Guild Wars 2

Ansau.7326:

Devata.6589:

Vadar.3254:

The thing I want to know is, why do people want directx 10, 11 or 12?, I am not being sarcastic, I genuinely would like to know, what are your reasons for it. There seems to be a lot of people that talk about directx without really understanding what it is and how it affects a game engine and the development of a game.

Performance increase. While most games are GPU heavy, GW2 is CPU heavy. My 2500k has trouble getting high frame-rate and then the GPU does not matter much (using a 460 or a 970).

Making use of DirectX 12 and better use of the multiple cores (partly what DirectX 12 can help with as it does not only reduces the calls going to the GPU, but can also split them over multiple cores) could mean a big increase in performance. The other way of getting better performance would be OCing the CPU or / and buying a newer / more expensive CPU while that would then only be useful for a few games, because as said, most games are GPU heavy. Meaning it would be a pretty heavy investment compared for what you get for it, and when buying a new GPU you will also have to buy a new motherboard. Not to mention the power-consumption when OCing the CPU.

So for customers, GW2 updating to DirectX 12 (in combination with a few other improvements) would be the best way to get a performance increase.

Now some people say that GW2 is a MMORPG so it’s fine to have lower FPS, but also think about using a VR set. Then you would need 90FPS for best result (on the current generation) or minimum 75FPS. Talking about that, when looking at the system requirements OR gives, it’s a GTX970 and an i5-4590. If I would put a 970 in my system would be close to that, the 2500k just performers a little under the 4590, a small OC on the 2500k, should put the performance on about the requirements for the OR, a system that is considered ‘heavy’, however performance in GW2 would still be pretty bad.

Like somebody said very well on reddit about this. “The problem won’t be that game will look lets say poor in two years, the real problem it will look poor, and it will run just as crappy as it does now, while games looking 4x times better will run at least 2x times better than GW2.”

The only problem is a newer API wouldn’t bring a big performance improvement, said by some of us here and confirmed by devs.

If people knew how truly dx12 works and what does and what does not, and how little would be the impact in gw2, this thread wouldn’t exist.
But you prefer to read something and assume all the world…

Can you link to the dev confirming that?

It’s indeed hard to say how much the improvement will be without knowing what is the true reason why GW2 is performing so bad, however we know for a fact that GW2 is very CPU heavy and we know for a fact that in general DirectX 12 creates the best performance increase with CPU heavy applications (that do use the GPU as well).

That said, it’s not only DirectX that would need to be improved, better multithread would also help a lot. I haven’t checked the usage lately but I did read that then the main core is running at 100% the other cores at about at 50%, let’s say you could move some more of the main core that those other cores so they would go to 75% usage, that could possibly also increase performance by about 30%.

Somebody else was talking about using a 64bit client that might, or might not increase a little.

Not let’s just say they could increase the use of multiple cores a bid more increasing performance with ‘only’ 10%, implementing DirectX12 would ‘only’ increase performance with 15%, and using a 64bit client would only increase performance with about 5%. You might still go from 25fps to 32,5fps. That is still not enough for many, bit still a nice increase.

Another question is, how much of the graphical stuff and other calculations that are done best by a GPU does GW2 do on the CPU instead of on the GPU. One would hope most is done by the GPU but if not, moving all that to the GPU could possibly mean a huge increase in performance. While as long as that would be the case implementing DirectX 12 would not help much. Moving it to the GPU and implementing DirectX 12 at the same time would see an even bigger increase.

So you are right, without knowing everything we don’t know what will, and will not work best. We simply say something based on general known information. It is however hard to believe that there are no good performance improvements possible for GW2, other than simply increasing the hardware / CPU.

Devata.6589:

Ansau.7326:

Devata.6589:

Vadar.3254:

The thing I want to know is, why do people want directx 10, 11 or 12?, I am not being sarcastic, I genuinely would like to know, what are your reasons for it. There seems to be a lot of people that talk about directx without really understanding what it is and how it affects a game engine and the development of a game.

Performance increase. While most games are GPU heavy, GW2 is CPU heavy. My 2500k has trouble getting high frame-rate and then the GPU does not matter much (using a 460 or a 970).

Making use of DirectX 12 and better use of the multiple cores (partly what DirectX 12 can help with as it does not only reduces the calls going to the GPU, but can also split them over multiple cores) could mean a big increase in performance. The other way of getting better performance would be OCing the CPU or / and buying a newer / more expensive CPU while that would then only be useful for a few games, because as said, most games are GPU heavy. Meaning it would be a pretty heavy investment compared for what you get for it, and when buying a new GPU you will also have to buy a new motherboard. Not to mention the power-consumption when OCing the CPU.

So for customers, GW2 updating to DirectX 12 (in combination with a few other improvements) would be the best way to get a performance increase.

