Guild Wars 2

As a foreword, this intentionally not a technical issue thread. I won’t be putting up or asking for exact specs, and would rather they not be the focus of discussion, but for the sake of argument my machine exceeds the “recommended” requirements by a fair margin. The intended purpose of this thread is for discussion on the topic, and I’d encourage any participants to be civil with one another.

I’ve come to believe that this game pretty badly optimized. It runs poorly in general, a stable framerate is extremely difficult to attain for most systems, and it’s still using DirectX 9 last I checked which by itself borders on unacceptable in 2017 for many people. I’m not particularly dogmatic about framerate or performance but I personally find myself constantly discouraged from playing the game on account of how bad it chugs at times.

With the second expansion on the way, I’m sincerely hoping that the engine gets an overhaul very soon, but I also worry that Anet will be reluctant to leave behind the current one. I had maintained hopeful that Heart of Thorns sales would provide Anet the resources to clean this thing up, but hope I daresay has turned to desperation.

As much as I love this game, and as much time I’ve put in it, I can’t help but feel conflicted as it remains feeling as outdated as it does for me. Not to mention the regular client disconnects during Raids, Fractals, and story missions.

In any event, that’s my two cents, and I’d very much like to hear other people’s opinions. Do you feel the same way, and think we’re long overdue for some improvements, or do you disagree?

Personally from my perspective I disagree. I dont have any issues with framerate or lag, unless its a huge massive zerg. I also never get disconnected. Im not really bothered by minor performance enhancements in general though, as long as its playable its good with me. This game runs better than other triple A games on my PC.

I know thats just my pespective and other people do have these issues, so I wouldnt say no to some improvements but I cant honestly say from my experience that they are necessary atm. :S

I don’t mean to be harsh but I suspect you’re going to find this a fruitless thread because i) without technical details it’s going to be hard to determine anything objectively, and ii) you’re lumping many technical issues into one lump. The connectivity issue, for example, depends greatly on whether your router is sufficient for the number of devices in your household, not to mention your provider, network, and all the bits and pieces between you and the anet servers. Too many variables, unknowns and uncontrollables. By lumping it together and blaming the ‘client’ there’s just no objective discussion to be had. There’s nowhere to go with this.

You mention technology, but wish to forego any discussion of it. Unfortunately the explanations for the game’s poor performance and the likelihood of it being addressed are technical, and there’s little point in having an opinion on a matter without understanding the situation, so I’m going to ignore your desire to ignore the explanation

DX9 is an old technology, and the game engine is heavily CPU bound. Upgrading to DX11 and offloading work to the GPU, or multithreading the game engine, are all herculean tasks. The sort that tend to require complete rewrites of game code. The game recently switched to 64 bit addressing, so machines with more than 4gb of RAM finally saw that memory being used, which did help with performance and killed a couple of nasty crash bugs when large amounts of players were present. In that respect, maybe we can hope for an engine overhaul in the future, but I think that’s unlikely since the game runs fine for most people that aren’t running it off of a toaster oven.

So, my opinion as someone who has an understanding of the technology is that the game engine is fine, runs without issues for the most part, and that incremental improvements to stability and performance would be reasonable to expect instead of an overhaul.

I for one fully agree with every thing your saying . sad part is I know they will not change this at all. they seam to think its not need for the game . or the game does not need to support new cpus or other hard ware for that matter like SLI and cross fire . or 4K even

and the game is still stuck in DX9A . for me this is part of the reason why I will not be buying the new pack when it comes out . they could have game the game some type of system hard ware upgrades

but due to all the spaghetti code in the game well only way to fix it is a new game .
which that is any ones guess far as the engine they raised up the low end specs at the very best at this point .

and by todays standards yes 2017 people do find the game in the same shape as you and me do . but the sad part to say some can only find that out for them self’s just looking at the systems specs as a whole . and I will say despite the problems and so forth . at the very least our systems can push it a little to the good end . and make a bit more ok and some what enjoyable to play .

this all said if one looks at other games that are much older . and have upgraded their system specs they will find most of the older games can support new hardware of todays market . as well as new games coming out have made the change overs already to the most latest hard ware and system specs and even include 4K and the new ryzen cpus including the thread ripper cpu .

as I said in the first part of my post I fully think and agree with you we are long over due for that system upgrade . but just not sure it will ever happen tho in this case

This game, in general is more processor intensive than it is video card intensive, so the processor is likely the bottleneck.

