Guild Wars 2

Will there ever be a upgarde?any news? Mircosoft annouced directx 12 a couple day ago and Nivida Announced cool new Directx11 drivers who brings a bunch more FPS.

You’ll probably get a response on something among the lines of it’s something they would like to do one day but its on a low priority compared to the future features of Guild Wars 2.

here is orginal Post from arena net and this was in 2012

Guild Wars 2

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

@Chase
this hurt when this is on low prio…=(

Since GW2 graphics are CPU RENDERED at this point, they would have to do changes to the game to have the graphics GPU RENDERED first for ANY Direct X rendering to be done.

All I want is real anti-aliasing. FXAA is stupid and blurs textures.

I hope so,it would be nice.DirectX9 is very old (10 years!)and i think that now most people have a graphiccard with directX 11.X.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

All I want is real anti-aliasing. FXAA is stupid and blurs textures.

They already have true anti aliasing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

i want TXAA :P

GW2’s entire technical frame-work seems outdated for a game that’s only 1.5 years old. It’s obvious that the years of delays left much technical potential unused.

I think it was originally planned for 2010 but wasn’t released until 2012.

The engine has obvious issues:

• It’s extremely CPU limited,
• it has poor multi-core support,
• it’s a 32-but application,
• can’t harness more than 2GB of RAM,
• it doesn’t benefit from DirectX 11,
• it has a very limited map-size,
• it has issues with calculating conditions,
• it has issues with AoE affecting more than 5 players.

According to the steam hardware survey less than 2% of steam devices have a DX 9 GPU. And I doubt any of them are used for serious gaming. I doubt a significant portion of the Guild Wars 2 player-base has a DX 9 GPU too (probably less than 1%).

World of Warcraft has both had a 64-bit client and a DirectX 11 client since even before Guild Wars 2 was released.

I believe many limitations of the game could be overcome is they updated their engine to support more modern APIs and hardware.

here also directx 9 versus directx 11 bechmarks in WoW

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-directx-11-performance,2793-7.html

@Dee Jay
Right it is a shame that gw 2 also not support 64 bit and cant handle more than 2 GB RAM -.-

Chase.8415:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

All I want is real anti-aliasing. FXAA is stupid and blurs textures.

They already have true anti aliasing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

It has supersampling, but you cannot choose how much supersampling, currently it is doing very low supersampling. In GW1 I had better anti aliasing than in GW2 with Supersampling + 25% downsampling.

64bit would be good, it would prevent out of memory errors which crash the game frequently.

ohh tank you Leolas for that link.

Yeah anti aliasing is very poor in Gw 2.oh man i hope they uprade the engine because from that we benefit all.

Leolas.6273:

@Dee Jay
Right it is a shame that gw 2 also not support 64 bit an can handle more than 2 GB RAM -.-

It can handle 4 GB indeed since it is compiled with Large Memory Aware. However you need to have 64-Bit Windows for that.

Dee Jay.2460:

• it has a very limited map-size,
• it has issues with calculating conditions,
• it has issues with AoE affecting more than 5 players.

That are also Server-side problems, and don’t have to do with the client.

Okei 4GB.

But what makes me upset is that arena net posted here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151048222709209

that they will evaluating directx11 after launch and that was,like grebcol wrote,in 2012 now we have 2014 and we get nothing,not one news about it.

Just toss in SweetFX and you are on your way. I haven’t used FXAA in over a year. The game looks very very nice with SweetFX tuned right and supersampling.
I do wish that they would put dx11 in as well as better multicore support but we all know that will never happen.

ARENA NET make it happen! Not all is vain

I hope also that anet will upgrade this.Gw 2 was released with an old API and now 2 years later this API becomes very old.

Stormcrow.7513:

Just toss in SweetFX and you are on your way. I haven’t used FXAA in over a year. The game looks very very nice with SweetFX tuned right and supersampling.
I do wish that they would put dx11 in as well as better multicore support but we all know that will never happen.

Now Mantle will never be happen,thats true but directx 11 i dont think so.

Stormcrow.7513:

Just toss in SweetFX and you are on your way. I haven’t used FXAA in over a year. The game looks very very nice with SweetFX tuned right and supersampling.
I do wish that they would put dx11 in as well as better multicore support but we all know that will never happen.

I cant stand SweetFX, it makes the game more ugly imho and not prettier. It cant replace proper anti aliasing.

Yeah SweetFX looks rubbish,i dont like it.Cmon Anet gogo for DX11! i will go every day to the church to pray.

