Guild Wars 2

Yes, my PC needs to be put in a retirement home where it can slowly spin its hard drive to the smooth jazz station, while defraging itself over a cup of hot….

The point is, my graphics aren’t the best. No problem, I can play pretty good with about 25-30fps. The problem is that in many places around this new map, the graphics painted on the ground and walls simply don’t show up.

This means that I’m often guessing where I can use a particular skill. This becomes more apparent in the race, where other players with higher graphics setting are seeing what skill they can use, and where.

I understand that ANet is trying to avoid pixelated blobs on my screen, but to have nothing at all feels a tad like I’m at a disadvantage.

I believe these are typically referred to as Overlays… and are handled through DirectX. They’re basically a way to put a Texture over the top of a Model by painting it on the same way RayTrace would put lighting on it. To do it manually, their team would have to individually bake every single texture into a dozen extra models and environment props if I’m not mistaken… Which would probably then just eat into your also limited amount of memory while also promoting more “junk” into higher tiers in your cache/CPU also causing it to lag as well. (not to mention the prefetching)

Basically… I don’t think there’s any other way to do this efficiently without enabling all the other extra eye candy you DON’T want