I’ve also found intel processors work better than AMD processors, at least that was true for me.

Beyond that the only lag I tend to get, or more technically latency, is because I live in Australia.

The game is outdated. It uses a modified GW1 engine.

Its an MMO, they will always be more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. It doesn’t matter if they upgrade it to DirectX 11 or anything, I’ve wrote long complicated threads on the issue but you can’t get around processing thousands of objects every frame including dozens if not hundreds of players’ logic.

To put this into perspective, the processing load is so high that they have to offload a great deal of computation to the client (making the game vulnerable to cheating), because no server would ever be able to handle it.

No the game is not optimized nor will it be . The Engine that is in place will not be touched or optimized . Time of the Dev"S is best spent on Cat’s and how to make them better in your home instance . Plus you will soon need that new Mount skin from the BLTC . So no the game is not going forward , but only better for you if you have cats in game and would like to spend Time and money for better cats .

Seriously? You do realise that the core engine developers probably aren’t the ones designing commander icons right? I mean, if you are going to spout an opinion at least attempt to ground it in reality.

It wont be simply because its an extremely risky thing to do, and extremely time consuming, and thats mainly because Anet has no idea what kind of PCs people are using to play it, or what type of Internet connection they have or what speed they get.
You risk alienating a large component of your player base doing something like this.
A good example is to look at the specs required to play WOW, which are XP or better and DX9 or better, and its been like that since the game was first released.

Returning player here. I think the game runs fine, way better than it did at launch. The x64 client was a huge improvement, and it eliminated the only frequent crashes I ever experienced, which was when 3 zergs would meet in WvW. I’m not sure what other changes took place while I was gone, but it runs much smoother than I remember, even if the framerate still drops during huge battles.

If you want to see unstable, try playing Overwatch. That’s what I played while I was on hiatus from GW2, and while it has been a fun game, I’ve never seen a game more sensitive to connection issues. The slightest hiccup in your connection, and you’re knocked offline and locked out of competitive for the next 10 minutes. GW2 is rock solid by comparison.

The game runs fine, does not disconnect at all, I have no lag except with large map-wide battles in WvW which can not be avoided (has nothing to do with DirectX version or game engine).

If you constantly get bad fps and serious lag you may want to check your own PC and uninstall all those other programs draining power from system components. Or turn down all those overclocks you do not need, that only make your machine unstable and overheating.

Short Answer: No. I can’t remember where it was stated by Anet but they have already said there is so spaghetti code that theres no chance of engine improvement.

To be fair, I find the graphics good enough for me as they are so i’m pretty happy

Beelzeboss.9704:

and it’s still using DirectX 9 last I checked which by itself borders on unacceptable in 2017 for many people.

You do realize, i hope, that almost certainly this has no significant impact on game performance?

Excelsior.

The game is badly optimized and outdated somewhat, it’s clear and simple.
Many people brought the core aspects up already and there is no point in beating the horse all over, but GW2 is the only game that did not get any benefits of my recent €2.400 PC upgrade… Which is somewhat a shame because it’s a big share of my PC gaming.

As video editor, I upgraded to a Ryzen, an Octacore. An incredible powermachine with awesome performance. Video rendering, using jDownloader (ressource hogging Java!) to Demux a Let’s Play playlist from Youtube, watch Videos on Youtube or playing a game meanwhile all at the same time: No problem, thanks to 8 cores – or better: 16 threads. GW2 however has zero improvements, because my Ryzen’s cores are 3.6 GHz average. Loading takes ages but when I look at my ressources, the game takes barely any ressources at all and I ask where’s that loading time going to. League of Legends for example loads for me in 15 seconds but uses 1.35 GByte of RAM. Too much, but reasonable for that loading time. RAM and VRAM in GW2 are not a problem. The only benefits I got compared to my i7-3770 I had before come from my GTX1080. It is sucking up some performance downgrades due to weaker (but more) cores I have now..