Now some people say that GW2 is a MMORPG so it’s fine to have lower FPS, but also think about using a VR set. Then you would need 90FPS for best result (on the current generation) or minimum 75FPS. Talking about that, when looking at the system requirements OR gives, it’s a GTX970 and an i5-4590. If I would put a 970 in my system would be close to that, the 2500k just performers a little under the 4590, a small OC on the 2500k, should put the performance on about the requirements for the OR, a system that is considered ‘heavy’, however performance in GW2 would still be pretty bad.

Like somebody said very well on reddit about this. “The problem won’t be that game will look lets say poor in two years, the real problem it will look poor, and it will run just as crappy as it does now, while games looking 4x times better will run at least 2x times better than GW2.”

The only problem is a newer API wouldn’t bring a big performance improvement, said by some of us here and confirmed by devs.

If people knew how truly dx12 works and what does and what does not, and how little would be the impact in gw2, this thread wouldn’t exist.
But you prefer to read something and assume all the world…

Can you link to the dev confirming that?

Posted multiple times on this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

GW2 bottleneck:

Which brings us to GW2. GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it’s a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say “Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you’re too busy”, but sadly this is not that world.

DirectX12:

As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn’t buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can’t do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best.

64bit (Memory Fragmentation):

And about crashing on Tequatl: Here’s one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running.

maddoctor.2738:

Devata.6589:

Dawdler.8521:

Whats more memory going to solve? Probably nothing. Its the games main thread thats bogging it down and its completely CPU bound. The only thing that will help is optimising this. x64 or DX12 will do nothing.

That depends, if the data the processor works with mostly is bigger than 32 bit (let’s say they do a lot with big ints) a 64bit processor (when using a 64bit client) can do this in one step, while a 32bit processor / 32bit client will need to cut the data into two parts so it takes longer. So it could increase performance, but that is not guaranteed.

Basically, the following code would theoretically run faster on a 64bit client then on a 32bit client.
Int64 a = 5;
int64 b = 5;
int64 c = a*b;

But, the following code would not.
Int a = 5;
int b = 5;
int c = a*b;

The number one reason a 64bit client would be better than a 32bit client is due to Memory Fragmentation.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_:

The most severe problem caused by fragmentation is causing a process or system to fail, due to premature resource exhaustion: if a contiguous allocation is needed and cannot be satisfied, failure occurs. Fragmentation causes this to occur even if there is enough of the resource, but not a continuous amount. For example, if a computer has 4 GiB of memory and 2 GiB are free, but the memory is fragmented in an alternating sequence of 1 MiB used, 1 MiB free, then a request for 1 contiguous GiB of memory cannot be satisfied even though 2 GiB total are free.

That’s why it is advised to RESTART your computer before joining TT, Tequatl, guild missions or other big world events to free up your memory blocks. Otherwise you risk memory crashes. That’s the number one reason for losing your Tequatl loot.

An 64bit client has access to a lot more memory to allocate. Which means Memory Fragmentation is not much of an issue with a 64bit client. If there are no large enough free blocks in the first 4GB of RAM, the system will allocate more RAM to the application. A 32bit client cannot do that because it can only address 4GB

This really depends on the memory usage. Let’s say GW2 will only use about 2GB of RAM this would usually not be a problem. GW2 does seem to use around the 2GB, so it would be strange if this is really be a big issue (not sure how certain you are that is the reason for crashes?). On the other hand you can wonder why GW2 is sticking around 2GB, is nothing more to load into the memory, or there is / could but the game limits itself to those 2GB, in the last case allowing it to use more RAM might also increase performance.

Devata.6589:

-snip-

Link was posted couple of times already, lurk few pages back.

And no, DX12 won’t give performance increase as much as you believe it would.

It won’t do a jack to fps drops like it’s on Maw, Karka or Great Jungle Wurm.

Performance isn’t that bad anyway, and the only problem with CPU is the same as in all MMOs – player amount in single area.

Unless, you have problems with playing Gw2 with 10 years old PC, then well, consider an upgrade?

Regarding 64bit client – we will need it sooner or later. And the faster we get it the better.
Anet is planning to introduce Raid system which will for sure require additional resources. To stabilize it we’ll need 64 bit architecture one way or another.

I still don’t get the idea to keep sticking to 32bit clients anyway and never thinking about 64 bit one.

Devata.6589:

maddoctor.2738:

Devata.6589:

Dawdler.8521:

Whats more memory going to solve? Probably nothing. Its the games main thread thats bogging it down and its completely CPU bound. The only thing that will help is optimising this. x64 or DX12 will do nothing.

That depends, if the data the processor works with mostly is bigger than 32 bit (let’s say they do a lot with big ints) a 64bit processor (when using a 64bit client) can do this in one step, while a 32bit processor / 32bit client will need to cut the data into two parts so it takes longer. So it could increase performance, but that is not guaranteed.

