Guild Wars 2

You said DX11 would be coming 6 months after launch, and here we are 4 years later and nothing.

Well DX12 utilises more CPU cores than DX11 and DX9, so if improving the game is your plan, DX12 has to be in there somewhere?

They never said that it was coming out. The most that I have seen is that they would look into it.

DX11/12 would not have the impact on performance that you would think. Just look at the old thread on this subject which this thread will likely get merged into.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Lol that reddit post is a year old. I’m talking about 4 years ago, at launch! They said DX11 was in the works and take 6 months!

That said DX12 WILL improve the game.
Unlike older DX where the first core is given almost all the requests, DX12 spreads them out a bit more. The first core is still the main, but more is shared between other cores.
So yes, it will improve performance, if you check that reddit thread, almost all mentions of DX12 state it should improve performance!
It wont improve lag, as that’s on their end with their bandwidth and servers.

The only reason it wont, is the same reason why Anet didnt implement DX11 support. They dont want to spent money on it!
They want to keep the game stale as it is whilst asking us to buy more gems.
Sorry but if the money players spend on gems isnt going to improve the game, even performance-wise, it doesnt deserve our money!

GW2 is DX9 because the most common cards at the time of development were DX9.
But go to your local computer store and buy the cheapest GPU there, it’ll be DX10.1,

You cant buy DX9 cards any more! They are obsolete! And as such so is GW2’s game engine!

At launch, they said they were looking into it, not that they were guaranteeing it. Actually, their programming lead at launch even came out and said it was unlikely to happen but they were trying, anyways.

This is like the millionth time people have said this.

So it’s not happening.

/thread

They never said they were going to upgrade, they said they would look into it, which they came back and said no after that. Back in the original beta, references to DX10 were found, but nothing ever came of that.

GW2’s engine is archaic, being built on top of GW1 and optimized for DX9 with custom wrappers, effectively giving it the features from later versions. Simply swapping in a different DX is not going to improve performance at all, but rather reduce it. To actually increase performance, they would need to rewrite the engine, which will take years. They said they were working on a native mac client, which is basically just that, so that would be the best time to do it.

Funny… because reality says neither one is ‘a must’. Or even desirable.

Buy Some Apples.6390:

You said DX11 would be coming 6 months after launch

Source?

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Lol that reddit post is a year old. I’m talking about 4 years ago, at launch! They said DX11 was in the works and take 6 months!

That said DX12 WILL improve the game.
Unlike older DX where the first core is given almost all the requests, DX12 spreads them out a bit more. The first core is still the main, but more is shared between other cores.
So yes, it will improve performance, if you check that reddit thread, almost all mentions of DX12 state it should improve performance!
It wont improve lag, as that’s on their end with their bandwidth and servers.

The only reason it wont, is the same reason why Anet didnt implement DX11 support. They dont want to spent money on it!
They want to keep the game stale as it is whilst asking us to buy more gems.
Sorry but if the money players spend on gems isnt going to improve the game, even performance-wise, it doesnt deserve our money!

GW2 is DX9 because the most common cards at the time of development were DX9.
But go to your local computer store and buy the cheapest GPU there, it’ll be DX10.1,

You cant buy DX9 cards any more! They are obsolete! And as such so is GW2’s game engine!

You state all these things that Anet supposedly said. Where’s the proof that they said these things?

Of all those people that stated in the reddit thread that DX12 would improve the game performance, how many of them do you think had actual experience programming games using DirectX? How many of them have direct experience with how GW2 is specifically designed?

The original Facebook post is long gone. However I found a reference to it on a German site from early August, 2012.

http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/guild-wars-2/news/guild_wars_2,44574,3003734.html

Our goal for Guild Wars 2 has always been to deliver a beautiful fantasy world that runs on a wide range of hardware configurations. We have therefore focused on DirectX 9, because it is more common and we want our game reach as many fans as possible.

If and when DirectX 11 comes to Guild Wars 2, the team will decide after the release.

There was also this post quoted in a thread at a 3rd party site

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

Which was pretty much what I had seen/heard. Funny how “if and when” becomes “we will”.

Excelsior.

Windows7 works fine for over 3 years straight on my computer.
(I will) Never change a (my) running system.
Windows 8 and above are a downgrade to me.
I am strongly against DX12 for that reason.

(This post has been written on a Surface Pro 3 with Win 8.1 – and I would never want Win 8/10 on my power machine tower PC…)

I’m with the upgrade crowd, Vulkan/DX12 are making big improvements and this game would be no exception.

Win10 however is definitely not an improvement, and not something i’d wish for anyone.