The network however is as stable as it can get. I had a few disconnects over the past years but all these lost their packets in a scandinavian node. Neither my ISP nor ArenaNets fault. There is so far not a single “maintenance” that I noticed unlike FF14 for example. Download speed reaches maximum of my 50 MBit connection (6 MByte/s) unlike FF14 which has often below 1 MByte/s.

So yes, the engine works, I can play the game fine, but it feels “bad” to me as well, like a beat down car that can’t handle everyday’s business and for what it’s made for.

The engine is pretty outdated, indeed. Like people already mentioned, a modified version of the GW1 engine which was already outdated five years ago when the game got released.
Considering all of this, the optimization isn’t actually terrible. It could be better of course. Much better even.

Let’s see whether PoF ends up being a big success or not. This might make the move to a new engine seem worth the effort and investment. All though, it will most likely take a few more years until they consider it given the amount of money it would cost.

Henry.5713:

The engine is pretty outdated, indeed. Like people already mentioned, a modified version of the GW1 engine which was already outdated five years ago when the game got released.
Considering all of this, the optimization isn’t actually terrible. It could be better of course. Much better even.

Let’s see whether PoF ends up being a big success or not. This might make the move to a new engine seem worth the effort and investment. All though, it will most likely take a few more years until they consider it given the amount of money it would cost.

Provide improvements, maybe. Switch to an entirely new engine? No. Nor should you honestly expect them to.

mauried.5608:

You risk alienating a large component of your player base doing something like this.
A good example is to look at the specs required to play WOW, which are XP or better and DX9 or better, and its been like that since the game was first released.

WOW, which are XP or better and DX9 or better is not correct . not sure where you got that outdated information from about that game still using them so low end specs .

as that game no longer supports or recommends the use of windows xp any more
. and looking at their support page these are the new recommend specs .

Minimum Requirements
Recommended Specifications
Operating System
Windows® 7 / Windows® 8 / Windows® 10
Windows® 10 64-bit
Processor
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E8500 or AMD Phenom™ II X3 720
Intel® Core™ i5-3330,
AMD™ FX-6300, or better
Video
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 440 or AMD™ Radeon™ HD 5670 or Intel® HD Graphics 5000
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 750 Ti or
AMD™ Radeon™ R7 260X or better
Memory
2 GB RAM
4 GB RAM
Storage
45 GB available hard drive space
Internet
Broadband internet connection
Media
DVD-ROM drive
Input
Keyboard and mouse required. Other input devices are not supported.
Multi-button mouse with scroll wheel
Resolution
1024 × 768 minimum display resolution

I also included the link where this information is very easy to find
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/76459

The Greyhawk.9107:

Henry.5713:

The engine is pretty outdated, indeed. Like people already mentioned, a modified version of the GW1 engine which was already outdated five years ago when the game got released.
Considering all of this, the optimization isn’t actually terrible. It could be better of course. Much better even.

Let’s see whether PoF ends up being a big success or not. This might make the move to a new engine seem worth the effort and investment. All though, it will most likely take a few more years until they consider it given the amount of money it would cost.

Provide improvements, maybe. Switch to an entirely new engine? No. Nor should you honestly expect them to.

Exactly, they are making some improvements, it’s not impossible, but swapping engines is not feasible. Off the top of my head since launch we now have a 64bit client and far better server side handling of conditions allowing us to stack more than 25 on a single target.

There have been lots of little changes and improvements both on client and server side but there won’t be a big “new engine” switch. That would be far too costly and at the end you still have the same models, textures and content in a “new engine”.

Zedek.8932:

Excelsior.

The game is badly optimized and outdated somewhat, it’s clear and simple.
Many people brought the core aspects up already and there is no point in beating the horse all over, but GW2 is the only game that did not get any benefits of my recent €2.400 PC upgrade… Which is somewhat a shame because it’s a big share of my PC gaming.

As video editor, I upgraded to a Ryzen, an Octacore. An incredible powermachine with awesome performance. Video rendering, using jDownloader (ressource hogging Java!) to Demux a Let’s Play playlist from Youtube, watch Videos on Youtube or playing a game meanwhile all at the same time: No problem, thanks to 8 cores – or better: 16 threads. GW2 however has zero improvements, because my Ryzen’s cores are 3.6 GHz average. Loading takes ages but when I look at my ressources, the game takes barely any ressources at all and I ask where’s that loading time going to. League of Legends for example loads for me in 15 seconds but uses 1.35 GByte of RAM. Too much, but reasonable for that loading time. RAM and VRAM in GW2 are not a problem. The only benefits I got compared to my i7-3770 I had before come from my GTX1080. It is sucking up some performance downgrades due to weaker (but more) cores I have now..