Basically, the following code would theoretically run faster on a 64bit client then on a 32bit client.
Int64 a = 5;
int64 b = 5;
int64 c = a*b;

But, the following code would not.
Int a = 5;
int b = 5;
int c = a*b;

The number one reason a 64bit client would be better than a 32bit client is due to Memory Fragmentation.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_:

The most severe problem caused by fragmentation is causing a process or system to fail, due to premature resource exhaustion: if a contiguous allocation is needed and cannot be satisfied, failure occurs. Fragmentation causes this to occur even if there is enough of the resource, but not a continuous amount. For example, if a computer has 4 GiB of memory and 2 GiB are free, but the memory is fragmented in an alternating sequence of 1 MiB used, 1 MiB free, then a request for 1 contiguous GiB of memory cannot be satisfied even though 2 GiB total are free.

That’s why it is advised to RESTART your computer before joining TT, Tequatl, guild missions or other big world events to free up your memory blocks. Otherwise you risk memory crashes. That’s the number one reason for losing your Tequatl loot.

An 64bit client has access to a lot more memory to allocate. Which means Memory Fragmentation is not much of an issue with a 64bit client. If there are no large enough free blocks in the first 4GB of RAM, the system will allocate more RAM to the application. A 32bit client cannot do that because it can only address 4GB

This really depends on the memory usage. Let’s say GW2 will only use about 2GB of RAM this would usually not be a problem. GW2 does seem to use around the 2GB, so it would be strange if this is really be a big issue (not sure how certain you are that is the reason for crashes?). On the other hand you can wonder why GW2 is sticking around 2GB, is nothing more to load into the memory, or there is / could but the game limits itself to those 2GB, in the last case allowing it to use more RAM might also increase performance.

Dev confirmation above this post

here’s the thing about DX12: games don’t have to be specifically coded for it, to be able to gain performance from it. DX12 API has a better way of managing multithreads, and performs many more draw calls per second (look up the 3DMark dx12 test on GTX 670) due to the better instruction set.

i’ve run that test on my system as well, with a 4930k, and a single GTX 670 enabled (i forgot to turn on SLI mode for this test)

DX11 Single-threaded draw calls per second: 1 404 929
DX11 Multi-threaded draw calls per second: 1 973 186
DX12 draw calls per second: 11 287 505

(i7-4930k, 2x GTX 670 SLI, 2560×1600 resolution)

for GW2, i’m not sure exactly my performance gain in frames per second, because it varies anywhere from 45 FPS in Teq / Vinewrath fights up to 145FPS out in Kessex Hills. i usually get 60-80FPS in Lion’s Arch. i can tell you that the game runs a lot smoother on my GTX 670 SLI system on Win10 DX12, than on Win8.1 and DX11

Draw calls in gw2 is not an issue. It barely gets 4500 is heavy situations, and to hit 5500 you need extremely populated situations with all UI possible open.

maddoctor.2738:

Devata.6589:

Ansau.7326:

Devata.6589:

Vadar.3254:

~

~

The only problem is a newer API wouldn’t bring a big performance improvement, said by some of us here and confirmed by devs.

If people knew how truly dx12 works and what does and what does not, and how little would be the impact in gw2, this thread wouldn’t exist.
But you prefer to read something and assume all the world…

Can you link to the dev confirming that?

Posted multiple times on this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

GW2 bottleneck:

Which brings us to GW2. GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it’s a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say “Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you’re too busy”, but sadly this is not that world.

DirectX12:

As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn’t buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can’t do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best.

64bit (Memory Fragmentation):

And about crashing on Tequatl: Here’s one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running.

“Posted multiple times on this thread:”
It would help to stick to their own official forums I guess.

It is an interesting post, when reading it you would think everything is optimized pretty well, but that would raise the question why then it’s still performing pretty bad even with pretty good hardware. Is it really that they are simply running into hardware limitations, somehow I find that hard to believe also when comparing it with other (MMO) games.

I am thinking that you might be able to test this simply by going to a small place (inside) with many people and see how looking at them vs looking the other way does or does not affect your FPS. One would think that you still get all information from the people standing behind you so turning towards them should only change what the GPU has to do, and when that is not the bottleneck it means you should not see real FPS-drops. If you do see FPS drops while GPU is not maxing out, you can wonder if the claim is completely correct.

Well it’s really hard to know anything for sure, but I do find performance bad when looking at the hardware and comparing it to some other games.

Tao.1234:

Devata.6589:

-snip-

Unless, you have problems with playing Gw2 with 10 years old PC, then well, consider an upgrade?

Well the 2500k is just over 4 years old, what would usually be pretty old (while new when GW2 was released btw) however because CPU improvements have been somewhat slow lately it’s still among the fast CPU’s. When you ask advice about an upgrade, in general people will not tell you to now upgrade the processor when you use a 2500k.

A GTX 970 is not even a year old. put in 8 or 16 GB or RAM and you have a system that is still pretty up to date / fast. However, this setup does not give you great performance in GW2, so it’s not just about having an 10 year old PC.

Beldin.5498:

Killyox.3950:

lordkrall.7241:

But the game engine is built for DirectX 9. You can’t just magically push a button and have it use DirectX 12. If that was the case why would any game ever use anything other than the latest version?