The graphics settings in GW1 are far superior to GW2, in GW1 it even takes FULL ADVANTAGE of my SLI setup running almost everything in the triple digit FPS.

Leolas.6273:

I hope so,it would be nice.DirectX9 is very old (10 years!)and i think that now most people have a graphiccard with directX 11.X.

I wonder if the GW2 client is looking at our PC specs… Else neither the players or ANet themselves would have any hard figures to show what percentage of the population has what capabilities. With hard figures good decision can be made.

EDIT:

• it has issues with AoE affecting more than 5 players.

I though they implemented a 5 target limit because everyone was getting aoe spam happy. Seem to remember no such limit at launch.

Grebcol.5984:

Yeah SweetFX looks rubbish,i dont like it.Cmon Anet gogo for DX11! i will go every day to the church to pray.

DX 11 isn’t going to change how the game looks drastically, unless they actually do add in tessellation etc… The only thing we might see a performance boost.

SweetFX looks fine, you just need to play around with the settings to get something you like. The shaders it comes with add very personalized touches that cant really appease everyone.

@CureForLiving

Here look: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

in steam 70.28% of the Users have a directx11 card.

Chase.8415:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

All I want is real anti-aliasing. FXAA is stupid and blurs textures.

They already have true anti aliasing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

You cannot configure Supersampling. What I meant was MSAA

You guys obviously haven’t played with SweetFX enough to get it looking correct. I can’t play without it now. FXAA is blurry garbage.

This is a screen from the other day. I know there are others that have it set up better than I do as well.
http://i.imgur.com/tOSAp9P.png

@CureForLiving
i4770K intel, Inno 3D 780 Ti, 16 GB Ram and SSD are my specs.There isnt a real reason why gw 2 shouldnt support DX11.WoW has DX11 Support is older than GW 2.Shogun 2 obtained DX11 upgrade after Realese(and is also older than gw 2) also why not GW 2?

Stormcrow.7513:

You guys obviously haven’t played with SweetFX enough to get it looking correct. I can’t play without it now. FXAA is blurry garbage.

This is a screen from the other day. I know there are others that have it set up better than I do as well.
http://i.imgur.com/tOSAp9P.png

That looks really nice

Steam February 2014
DirectX 11 GPUs Users 70.28%
DirectX 10.x GPUs User 30.33%
DirectX 9 Shader Model 2b and 3.0 GPUs Users 1.74%
DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 GPUs Users 0.97%
DirectX 8 GPUs and below User 0.69%

So Gw 2 have DX9

DX11 70.28% VS DX9 1.74% + 0.97%

I dont also see any reason why the hell they shouldn’t support DX11

Stormcrow.7513:

You guys obviously haven’t played with SweetFX enough to get it looking correct. I can’t play without it now. FXAA is blurry garbage.

This is a screen from the other day. I know there are others that have it set up better than I do as well.
http://i.imgur.com/tOSAp9P.png

sorry that looks like garbage to me compared to native graphic settings.

Malediktus.9250:

Chase.8415:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

All I want is real anti-aliasing. FXAA is stupid and blurs textures.

They already have true anti aliasing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

It has supersampling, but you cannot choose how much supersampling, currently it is doing very low supersampling. In GW1 I had better anti aliasing than in GW2 with Supersampling + 25% downsampling.

64bit would be good, it would prevent out of memory errors which crash the game frequently.

Just get a 2550×1440 resolution and jaggies become much less of a problem.

DirectX is a proprietary dead end. Windows market share is declining. If they’re going to rewrite the graphics engine I’d rather they move to OpenGL, which will also open the doors to native Mac & Linux clients, etc. Games are the only thing tying modern desktops to Windows and it would be nice to see more mainstream games take a progressive stance and allow users to choose which OS they want to play on.

Still wait for DX11. Maybe HD Graphics and maybe 3D View of the Game. The future would begin with those steps.

Yes, they’ll completely rip apart the game code and rewrite it all for a new render engine and put it out tomorrow. Does anyone comprehend the amount of money and time that would need to be invested into it? All the while keeping in mind that all of that work is going to get a very very very very very very very very very negligible income return.

Dee Jay.2460:

GW2’s entire technical frame-work seems outdated for a game that’s only 1.5 years old. It’s obvious that the years of delays left much technical potential unused.

I think it was originally planned for 2010 but wasn’t released until 2012.

