Asking for DX12 is pointless.
But at least get us DX 11 to support multithreading of CPU.
It’s CPU heavy game and my i7 4790 won’t ever go above 50% load, but fps keeps dropping in massive events. You might say that DX11 won’t help me with that, but it will. Right now game can only use 50% of my CPU power because it doesn’t support multithreading. If there would be DX11 for this game, it would be able to use 100% of my CPU power, and that would mean less FPS drop in WvW and other huge events.
There were other threads about that, but I just want to remind Anet that players still didin’t forget about that.
DX9 was released in 2002, but I think GW2 is using DX 9c which was released in 2004. I know it takes some time to implement new DX version, but it just makes me sad to see game popular like this still using 12 years old DX version.
As I said, I know that expecting DX12 for GW2 is pointless, since this is pretty new. But at least provide us DX11 for multithreading. It’s 4-6 years old version, so by now it shouldn’t be that hard to use it.
If Anet use that “spy” software hiden inside game to detect system hardware you will see that pretty decent amount of players are using CPU with multithreading (Intel i7 and Xeon), and they would all benefit from DX11 upgrade.
Asking for DX12 is pointless.
But at least get us DX 11 to support multithreading of CPU.
It’s CPU heavy game and my i7 4790 won’t ever go above 50% load, but fps keeps dropping in massive events. You might say that DX11 won’t help me with that, but it will. Right now game can only use 50% of my CPU power because it doesn’t support multithreading. If there would be DX11 for this game, it would be able to use 100% of my CPU power, and that would mean less FPS drop in WvW and other huge events.There were other threads about that, but I just want to remind Anet that players still didin’t forget about that.
DX9 was released in 2002, but I think GW2 is using DX 9c which was released in 2004. I know it takes some time to implement new DX version, but it just makes me sad to see game popular like this still using 12 years old DX version.
As I said, I know that expecting DX12 for GW2 is pointless, since this is pretty new. But at least provide us DX11 for multithreading. It’s 4-6 years old version, so by now it shouldn’t be that hard to use it.If Anet use that “spy” software hiden inside game to detect system hardware you will see that pretty decent amount of players are using CPU with multithreading (Intel i7 and Xeon), and they would all benefit from DX11 upgrade.
multithreading… i would appreciate it if they could actually use the resources my graphics card provides instead of majorly depending on my cpu…
they already mentioned they won’t add dx11 support. hell, they couldn’t even be bothered with 10, as far as i know. I wouldn’t get my hopes up. :/
They’re not able to produce what they’ve already promised, GW2 will forever be on DX9.
Well another way to solve FPS drop would be to depend more on GPU than CPU. But that would also take a lot of optimisation just like for DX11.
1200$ worth PC and I get 15-30 fps at WvW battles. And I don’t even have everything on high settings -.-
They keep saying it’s impossible to improve FPS at WvW battles. But DX11 would surely fix that problem. Multithreading to use all threads and general optimisation for better performance.
if you do not have data regarding what to render… my best guess it’s still about how many ppl need to be fed data and the packaets grow larger with many ppl slowing the system
I can have 120+ FPS in the world,and whne in zergs I have 60 FPS, when the zerg meeets another zerg I notice slows in the game even when I cannot see ’m yet. when fighting begins the FPS drops like a brick.
This isn’t to do with the GPU load or the CPU load but solely with the engine only using 2-3 cores and the GPU not being used for all effects while needing to wait on info from the server. when the FPS drops I run 30-45% GPU at max settings 1920*1080 and 2 cpucores at 100% handing the game and 2 or 3 cpucores handing network and system at 15-55% the other 7 threads are just doing -nothing- (unless streaming or watching a vid, using my browser and so on)
limits seem the following:
if 1 person uses a skill this needs to be send to the server and the server informs a the person of the result.