WOW could provide DX11 client from DX9 so could GW2 if ANet focused on it. That would be a huge performance boost.

Yeah .. if such a poor indie company like Blizzard could do it .. no reason why
you can’t do it yourself in your cellar ^^

But carefull .. the performance boost to 1000 Gazillion FPS could maybe make
your monitor explode.

Serious .. just stop with the WoW argument .. Blizzard earns money without end
from their cashcow, on the other hand that game is ugly as hell and was espically
build to run on low speed single core processors.

NCSoft isn’t poor either and ArenaNet belongs to NCSoft.

Also with 144Hz monitor I am fine

Devata.6589:

Tao.1234:

Devata.6589:

-snip-

Unless, you have problems with playing Gw2 with 10 years old PC, then well, consider an upgrade?

Well the 2500k is just over 4 years old, what would usually be pretty old (while new when GW2 was released btw) however because CPU improvements have been somewhat slow lately it’s still among the fast CPU’s. When you ask advice about an upgrade, in general people will not tell you to now upgrade the processor when you use a 2500k.

A GTX 970 is not even a year old. put in 8 or 16 GB or RAM and you have a system that is still pretty up to date / fast. However, this setup does not give you great performance in GW2, so it’s not just about having an 10 year old PC.

I still use i5-760 4gb ram adn gtx670. Planning upgrade when Pascal architecture from nvidia sees the light of day + skylake from intel tick period and pref 32gb ddr4

Will have again some years ahead. Thank goodness CPUs didn’t pull so much ahead:DD

Devata.6589:

Well the 2500k is just over 4 years old, what would usually be pretty old (while new when GW2 was released btw) however because CPU improvements have been somewhat slow lately it’s still among the fast CPU’s. When you ask advice about an upgrade, in general people will not tell you to now upgrade the processor when you use a 2500k.

A GTX 970 is not even a year old. put in 8 or 16 GB or RAM and you have a system that is still pretty up to date / fast. However, this setup does not give you great performance in GW2, so it’s not just about having an 10 year old PC.

I have ~5 years old PC.
My only bottleneck is CPU and crowded places – that’s why turning Character Model Limit to Low is fixing all kinds of performance issues and allow me to play smoothly while the rest of the graphic settings are maxed.

But like I said, Character Model Limit aka Player crowd is the biggest issue in all MMO games, and rarely even a top notch CPU and GPU solve the problem.

Mind you that my CPU is on pair with yours, kinda worse in MMO gaming.

Have been doing some testing and it looks like the problem is bigger in LA then in WvW. Just a few people in LA create the same decrease in FPS as two complete zergs in WvW.

Also I was thinking that if the CPU is the bottleneck, increasing the resolution should not have a real impact on the performance (as that is just additional work for the GPU)

Nonetheless I would still love to see them pushing out as much FPS as possible, mainly because that is important for VR, what btw would be an addition reason to implement DX 12 (or 11) as GameWorks VR (Nvidia’s api for VR) does work with DX11 and DX12.

So other then performance reasons, there are more reasons to implement DX11 or DX12,

When DDO added the DX10 mode it allowed more performance and better quality graphics and effects. They were able to keep and support dx 9 and dx 10 modes at the same time. Adding a x64 bit DX 12 mode will increase performance and it will allow more graphical and effects options to make this beautiful game even prettier. With an MMO of this size there really is no reason to be so many generations behind.

Tao.1234:

Devata.6589:

Well the 2500k is just over 4 years old, what would usually be pretty old (while new when GW2 was released btw) however because CPU improvements have been somewhat slow lately it’s still among the fast CPU’s. When you ask advice about an upgrade, in general people will not tell you to now upgrade the processor when you use a 2500k.

A GTX 970 is not even a year old. put in 8 or 16 GB or RAM and you have a system that is still pretty up to date / fast. However, this setup does not give you great performance in GW2, so it’s not just about having an 10 year old PC.

I have ~5 years old PC.
My only bottleneck is CPU and crowded places – that’s why turning Character Model Limit to Low is fixing all kinds of performance issues and allow me to play smoothly while the rest of the graphic settings are maxed.

But like I said, Character Model Limit aka Player crowd is the biggest issue in all MMO games, and rarely even a top notch CPU and GPU solve the problem.

Mind you that my CPU is on pair with yours, kinda worse in MMO gaming.

I used to have that problem but then i upgrade my ram to 24gb and now i get 30-40 fps in wvw on crowded places easily

Nobody is suggesting you need to throw out Dx9 for Dx11 or 12.

And Dx10 was and still can be slower in DDO, it all depends on the options.

See it’s a mix bag. Sometime it’s faster to use Dx10 because it’s less work to do the same thing. Problem is you can now do more and many developers can’t help themselves to add the “Pretty” because they could. So while Dx9 “very high” default settings does A, B and C the Dx10 version of “very high” default adds in enhanced C as well as D, E and F.

Here’s a modern comparison between Dx9, 10, 10.1 and 11.

http://www.techspot.com/review/537-max-payne-3-performance/page6.html

Sure Dx9 is 20% faster than Dx11.

