Guild Wars 2

I was always having massive fps drops with all versions of the game client. My System was oscillating somewhere between 8 and 40 FPS. Last night I was playing with Sound Quality Settings and changed it from Fastest to Highest Quality and… the game is now running like a charm!! 30-60 FPS, even with 40 other players unloading their skill bars! Everything maxed out and shadows set to middle (cute :)) without any problems. The FPS counter is still showing nice values. Maybe you guys should give it a try! This little change fixed the game for me!

I Imagine this has for effect to switch the load of sound processing from the CPU to the sound card? It would make sense then to see a performance improvement in the right circumstances.

What effect does this have on the gaming experience? Are sounds dropped, less quallity, or what?

I can only speculate, but..

I would assume lower quality means the sound is handled via CPU and that the game also has less channels to play with, resulting in certain sounds over a certain number to just stop. Good games can (for the most part) pick and choose which sounds are needed to cull, but it can be noticeable sometimes.

If you are using a dedicated soundcard and have it selected it will be used no matter what quality setting you set it too. The audio rendering engine in GW2 at the moment is just not that great and has quite a lot of issues which need to be fixed, its quirky at best.

Cheap DSP’s ‘offload’ to the cpu not the other way around. This means that the more quality and or channels it tries to proccess the more it will offload to the cpu to help out. So higher sound Q setting would decrease performance on cheap DSP’s (like onboard audio)