if any other person uses a skill you will need info on this as well, he will need info on you as well… you and he send a packet and you both get both results 2 send 4 recieved in total
when soloing is simple 1 send, 1 recieved (movement, actions, dmg on target(s)); 1 receive total;
say you are with 5 ppl in a dungeon the amount of data will be 5 sending distibuted to all for 5: ppl reciving data on 5 ppl+targets (movement, actions, dmg on target(s)); 25 received in total
when fighting 80 vs 80 vs 80 you will recieve data on 240 ppl using actions and movement. those 239 other ppl will get this info as well
240 ppl sending, received data will be 240ppl recieving data on 240 ppl =57600 combined info packages send from the server (yes this could also be 240 individual packages but 240(+) times the length of a packlage but this number (57600) is mostly meant to show the volume). this also seems too slow the server down and slows my ability to build new frames…
this seems to be the overhead.
(edited by PaxTheGreatOne.9472)
In open world when I’m grinding alone, there isn’t any fps drop.
But as soon as there are more than 30-50 players figthing together, I start to get fps drop.
WvW is one of the most interesting thing for me and it performs the worst of all.
I just hope they will find some solution to fix that FPS drop.
GW2 becoming faster just by slapping DX11 on it is a complete fabrication. DirectX isnt magic.
The game is crippled by its own main thread, which need to be recoded. Simple as that.
From personal experience, the game particle effects are also bugged and a major performance hog for no apparent reason. I havent tested it in a looooong time so I dont know if its fixed now, but it’s been particularly visible on shaman – your game will run at 20 fps with 60+ peeps bashing shaman, then suddenly and without any apparent visual change, performance will skyrocket to buttery smooth 60+ fps for about 5 seconds, then plummet to 20 fps again.
Here’s something interesting I dug up from the forum, dating two years back:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Low-FPS-and-nVidia-employee-response
Well the game engine is “crippled” by non-thread safe data which makes dividing and conquer approach for multithreading the grunt work all but impossible, at least according to the reddit thread from the game engine dev from a few months plus back.
It was reveled recently on reddit as well that some of the very foundation of the game has common code shared with the GW1 engine.
It appears that the GW2 engine design goals were starting with the GW1 engine, split off the render thread making two cores manditory, allow some async asset loading and character model generation in support threads, and moving from Dx8 to Dx9 support with Win XP being the targeted platform.
Dx10 was out during development but Dx9 had the larger knowledge base on tips and tricks. Also while Dx versions up to 9 were evolutionary as in you wrote a renderer the same way, Dx10 was a paradigm shift and early Dx10 engines actually preformed worse than the Dx9 counterpart. Dx11 built on Dx10 primarily by making Dx calls thread safe so now multiple threads can use Dx calls without stepping on one another. There is still a bottleneck with single thread at the kernel driver level but that was the primary change that Dx12 provided.
So going to Dx11 would require at least an extensive change dealing with the whole Dx API. Then thread safing the game’s data to allow multithreading as an option, both with back end set up grunt work and the actual rendering. The knowledge base on coding for Dx10/11 is now quite mature.
So while incorporating these features in a GW3 engine, doing an upgrade to the existing one is doubtful.
The one advantage about the GW2 engine over say the UE3 in BnS is I can run with a number of my settings on high and get better performance in GW2 than I get with settings on minimal in BnS. While I would expect a major performance leap in BnS if I slap a proper gaming card into my system, along with an upgraded PSU, in GW2 it simply won’t matter as much, I will just have prettier slightly less dismal frame rates during events.
Reading more and more of those articles about GW2 and it’s engine.
Seems like we will just have to wait for GW3 and hope for better engine there. They better use Unreal Engine 3 or 4 this time.
It took 7 years to go from GW1 to GW2, so I’m guessing that we can expect GW3 to be released around 2018 or 2019?
What do they really gain from spending resources to recode the game so that it works using a higher version of DX? What do players really gain? Would it be worth it over actual content?
Gw2 is still one of the most polished mmos out there,ive tried out tons in the meanwhile while playing this.Latest being bdo and blade n soul which are both terribly optimized and arn’t nearly as polished as gw2 is.
