive also seems like it's being used too much instead of my RAM

 

[AntiZig]

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=458

google is your friend

the only most recently updated drivers I'm seeing are the LAN NIC, so grab those.

BIOS didn't update since 2010 it seems.

Regardless, benchmarks have shown that GW2 doesn't run very well on AMD cpus. Don't about the rest of the games.