Dx12 is out and most cards support it. I read game update is not happening. but how true that is? or do arenanet have plans for it or to update the Graphic engines? I mean the game looks great and is very immersive I can imagine just a little more of modern effects

Sonido.6321:

Dx12 is out and most cards support it. I read game update is not happening. but how true that is? or do arenanet have plans for it or to update the Graphic engines? I mean the game looks great and is very immersive I can imagine just a little more of modern effects

Have a skim through this thread (well, I use ‘skim’ in the literal sense – it is over 500 posts long).

There has been discussion on whether or not ArenaNet is upgrading to higher DirectX’s since the game’s release. I don’t think the cost-benefit analysis merits an update to the graphics engine, and thus I doubt there will be any resources put into updating it.

Edit: Added quote

DX11/12 threads are the new Mounts threads.

Thanks for the info

If the customer/consumer base feeds ANet enough money, either through the gemstore or buying up expansions, i’d say it’s likely that NCSoft would allow them the funding/people to rebuild the graphics engine to take advantage of more modern graphics technology (just so the cash cow keeps producing)

It doesn’t seem as though GW2 generates so much revenue right now that it’s likely to happen anytime soon, however.

yes I think you’re right

uknortherner.2670:

DX11/12 threads are the new Mounts threads.

Well asking for dx12 isnt that useless, dx 12.5 is a miracle fix for dx itself,

Behellagh.1468:

Here’s a modern comparison between Dx9, 10, 10.1 and 11.

http://www.techspot.com/review/537-max-payne-3-performance/page6.html

Sure Dx9 is 20% faster than Dx11.

Haha .. nice find .. especially for people that want even DX10 or 11 because
of better performance ^^

Like I said earlier. It probably would be faster, Dx11 over Dx9, if developers simply kept the same effects and features. Problem is Dx10/11 allowed them to do more complex and additional effects that simply weren’t possible with Dx9 and that, while it upped the “Pretty”, ends up impacting the frame rate. And once people are shown the pretty, they don’t want to turn features down or off.

On top of it what’s “Very High” preset for Dx9 may be streamline when compared to “Very High” for Dx11.

So the bottomline to all the agruments, There’s nothing speical about DirectX past 9. If it offers nothing but just extra bells and whistle we all be just on DirectX 9, Nothing should exist past 9.

And for one that said about 32bit. If the client is 64bit it can use more ram. I ran a SL Viewer Client 32 and 64 bit and I had much better performance on the 64bit beacuse my pc had 6GB of ram installed ontop of that is the graphics card and CPU.

32bit Client cannot take advantage of other things a 64bit client could. 32 bit OSs cannot take more ram than it’s allowed. To have more ram you must have a 64bit OS.

Wow Sonic plays GW2, I am in full awe!

I wonder how many people would be interested in good decent build-in VR support. As those also require DX11 or preferably DX12.

The VR Api of Oculus and that of Nvidia do not support DX9.
http://vrfocus.com/archives/10910/oculus-depreciating-support-dx9-next-sdk/

https://developer.nvidia.com/virtual-reality-development

That does not mean you can’t have any support VR in DX9, you can, but for really good native support you do need the upgrade.

Good VR support in GW2 could be amazing (when implemented well) and adding a complete new, more immersive experience to the game, and good support could be a good selling-point.

Devata.6589:

I wonder how many people would be interested in good decent build-in VR support. As those also require DX11 or preferably DX12.

The VR Api of Oculus and that of Nvidia do not support DX9.
http://vrfocus.com/archives/10910/oculus-depreciating-support-dx9-next-sdk/

https://developer.nvidia.com/virtual-reality-development

That does not mean you can’t have any support VR in DX9, you can, but for really good native support you do need the upgrade.

Good VR support in GW2 could be amazing (when implemented well) and adding a complete new, more immersive experience to the game, and good support could be a good selling-point.

Immersive as in you are going to womit every time you dodge.

VR equipment is only good for 1st person games thats been designed for VR. GW2 is not one of those games.

Would be nice with dx12 support, though I doubt we’d see it in this game, atleast not this expansion.

Dawdler.8521:

Devata.6589:

I wonder how many people would be interested in good decent build-in VR support. As those also require DX11 or preferably DX12.

The VR Api of Oculus and that of Nvidia do not support DX9.
http://vrfocus.com/archives/10910/oculus-depreciating-support-dx9-next-sdk/

https://developer.nvidia.com/virtual-reality-development

That does not mean you can’t have any support VR in DX9, you can, but for really good native support you do need the upgrade.

Good VR support in GW2 could be amazing (when implemented well) and adding a complete new, more immersive experience to the game, and good support could be a good selling-point.

Immersive as in you are going to womit every time you dodge.

VR equipment is only good for 1st person games thats been designed for VR. GW2 is not one of those games.