Would love to see gw2 in dx11,but thats not gonna happen.
Don’t waste your time requesting this. Anet has made it clear that they have absolutely no desire to bother properly supporting hardware released in the past 7 years(dx11 launched in 2009). Despite the fact that more and more of their competition does so AND that the vast majority of their userbase can use it. It’s a shame, but what can you do with devs who clearly don’t care about improving their engine?
PPL needs to realise all MMORPGs are CPU intensive mainly because UNITS PER SCREEN is called MASSIVE MORPG for a reason, and is the CPU job to render and calculate them all. Shure gw2 engine have its limitations but GPUs are not ment to calculate but to draw. Shure there might be some Nvidia technology that allows the GPU to do some CPU jobs but is not realy possible 100%.
The multi threading is other story. But even if made on dx12 the game would still rely on ur CPU mainly, thats wny you never buy AMD crap. Better have 4 good cores than 8 useless ones.
If you max out the client CPU and GPU you will almost certainly see the Game Server as the bottleneck. Looking thru many report and my own small experience clearly indicate that the dips caused by WvW population and other similar events are mostly server side.
If so, moving to Dx11 or 12 or whatever will make little difference in FPS dips for these specific events, will however improve the pretties.
Having more threads available client side to fully utilise more cores will only improve FPS dips IF the server can step up and deliver more throughput. I doubt this would be the case; the CPU cores on server are unlikely to be any more powerful that top-end desktop and I am pretty sure currently these will be maxed out already. I certainly can’t believe that the GW2 servers currently run at low CPU utilisation in large WvW battle, clearly they would have scaled the battle caps to make best use of the server cpu cores.
I would also like to express just how good GW2’s gameplay is in handling massive battles events – try out some other games before you write off Anets ‘old technology’.
As regards ‘AMD crap’ I have found that even low end APUs produce playable gameplay, indeed the massive battle FPS dips appear to be wholly independent of client specification – hence why I suspect peeps are seeing server bottlenecking under these high dynamic conditions. As far as I can see low end processors yield lower quality graphics – or more accurate put a cap on the degree of rendering possible – but have a much less significant effect on the dynamic elements of the gameplay.
This is actually very good news as you want the game to be available to the most players – even if the graphic quality varies a bit.
Anyway here is a test for peeps, a fun test.
I am currently assembling a AMD 5350 / R3 + AM1-I mobo computer, no discrete GPU.
Assuming the game is bootable take a guess at the static FPS in LA?
My bet would be 10 to 15 fps on low settings/default, in short not really playable
If I get more than 20 fps I would very very impressed as the graphics are bare minimum to run Dx12 (although I am kinda hoping Dx9c might not be too big a problem). Note, the four physical CPU cores are the exact same used on the PS4 and Xbox One!!!
Go on make a prediction – I honestly don’t know the answer.
Just to say, dx11 brings multithreading to the API, but has nothing to do with the multithreading of the game engine, which is the main source of bottleneck in heavy situations.
Dx11 wouldn’t solve performance issues of gw2.
@lilypop servers have nothing, or very little, to do with the performance issues of gw2. If they did, a fx-6300 wouldn’t see such issues and would perform pretty equal than a oced i7, which is not the case.
@Ansau, you may well be right, however any PC spec sees sizeable droops on fps on high pop events. A good test would be to take a i7 + high level GPU and set the graphics to minimum – this would set the construction of rendering instructions to a minimum and creating lots of spare capacity for the two threaded loops.
If you still get a droop on such events, I am right, otherwise you would be.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that peeps will max their graphics to the normal and come the pop spike they would get a droops, but I am pretty sure the servers will not be running at high spare capacity either – it just doesn’t make economic sense to load servers for the very worst possible condition.
As for Dx11 and Dx12 all you’re going to enable is higher capacity to construct rendering instructions and make droops less frequent and less severe, but you’re not going to stop them occurring, MMO games are always going to be two threaded because there isn’t much you can do with a third thread that is viable.