The network however is as stable as it can get. I had a few disconnects over the past years but all these lost their packets in a scandinavian node. Neither my ISP nor ArenaNets fault. There is so far not a single “maintenance” that I noticed unlike FF14 for example. Download speed reaches maximum of my 50 MBit connection (6 MByte/s) unlike FF14 which has often below 1 MByte/s.

So yes, the engine works, I can play the game fine, but it feels “bad” to me as well, like a beat down car that can’t handle everyday’s business and for what it’s made for.

While I agree that the game is terribly optimized for multi core setup and benefits more of single core performance than of a fast graphic card, I cannot say that a system upgrade to a modern gaming machine did not help my performance. I also upgraded to Ryzen (only Ryzen 5 1600 in my case) and a GTX 1080 and compared to my old system the game is massively smoother than before, plus I can play in ultra settings. I had a Phenom II Ghz and a GTX 660 before and while I used to get something about 30-40 fps in lions arch I have at least 60 fps now which might be more if I had not frame capped the fps to 60.

So, yes the system needs optimization and it might benefit less from modern hardware than other games but it’s still worth a hardware upgrade.

Can’t say I’ve got any issues with it, the only time I get low fps is when there’s a tonne of people together, world boss, zerg etc. In which instances, lower fps is to be expected. Never get any disconnects, except on those rare occasions when the servers go down.

Personally I’d say the engine is best left alone, it works fine. To overhaul to a new engine would cost an extortionate amount of money, time, and resources, as well as impacting development of any new content, maintenance and bug fixes etc. The other crucial issue is changing to a new engine at this stage would likely cause no end of issues, crashes and headaches with existing content, in the core game and expacs.

I play on a quad core AMD X4 that someone threw in the garbage (really!) and an nVidia 9800GT that I’ve had since it was new. I don’t have any framerate or performance issues unless there are tons of players around and even that is fine if I turn down the number of characters displayed when it’s overpopulated.

mauried.5608:

It wont be simply because its an extremely risky thing to do, and extremely time consuming, and thats mainly because Anet has no idea what kind of PCs people are using to play it, or what type of Internet connection they have or what speed they get.

They can find that out in a few weeks by creating an anonymous hardware survey and asking everyone to generate one on game startup. Frontier has one in the Elite Dangerous launcher and they found out that less than 0.01% play in 32bit mode and that around 2% of playerbase used dx10 or older.
They already dropped 32bit support completely and soon will scrap dx10 to speed up development and reduce amount of bugs.

I think Anet should develop the next guild wars using OpenGL or Vulcan to better take advantage of open source and the performance capabilities. With Microsoft doing everything it can to go the way of the dodo, using cross platform software is the correct way to go.

Also a Linux client couldnt hurt.

I use Wine to play on my Fedora Linux. And on my windows PC, when I used to run windows, I barely had any sort of lag or issue. It’s a laptop from 2012, which means no graphics cards, only two processor cores and the game runs fine.

Even on wine it mostly runs fine, but cmon, I’m not expecting it to be on par with windows given it has to translate everything to linux language. I do have major lag on the mystic lounge, but look at all the players there.

On a map I can run around reasonably well, and complete events. I guess when it has to send out a bunch of network data AND do local processing, then thats the reason why it all goes haywire.

I have no issues at all except in a huge zerg. Specs in sig. For me, I think the o/c is doing me the favour of running on high settings and supersampling. My GPU is helping of course but it’s the CPU clock that counts most – as has been mentioned.

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

nosleepdemon.1368:

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

Having a fast drive will help load times, surely?

The game is optimized fairly well in my opinion. It has its problems sure, but what MMO doesn’t? Could it be improved? Yes, pretty massively in some cases. Will modifying the entire engine to use DX11 achieve this? No. Its been explained multiple times, though WAR refuses to even read those arguments, by the devs themselves that the graphics thread IS NOT the source of the bottleneck that causes performance problems in GW2.