“only good for 1st person games”
This is the biggest misconception about VR there exists, same for 3D glasses btw. I own 3D vision glasses and can tell you MMORPG’s are the best games to use them, I did try it on well supported 1st person shooters but it just does not work very great, probably because of the faster movement and the way you aim. (this is better in VR)

Back to VR, Oculus has multiple games it uses to demonstrate the VR-set, including multiple that are not 1st person. Chronos for example does not even let you move with the character (3th person) but places you in a fixed location in the room, and the effect you get with that is great.

For GW2 you could obviously play it in first person view but that might not always give you the best experience in VR, when just walking around I think it does, but indeed for dodging and combats with many people around you it might not be great, however for third person it can very well be a great experience. Where you now can look all around you (movement should not be bases on where you look, but similar to when you move the mouse while holding the left button) and seeing you character in front of you (making the same movements with his head, as you do). Or imagine looking up to one of the world-bosses.

That for sure creates a good immersive experience as you really feel like being in the game / world, you see and hear the world around you and see everything in 3D.

Back to DX12..
“games thats been designed for VR.” There is some truth in this.. It does not so much have to be design for it from the start, but you would want good build-in support for a good effect. Third party or generic solution to get a VR-set to work, will not get you very good results. That is for sure, and that is also exactly where DX11 / DX12 come into play.

Sonic the Hedgehog.5169:

So the bottomline to all the agruments, There’s nothing speical about DirectX past 9. If it offers nothing but just extra bells and whistle we all be just on DirectX 9, Nothing should exist past 9.

And for one that said about 32bit. If the client is 64bit it can use more ram. I ran a SL Viewer Client 32 and 64 bit and I had much better performance on the 64bit beacuse my pc had 6GB of ram installed ontop of that is the graphics card and CPU.

32bit Client cannot take advantage of other things a 64bit client could. 32 bit OSs cannot take more ram than it’s allowed. To have more ram you must have a 64bit OS.

No the argument that Dx11 is faster just because it’s Dx11 is false. Dx11 can be faster because it allows developers to multithread the render code so it can scale on CPUs with more cores. Dx12 goes one step farther and allows a substantial part of the driver to be shifted from the OS kernel to the user side so it can also scale alongside the multithreaded renderer. That’s where the majority of the improvements in performance are from, not the API itself.

Dx10/11/12 allows more complicated effects that are slow/difficult/impossible to do in Dx9. But Dx11/12 allows a developer the capability to code their renderer to be multithreaded, something they can’t do at all in Dx9/10. But they don’t just get it for free.

nevermind my $3000 pc doesn’t support dx12 rofl

just make it dx11

Cronos.6532:

nevermind my $3000 pc doesn’t support dx12 rofl

just make it dx11

Windows 10 is free, I would upgrade if I were you.

The thing is, DX9 was a success since most developers utilized it…however, I hear it was a total PITA to code using it, and that dx10 and 11 were even less dev friendly. DX12 is suppose to be better on code monkies, at least from what ive heard.

Also the advantages of the jump from 9 to 12 is huge, dx10 gets you…?? and 11 tessalation…which is ok but you know…

DX12 is going to be the new standard, so the sooner they get on board the better….

But yeah I don’t see it happening…its a huge undertaking that wont yield new players really…maybe a few would check it out just to see how it all works if they get it done before it becomes standard issue…which wont happen.

We will have to wait for GW3 for that….and to be honest…they should do the WoW thing, just keep making the game you have that people like better rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. So maybe if they see fit to not make a 3rd game and just keep gw2 going forever, then dx12 would make sense.

Since i have read this :
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3j1916/get_your_popcorn_ready_nv_gpus_do_not_support/

I now really wish we get DX-12 .. lol

by the time we get GW3 its already dx20….

StrangerDanger.3496:

We will have to wait for GW3 for that….and to be honest…they should do the WoW thing, just keep making the game you have that people like better rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

I agree, and in fact Anet had already stated that is what they wanted to do. I think the quote was something along the lines of. “GW2 will evolve into GW3”.

However in order to really do that, you will also need upgrade the core like upgrading to a newer DirectX.. When you want to make the comparison with WoW, just as WoW.

I think it is in fact a selling point, many people will add value to that even when it is not something you can directly see. Also it can help with implementation of VR again something that can be a selling point.

And let’s say that Anet would be able to make seamless zones (something that requires an upgrade on the core), that would also be a selling point. So improvements to the core will usually result into selling points.

Beldin.5498:

Since i have read this :
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3j1916/get_your_popcorn_ready_nv_gpus_do_not_support/

I now really wish we get DX-12 .. lol

AMD has an advantage on the number of Async cals it can handle, Nvidia does have some other advantages. Ashes of the Singularity happens to make a lot of use of that.

Don’t forget that Ashes of the Singularity really always has been a AMD game, it was also used to show of Mantle where people from AMD and from Oxide where showing their product side by side. So I guess you have to take everything it with a grain of salt. We will see what will happen but Nvidia could come in big troubles if they sell a product as DirectX 12 while it isn’t so I guess everything is a bid more nuanced then we see now.