Ok if anyone predicted 31 you win the prize of being correct. Note, this was lowest possible GW2 settings, 4 GB of RAM, with res of 1920×1080. Lower the res could add up to 5 fps more.
That said when originally loaded the game had my main gaming PC settings – mixture of highs and low on a £450 low-mid gaming rig – fps then was 12.
The Athlon 5350 rig cost £155 – base unit only – and is near silent (even on full load).
I am really starting to like it, and have now purchased another 4GB of RAM for £16. I would expect roughly a 20 to 30% improvement in graphics as a result.
FWIW, the 3DMark06 (Direct 9.0c) benchmark was 4155, as a comparison a i7-4770 (HD 4600) gives around 8600. My low-mid gaming rig -with a 260x – yields >19K and has fpss > 40. If you equate these numbers to the ability of the CPU to construct rendering instructions, you should see that moving to Dx11/12 isn’t going to be a big deal in terms of fps. All that will happening is peeps will fill any extra capacity with more rendering instructions only to cry on a pop spike again – peeps are not going to run their PCs with high spare capacity giving the low frequency of the droop events..
Correction: Turns out that the auto-detect had initially set the settings off minimum possible yielding 12 fps. Actual low-mid gaming rig has all settings at high etc. and on core zone the fps was normally in the range 50 to 55. The >40 comment comes from another rig that uses a A8 7600 APU only.
(edited by lilypop.7819)
Well another way to solve FPS drop would be to depend more on GPU than CPU.
That’s not how it works.
a fx-6300 wouldn’t see such issues and would perform pretty equal than a oced i7, which is not the case.
Where would an fx-6300 ever perform “pretty equal to” an OC’d i7? An i7 will be more power then the 6300 across the board. An 8350 can/could get pretty close in heavily multithreaded apps, but not a 6300, and especially not these days when Intel’s got 2 more generations of CPUs released.
@lilypop a few things:
Gw2 issues are not gpu related, they are to cpu. It is not about the code related to the gpu and running in the cpu, it is about the code related to the game engine that doesn’t involve graphics.
As gw2 is a mmo, there’s a huge amount of these type of calculations, like player position, damage calculations, boons and conditions appliance, aoe player selection, range calculation, CC… Regardless the graphic settings you have, these calculations are still present and are still processed by your cpu. And as you get more players, the amount of these increases exponentially.
You think server do a lot of the calculations, when the reality is those are mostly done by the client in your computer.
The way you think it works is the way the new Camelot Unchained will work, but no how Gw2 does.
I measured the download rates in different situations.
- Guild Hall (no players) had a peak of about 7 KB/s and an average of 3 KB/s.
- LA (medium amount of players but doing nothing) had a peak of about 27 KB/s and an average of 8 KB/s.
- EoTM 50vs50 fight had a peak of 111 KB/s and an average of 41 KB/s.
- Loading EB map had a peak of 650 KB/s and an average of 65 KB/s.
There’s hardly 5 times more traffic in blob fights than standing still in LA.
Loading some maps downloads quite more data than blob fight.
Blob fight was hardly pushing a 0.08% of what my ethernet adapter is capable. Or better said, my ethernet adapter could handle 1250 people fighting each other.
Trying to guess the performance of that system is pointless. The specs are too low to give a proper idea of the performance of this game. It doesn’t even meet the minimum specs to play it decently (not to mistake with the minimum to run the game).
I have a fairly powerful setup and it is much easier for me to see where the spots are. Cpu usage ramp up all across cores when approaching populated areas, but some of them start to lower in insane populated scenarios, sign that the cpu is struggling with the main thread and all the rest have to wait for it, hence the lesser core usage.
@fermi I was referring to the idea of lolypop about issues being server related. With his theory, the power of cpu handling the client wouldn’t matter, and a fx 6300 should perform similarly than an i7.
You should have quoted the "If they did, ".
@fermi I was referring to the idea of lolypop about issues being server related. With his theory, the power of cpu handling the client wouldn’t matter, and a fx 6300 should perform similarly than an i7.