Updating the engine might make the game run better, but it would be a massive task to rewrite the engine, one that I don’t think is worth the developers time. Since that would require not only rewriting the entire engine, but also rewritting large parts of the entire game itself to work with the new engine. We would spend a large amount of time with no new content in the game (think the content drought before/after HoT, but worse, because nothing would be in development to be released as soon as this was done), which ultimately would be detrimental to the game’s health.

Best way to update the engine is to have each major release (definitely expacs, maybe LWS episodes) ship with a part of the engine rewritten. It takes a while, but eventually a large part of the engine will have been updated.

I agree with the poster above, a rolling refactor is the best in this situation.

As a foreword, I’m not a tech specialist, but I’m no naive computer user too.

What bothers me the most is : I have this several years old laptop which is not true gaming, yet has a decent graphics card, a nice CPU, and enough RAM. I mostly play TESO and GW2 on it. On GW2, I need to put almost every graphics things at minimal not to lag too much, and the game is quite ugly, with lots of graphics bugs all around. I can play TESO almost full graphics high on the very same laptop, and what I removed didn’t impair the overall graphics impression much. Also, the overheating is far more significant on GW2 than ESO.

I know GW2’s engine is roughly an update of GW1’s. I also acknowledge they improved the graphics experience, light effects and such things : you just need to check PvP lobby before/after.

I’m supposing code isn’t really clean and moving one part can tilt the whole game down, yet, building new things atop old ones may get things even worse in the mid/long term. So, really, even if cleaning the whole enging, updating it, have a better use of GPU, or whatever can improve things isn’t easy, I think it’s necessary, just like OriOri said.

My biggest concern, though, is : even if the game is still nice and appealing, it really feels bad to see such tech issues, and it yells bad buzz.

And if it’s not for GW2, please build up a new engine from scratch for GW3.

If anything, I think that it needs a good system to run at its max. If I set my graphics to high, it drops my framerate and makes my laptop burn up. Mind you, I don’t have a “gaming laptop” due to not wanting to spend $900+, but I at least made sure that my laptop has all the basic specs to run most games without issues. Sure, it doesn’t get the shiny, glossy treatment…but it’s playable (when I’m not getting disconnected from the server).

Flatley.1620:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

Having a fast drive will help load times, surely?

You would expect it to yes. When people quote system performance and resource usage, they tend to forget about data transfer rates. It’s no good having oodles of RAM and a huge graphics card if your HDD is taking forever to read lots of little bits of data from all over your disk.

No, I think the game is optimized really well but its far from truly ideal or perfect.

WvW can be extremely laggy when zergs start bumping into each other. Skill lag, movement lag, extremely high ping going to the 3k-5k range. Stuff like that needs to be looked into.

One of my friends also complains that whenever shes doing story instances, they sometimes kick her out usually at the very end. I’ve also experienced this but it rarely happens ever happens.

My cpu also tends to overheat when I play GW2. I have a Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor and it only gets really hot when I play gw2. No other game does this to my cpu. Its gotten so bad that my quick fix solution is to point a large fan at it, which I don’t think is healthy long term.

Take a look at the requirements:
https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/201862958-Minimum-System-Requirements

The game now -requires- 64bit windows which is a step forward. At least they only support the 64bit client now, instead of supporting the 32bit client

Computer Scientist with some game programming experience… there’s no way you can tell if this game is optimized or not from just looking at it. You need all the technical details that you can’t see before you can make that judgement call.

I have red the above with interest. The biggest impact (positive) that I noticed is not mentioned at all. I have a clean 2012 iMac. Just macOs and one game (this one). The machine arrived with 8gb of Ram and just 1gb of Vram. It did not have an issue with running GW2. I managed between 30-60fps in full-screen. With the arrival of 64bit version I started monitoring the performance. Memory was hardly relevant. I have upped the system to 24gb, Not used. GW2 tops at 4gb. CPU was steady running at 180%. I assume two cores out of four. Flat-out. In line with above comments. Next I replaced the HDD with a SDD. That saved my day! The system is flying. Loading in seconds.
My bottle-neck was the HDD. Probably the design of the GW2 database causes lots of disk access. Latency is killing it. If the system updates itself during sign-on, it always shows an enormous number of files that is loaded in that single datafile. Apparently that single datafile is not (partly) loaded in memory but accessed continuously.