The engine has obvious issues:

• It’s extremely CPU limited,
• it has poor multi-core support,
• it’s a 32-but application,
• can’t harness more than 2GB of RAM,
• it doesn’t benefit from DirectX 11,
• it has a very limited map-size,
• it has issues with calculating conditions,
• it has issues with AoE affecting more than 5 players.

According to the steam hardware survey less than 2% of steam devices have a DX 9 GPU. And I doubt any of them are used for serious gaming. I doubt a significant portion of the Guild Wars 2 player-base has a DX 9 GPU too (probably less than 1%).

World of Warcraft has both had a 64-bit client and a DirectX 11 client since even before Guild Wars 2 was released.

I believe many limitations of the game could be overcome is they updated their engine to support more modern APIs and hardware.

- The game is enabled to support 3GB of memory on 32-bit systems, 4GB on 64-bit (IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE enabled).

- The Dx9 is due to XP support which is still wide spread in many parts of the world. You could have a Dx11 card but if you are running XP you can only use Dx9.

- Game development started in 2007 when quad cores weren’t as prevalent, Vista was being rejected by gamers, another reason for only Dx9, and since Vista was the first Windows OS that had widespread 64-bit support for drivers, a reason why no 64-bit.

As for WoW, when ANet brings in $1 billion USD a year in income, I’m sure they could fund a tiger time to rebuild the game engine for both Dx11 and 64-bit.

The reason for no 64bit was because the game would be rendered incompatible with 32bit systems, namely winxp and the idiot versions of vista and now win7 and win8.

Behellagh.1468:

- The game is enabled to support 3GB of memory on 32-bit systems, 4GB on 64-bit (IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE enabled).

- The Dx9 is due to XP support which is still wide spread in many parts of the world. You could have a Dx11 card but if you are running XP you can only use Dx9.

- Game development started in 2007 when quad cores weren’t as prevalent, Vista was being rejected by gamers, another reason for only Dx9, and since Vista was the first Windows OS that had widespread 64-bit support for drivers, a reason why no 64-bit.

As for WoW, when ANet brings in $1 billion USD a year in income, I’m sure they could fund a tiger time to rebuild the game engine for both Dx11 and 64-bit.

This simple, listen to this guy.

I’d love some improvements myself but we don’t always get what we want because it’s just not possible, I believe Anet classifies the current state of this matter as “good” so don’t expect any changes even in the next 5 or so years.

The game does look beautiful and the art style is a big part of it.
Here are a few more SweetFX screens. If anyone wants my settings just let me know.

http://i.imgur.com/BJkHXrx.png
http://i.imgur.com/W9o9BXK.png

While I find most of SweetFX’s filters ugly, remember that you can disable all of them except SMAA, which is pretty decent anti-aliasing. At least compared to the blurry garbage that FXAA is.

Yes you can just use SMAA if you want to keep the original “look” of GW2. And SMAA is 100x better than FXAA

Aidan Savage.2078:

The reason for no 64bit was because the game would be rendered incompatible with 32bit systems, namely winxp and the idiot versions of vista and now win7 and win8.

WoW isn’t just 64-bit now but simply has a 64-bit version available.

Grebcol.5984:

Will there ever be a upgarde?any news? Mircosoft annouced directx 12 a couple day ago and Nivida Announced cool new Directx11 drivers who brings a bunch more FPS.

~~~Soon~~~

DX10+ vs XP: Sounds like an excuse. The renderer can be backwards-compatible (e.g., platform-targetted at run-time). However, that requires time (and thus resources/money) — in both development, and training (if the programmers aren’t capable with DX10+). Bottom-line: is it “worth it” to ANet at this point?

As someone said earlier, transitioning towards more modern DX (or OpenGL) would primarily offer benefits in performance (CPU vs. GPU). In turn, however, this would allow for greater “eye-candy” because, well, it’ll allow for it.

If they’re going to rewrite the graphics engine I’d rather they move to OpenGL

I would agree on a move towards OpenGL. However, it would probably involve much more time (and resources) compared to just slowly transitioning into DX11/12. That’s probably one of the main reasons DX is still very widely used — it’s an easier path.

The other reason for the transition not being made is financial. They need to see some sort of income boost to justify that expenditure. Not just one that’ll cover the cost they just incurred, but actual profit. If they spent half a million on this change, they’d need to justify it by proving it’ll bring in, say, 150% minimum of what they put in. If there’s no profit margin available, or the more likely case, a loss near 100%, there’s no reason for them to do it.

The ONLY way I can see them doing it is if they included that code rewrite into an expansion style that gw1 had. Unfortunately, it seems anet’s not interested in doing something like that.