You should have quoted the "If they did, ".
Aha, I get it now. Even with the “If they did” it just didn’t make sense to me. That cleared it up, thanks
There are definitely both sim calculation and renderer performance issues. The latter become obvious when observing the massive fps drop when activating ‘Show All Player Names’ while looking at a crowd. Or when the blizzard starts at the Frozen Maw fight.
Those performance issues would indeed benefit from a less ancient renderer. Still, it will not happen. ANet did not implement simple GUI features like saving builds (or, my pet passion, dyes saved per outfit).
This seems to indicate very limited manpower.
I still think that network traffic is one of the main problems .. the more player that
are involved in a fight the traffic grows exponential .. and it simply would be a
problem to send players already new frames when they don’t have the updated
data of the hitpoints of enemies. Ok .. you can do it .. but that would lead to
other complains.
I still think that network traffic is one of the main problems .. the more player that
are involved in a fight the traffic grows exponential .. and it simply would be a
problem to send players already new frames when they don’t have the updated
data of the hitpoints of enemies. Ok .. you can do it .. but that would lead to
other complains.
That would result in lag, not frame drops. In terms of GW2, you see it when the skill queue chokes or when the game start rubberbanding all over the place. Not so visible in PvE, but often in WvW 3-ways with 80v80v80 peeps.
Ansau,
The area of disagreement is over any absolutism of saying that ‘all droops are client based’. I fully understand that droops can be caused on the client side for the reasons you have specified. I am well aware the character models on the servers are much simpler than those on the client.
My point is that the ONLY way of avoiding high pop droops is by provision of over-capacity.
On the client side you can achieve this with mighty CPU/GPUs. However I am almost certain that most players will fill any over capacity with more graphics rendering and improved graphics quality and come high pop events they will always hit capacity limits. Any improvements due to Dx11 or 12 or whatever are just going to be sucked up by people – quite sensibly – upping their graphics quality for the ‘normal’. Come high pop events you’re back to droops.
However.
The same principle applies on the server side. Anet clearly size zones for a given ‘normal’ max server loading. In 80v80v80 WvW close in fighting they will not size these zones for 60 fps. It makes as much sense to do this as it does to purchase a i7 + dual furies to play noughts and crosses on a PC. My guess is that such server loading is sized for 5 fps very worst case. And I suspect Anet know that the clients – giving human nature – will experience capacity problems ahead of the servers.
So my thinking is that no matter how high your PC spec is, you’re never going to remove the potential for droops. These capacity droops work concurrently, the higher you’re PC spec the more you will move towards server droops; those on low spec PCs may only ever see client droops.
With regard to server/client traffic, suppose a server is maintaining a zone with 10 characters, and for whatever reason the traffic to/from EACH character needs to increase by 10%. From the point of view of the server the load cost of that zone has doubled. Now I know servers will be maintaining many such zones and that this number will vary in real-time and if max capacity is approached they can shed zones to lower loaded servers – more likely they will inhibit any new zones being assigned to the server – but I am pretty sure each zone will be load capped in some way. My point being that although client rendering is exponential from the server point of view traffic is exponential.
I would also argue that MMO games are inherently two threaded, and that in this regard there is nothing special about GW2 – some non-MMO games can use a third/fourth loops for an AI (expect to see a big jump in the quality of these games in the future). There has been little improvement in core CPU processing over the last four years, even AMD Zen is essentially an Intel catch-up with regard to single core performance which hopefully will lead people to question Intel’s high-end prices for mighty four physical core products. AMD’s Trump card will be to stack 8, 12, 16 cores per processor, something that will make little difference to two-loop MMOs except with regard to construct of rendering instructions, although it does mean we’ll all be driving GW2 with i7s with prettier graphics in the future. But I am willing to bet you still be seeing sharp droops on high pop events.
All said and done, GW2 is one of the best performing MMOs going in my experience and likely to remain so for a good few years yet.
(edited by lilypop.7819)
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