I’ll make one more reply trying to explain this.
- MMO is not RPG, TBS, RTS, FPS or MOBA.
- MMO is not single player or five player game. You can argue that it should be when no other players are around but it does not work that way, those games are highly optimised for only a few players at all times.

If you cannot understand why MMOs require alot of processing power, then its pointless to discuss it with you. But I’ll give you one more hint: The MM stands for Massively Multiplayer.

Your quintillion cores will not help even if they completely rewrite the game. You are running up against a limit of computer physics:
- A faster CPU will not decrease load times, its I/O related.
- A faster CPU may not increase FPS if its only upgrade was more cores.
- A faster GPU will not increase FPS if it wasn’t a bottleneck.
- A faster HDD will not increase FPS.
- A faster HDD may not decrease load times (much), its primarily network I/O.
- More RAM will not increase FPS unless you were swapping before.
- More RAM will not decrease load times.
- A faster network will not decrease load times, because there are many hops between you and the server and they aren’t all 1Gbit.
- A faster network/lower ping may help with input responsiveness.

System upgrades do very little to improve a game that does not need the features introduced by the upgraded platform. In fact, almost no game can even begin to take full advantage of newer PCs-even the best will only use 2-3 cores and will only max the GPU if you turn on full hardware anti-aliasing.

Prins Lionheart.3182:

I have red the above with interest. The biggest impact (positive) that I noticed is not mentioned at all. I have a clean 2012 iMac. Just macOs and one game (this one). The machine arrived with 8gb of Ram and just 1gb of Vram. It did not have an issue with running GW2. I managed between 30-60fps in full-screen. With the arrival of 64bit version I started monitoring the performance. Memory was hardly relevant. I have upped the system to 24gb, Not used. GW2 tops at 4gb. CPU was steady running at 180%. I assume two cores out of four. Flat-out. In line with above comments. Next I replaced the HDD with a SDD. That saved my day! The system is flying. Loading in seconds.
My bottle-neck was the HDD. Probably the design of the GW2 database causes lots of disk access. Latency is killing it. If the system updates itself during sign-on, it always shows an enormous number of files that is loaded in that single datafile. Apparently that single datafile is not (partly) loaded in memory but accessed continuously.

Literally a couple of posts above, where I mention IO :P But yes, when there’s a lot of data to stream into memory, especially when it’s fragmented (which is why I suspect it’s in one file – to try and mitigate that), is going to be a big bottleneck. Glad an SSD saved the day! The best I managed was moving the install to a disk that was not my OS, so at least all my windows services weren’t also competing for IO access.

To the guy talking about about needing lots of tools to monitor the game; system resource monitor is often enough. Just check out disk usage when zoning into LA.

Most people seem to think that because it’s called a “game engine” that it works just like a “car engine” and therefore you assume that replacing the engine with a brand new more powerful one will just magically fix all the problems.

Unfortunately that analogy doesn’t work. The game engine is more like an environment that you put objects inside of. It would be like trying to fix global warming by replacing the earth’s crust with a new one.

Changing engines is a lot easier said than done, and the same goes for upgrading from dx9. It’s not even clear if upgrading from dx9 will make that big of a difference. Just because dx10 is a bigger number doesn’t mean it will magically fix GW2.

nosleepdemon.1368:

Flatley.1620:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

Having a fast drive will help load times, surely?

You would expect it to yes. When people quote system performance and resource usage, they tend to forget about data transfer rates. It’s no good having oodles of RAM and a huge graphics card if your HDD is taking forever to read lots of little bits of data from all over your disk.

Yep, a standard HDD is going to take some. I usef to have 10k Raptor that helped load times. Of course, now its all about the SSD which is another step forward. To make things even better, my system drive, which also houses GW2, is one of these:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-samsung-960-evo-v-nand-m2-nvme-pcie-gen-30-x4-3200mb-s-read-1800mb-s-write-330k-330k-iops?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIltCur9L81QIVzbDtCh0pNwemEAQYAyABEgI2ZPD_BwE

Stuff loads quick now.