Devata.6589:

Beldin.5498:

Since i have read this :
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3j1916/get_your_popcorn_ready_nv_gpus_do_not_support/

I now really wish we get DX-12 .. lol

AMD has an advantage on the number of Async cals it can handle, Nvidia does have some other advantages. Ashes of the Singularity happens to make a lot of use of that.

Don’t forget that Ashes of the Singularity really always has been a AMD game, it was also used to show of Mantle where people from AMD and from Oxide where showing their product side by side. So I guess you have to take everything it with a grain of salt. We will see what will happen but Nvidia could come in big troubles if they sell a product as DirectX 12 while it isn’t so I guess everything is a bid more nuanced then we see now.

Pure benchmarks show Nvidia being faster than AMD at async shaders (alot faster when its within the 31 stream limitation of Nvidia and and only “as fast” when doing 128).

We need a dozen more DX12 game benchmarks before we get the full story on this.

I’m one of your oldest fans Arenanet, but there are three things that stick in my craw:

1) I have 16GB of luscious RAM, but GW2 can only use 8GB of it – we need the client to go to 64bit!
2) I have a AMD 8350FX water cooled with a Corsair H100i – 8 Cores of shiny running at below room temp – but GW2 will only utilise 50% of one Core – we need Dx12 support!
3) I have a Asus Radeon 290 (Antrioscopic Filtering, Tessellation and HBAO – oh my!)– a quite excellent GFX card, that GW2 tends to ignore – we need at least Dx10 support!

In a sunless take down event.. I have to turn the number of characters to lowest to make this playable at the highest settings. On the highest settings otherwise, I will get 2-5fps during this encounter – even WITH the character limit set to lowest, this is still rarely higher than 15fps. I hate having to do this when streaming, frankly it’s a little embarrassing.

I stream using OBS, this requires a chunk of CPU power – when its on – fps drops in GW2.. (how can this be since GW2 itself isn’t using a whole core.. let alone the other 7! – NB there is little or no FPS drops on any other game I have streamed.

I also play other games (shock I know!) – lets discuss the Witcher 3 in contrast… it has very complex ploys and textures including Nvidia hair physx – with many NPCs on screen at once. I’m on an AMD card so to run the hair phys is more GPU intensive. Even with everything set to max, I will get above 30fps and more typically (when hair phys is off) above 60fps most of the time.

The game is three years old now – and to stay current you need to bring the client up to today’s standards. At the very least we need a 64bit client to enable access to memory above 8GB. HoT is the opportunity to set this right, not doing this is likely to drive a good proportion of those new players we have just seen arrive, away.

What I would like to see, is some optimisation going on.. I want to be able to play Edge of the Mists, with a zerg of more than 50, be able to stream it and not see the frame rate drop under 60fps. Right now.. even if I upgraded my CPU to an Intel i7 and a Titan – this would not be so.

Up till now, Arenanet has been easily my favourite developer in the world. You listen to your community and your communications are legendary (Love you Rubi!). Please.. let’s address this, it’s getting a bit silly now.

Thanks.. a very loyal customer.

I second this. Despite the vastly inferior boot times and aesthetic of Windows 10 (all that flat lazily designed Metro…eww) I use it anyway just for the DirectX12 support.

However, Guild Wars 2 runs on DirectX 9, which Windows 10 has no support for. Whenever I try switching the resolution to 8k for screenshots (I need to switch it in nVidia, log out then revert back to 4k) it simply crashes in game and if I manage to control + alt + delete I’ll see that DirectX 9 is the source of the problem then I’m obligated to hard reset. Sometimes when doing Teq I’ll randomly be disconnected.

The previous 12 pages also communicate countless quality of life and even critical improvements that would come from updating the API.

Keep in mind that Pascal will be released (GTX 1180? They skipped over the 800 series and logically the 1000 series should be out by now yet they’re skipping HBM going right for HBM2 next year) quite a long time from now, but still soon enough to start worrying about optimizing for it.

Does a Dx9 game run in Windows 10? Yes. Therefore Windows 10 support Dx9.

Does Dx9 support extreme resolutions? I can see that not being the case but that’s an issue with the Dx9 feature set and driver implementation.

And once again Dx12 does not buy you much in terms of performance as people suppose until the game renderer is rewritten for multithreaded scaling for Dx11 and Dx12. Also the real bottleneck is the main thread at events and not currently the renderer.

There is a lot of infrastructure work needed to be done before they can even look at another API. Remember the entire game engine is home grown with roots going back to the original Guild Wars. This isn’t an engine from a game developer that uses it on multiple released games or licence it to 3rd parties and need to compete against other engines.

I’m not disagreeing that it wouldn’t be nice to have it happen, I’m merely pointing out that it’s not the same as adding a new API to a engine that already supports several. It’s much more difficult to go from supporting one to two than two to N.

I entered a driver disk specifically to upload DirectX 9 and it very explicitly told me it wasn’t compatible. The only way to use it is Windows compatibility mode., which Guild Wars 2 set to Windows 8 automatically.