Also, from what the devs managed to say so far, the problems with GW2 engine not being that well optimized are in no way DX related. It’s the CPU main thread that would need to be rewritten. Graphical stuff is relatively fine (as long as you’re using 64bit client), the main bottleneck is outside of it.

TL/DR: no matter how big the DX improvements, they would be wasted due to inefficiency of the threads they connect to and w wouldn’t be seeing any improvement.

It’s the case of a better car in a heavy city traffic. You could have a ferrari, and it wouldn’t make your ride faster by a second.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/DirectX-11-12-request-merged/first

Astralporing.1957:

Win10 however is definitely not an improvement, and not something i’d wish for anyone.

Also, from what the devs managed to say so far, the problems with GW2 engine not being that well optimized are in no way DX related. It’s the CPU main thread that would need to be rewritten. Graphical stuff is relatively fine (as long as you’re using 64bit client), the main bottleneck is outside of it.

TL/DR: no matter how big the DX improvements, they would be wasted due to inefficiency of the threads they connect to and w wouldn’t be seeing any improvement.

It’s the case of a better car in a heavy city traffic. You could have a ferrari, and it wouldn’t make your ride faster by a second.

Not sure about calling win10 a downgrade. I went 7 -> 10 and skipped 8 entirely, and so far I’m in love with 10. It takes some tuning to customize, and you pretty much need classic shell, but with a little fiddling in the command line and a program download you end up with the same UI and information sharing as windows 7 in an objectively superior OS from both performance and security perspectives.

A new version of DirectX would help a bit, as it’s got some strictly better single-core performance bumps, but the bottleneck does lay in the engine’s main thread and lack of parallel execution of code here which is a very difficult and time-consuming fix, and a risky one at that when it comes down to bugs and how much could really be gained; some code (though more implementation-specific) simply performs worse in parallel systems and there’s currently no way around it.

The upgrade to newer versions of DirectX is also very difficult programmatically. Aspects of design in how the API’s were to be used changed pretty substantially between versions, making this more difficult to make conversions and updates; it would require re-writes, and the time spent for programmers to learn the new API and its nuances. DX11 is notorious for being convoluted, which was the topic at launch as the upgrade candidate. Since DX12 is also new, and further shifted the paradigm of how the API is to be treated, and the performance bottlenecks are still really in the design of GW2’s engine itself, a port would be expensive, time-consuming, and very likely buggy. I don’t know of a single release yet that’s actually taken real advantage of DX12. It’s still new, and expert programmers on older versions are going to be able to crank out better performance and much better code out of older API’s than brand new ones for quite a while. Whether or not ANet takes that plunge is undetermined, but any changes to DX they make will have nothing to do with the Mac client in any way, since DirectX is a uniquely windows-only product. If anything, the Mac client would likely be taking the graphics gurus away from any DirectX changes, even if they were to be scheduled, which is unlikely in the near future.

ANet probably still plans on being a company after the next ten years or so. GW2 will monetize for several more just fine as it is. I don’t doubt they have plans to cook up something as part of their long-term business strategy, and it’s likely that next product which will be getting the bump to newer API’s as to keep their studio relevant. I wouldn’t expect that to even start happening within the next three to five years, and likely a few years of further development after that for the actual engine preparation and creation for their next big title.

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Lol that reddit post is a year old. I’m talking about 4 years ago, at launch! They said DX11 was in the works and take 6 months!

That said DX12 WILL improve the game.
Unlike older DX where the first core is given almost all the requests, DX12 spreads them out a bit more. The first core is still the main, but more is shared between other cores.
So yes, it will improve performance, if you check that reddit thread, almost all mentions of DX12 state it should improve performance!
It wont improve lag, as that’s on their end with their bandwidth and servers.

The only reason it wont, is the same reason why Anet didnt implement DX11 support. They dont want to spent money on it!
They want to keep the game stale as it is whilst asking us to buy more gems.
Sorry but if the money players spend on gems isnt going to improve the game, even performance-wise, it doesnt deserve our money!

GW2 is DX9 because the most common cards at the time of development were DX9.
But go to your local computer store and buy the cheapest GPU there, it’ll be DX10.1,

You cant buy DX9 cards any more! They are obsolete! And as such so is GW2’s game engine!

Getting DX11/12 support will only help with the stuff that DX affects, which is mostly rendering. Anet told us that the render thread is almost never the cause of performance issues in GW2, instead it is the main thread. And btw, DX11/12 support will not influence the main thread in the game. ANet can only do that by fundamentally changing how the game works, which takes a lot of effort, and they have slowly been trying to move more things out of the main thread to improve performance

Anet should just make a DX12 renderpath, restrict it to Win 10, reduce perfomance by 20% by adding some shaders you cant see and then go “here, DX12! Enjoy!”.