I have some 8k screenshots but can’t really seem to set the resolution to 8k anymore, probably related to the crashing bug (I play on 4k mainly) Granted, it’s not a resolution I actually intend to do actual gameplay on but rather strictly screenshots. It’s a 2-10 fps slideshow at 8k, probably mostly due to bandwidth limitations despite my CAT-7 cable since Comcast doesn’t offer an option that would enable playable 8k as well as Dark Souls being playable at 8k but I still plan big hardware upgrades next year especially Pascal.

In other words even with a Pascal 1080 (or 1180 if they’re skipping another gen) the bandwidth bottleneck should still make things a slideshow

I think its very possible they could port the game into a DX12 game engine. There wont be a GW3 mmorpg. People are not investing major money into mmorpgs any more. they simply don’t draw the crowd they use to and every game that got major investment had one goal in mind, to out do another game, and no game came even close….so I think the big money is done trying to tap into that one mmorpg anomaly.

Basically I see a GW3 being more like skyrim, maybe with co-op…which would be a fantastic thing to make btw, get on steam and sell it for $50 and take that money to the bank.

The only two solutions for Gw2 however, as I see it, is to do the blizzard thing, double down on the games you do have, keep them modern, invest in them, continually develop them with no end in sight….or put the game into maintenance mode after HOT, do light upkeep on the code and bugs, and downscale resources put into it as people trickle out.

I really think they could keep this thing going with $50 expansions every 1.5 years for a very long time, however they’ll need a gimmick to keep people coming in, and I think being an early adopter of DX12 would draw in a lot of people.

It would make sense if they are determined to stick with this game blizzard style, to adopt dx12 relatively early, providing a foundation for a lot more expansions for a very long time, I think dx12 will be the dx9 moving forward, the go to DX where 10/11 failed to provide enough for their efforts.

I really think they need to look at taking the HOT money and putting some towards a DX12 client, invest in the future of the game, unless of course the goal is to slowly back down and put their efforts elsewhere.

Also I really think a GW3 single player/co-op skyrim-esque steam game would really be a big hit…if you get a solid writer and take the storyline up a few notches.

“Basically I see a GW3 being more like skyrim, maybe with co-op…which would be a fantastic thing to make btw, get on steam and sell it for $50 and take that money to the bank.”

I don’t agree. Skyrim’s mechanics are terrible and kinda clunky. I think it would be better moving in a Souls direction so somewhere between GW2 and Dark Souls 1 (or 3 if it improves upon it) mechanically.

“he only two solutions for Gw2 however, as I see it, is to do the blizzard thing, double down on the games you do have, keep them modern, invest in them, continually develop them with no end in sight….or put the game into maintenance mode after HOT, do light upkeep on the code and bugs, and downscale resources put into it as people trickle out.”

I agree with this. I don’t mind if the game is down for an entire week or two so long as we’re being told they’re making drastic technical improvements such as DirectX 12 implementation. We really need 64-bit clients too.

“if you get a solid writer and take the storyline up a few notches.”

The mechanics and overall gameplay need to come first however.

So, any info yet if any engine improvements or upgrades are coming with HoT? Because this is really what is keeping me from buying the expansion.

I would much rather have a better framerate and therefore a much smoother experience than any of the features they have announced to date.

Tron.2189:

So, any info yet if any engine improvements or upgrades are coming with HoT? Because this is really what is keeping me from buying the expansion.

I would much rather have a better framerate and therefore a much smoother experience than any of the features they have announced to date.

There will be no major engine upgrades coming with the expansion. If there where we would have known by now.

Do not worry, when the game was launched they said DX11 support was coming Soon™

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Do not worry, when the game was launched they said DX11 support was coming Soon™

That is outright lying.

What they did say was that they were going to LOOK INTO adding DX10. And since they clearly haven’t done that it seems likely that their looking into adding it showed that it was simply not worth it.

lordkrall.7241:

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Do not worry, when the game was launched they said DX11 support was coming Soon™

That is outright lying.

What they did say was that they were going to LOOK INTO adding DX10. And since they clearly haven’t done that it seems likely that their looking into adding it showed that it was simply not worth it.

The actual quote off of the Facebook post.

For those of you who have been asking about DX11 support for Guild Wars 2, our goal with GW2 has always been to provide a gorgeous fantasy world while at the same time running on a wide range of gaming PCs.

Focusing on DX9 allows us to do this, as it’s a much wider supported graphics API than DX11 is and we wanted our game to reach as many of our fans as possible.

We will be evaluating supporting DX11 post launch. ~RB2
August 7, 2012

“Evaluating” is not promise.

Well, it’s been 3 years and still no change. At least they could post a comprehensive blog post about why they’re sticking with this outdated engine.

Is the effort needed really so high that it doesn’t make financial sense?

Would really love to hear directly from the engine team what the technical hurdles are and the potential downfalls/benefits.

At least then we all will have a better understanding on why the hell nothing changes in this department.