Guild Wars 2

Seeing characters s-l-o-w-l-y show up when I’m right in front of them (they should have loaded a lot earlier), and Habib Loew’s blog post on removal of culling in WvW mentioning this (in terms of extra stealth), I have to ask a couple of questions regarding both PvE and WvW:

- It is obvious to me that the game does this slow and very perceptible “phasing-in” artificially (perhaps in order to avoid characters just popping up suddenly), so can an option be added to remove this phasing in?

- It is also very apparent to me that a similar kind of culling is occurring with sounds. I start to fight and don’t hear my sound FX until after a few seconds (sometimes more than 5 sec). Can this be avoided with a user setting?

- It makes sense that the game is loading character graphics data late, because it can’t do it otherwise, most probably because there’s not enough RAM. So the question is, can I eliminate these problems by increasing the RAM? I have 4GB system RAM (Win7 x64) and 1GB on the graphics card. Which RAM should I increase in order to at least alleviate these issues?

Thank you.

PS: If it is relevant, I use an XFi sound card and have sounds set to minimum latency and highest quality.

Culling is a server-side process. It can only be removed when they choose to remove it.

They’ve eliminated culling in WvW so you can go in there to see how well your computer stands up. There’s options to change the detail & #of characters there for low-end systems but we won’t get these fixes to the open world until later this year.

(it’s not your RAM in the open world)

You almost certainly need more system RAM. Even if you’re running a completely clean system you will have issues with that little system RAM.

I would recommend upgrading to 12 GB system RAM… That WILL be more than you need but if you’re doing an upgrade its best to not get jut enough but to get to the point where you have some slack for the future.

Way more than needed, as i think GW2 is still a 32-bit program and so can’t handle more than 4GB of ram.

digiowl.9620:

Way more than needed, as i think GW2 is still a 32-bit program and so can’t handle more than 4GB of ram.

Exactly this and 1GB ram on the GPU is also more than enough. You really dont need more than 1GB on your GPU since only a select few games out there will use more if its available and those arent MMOs.

OK, sorry for the delay in responding.

The game loads textures/graphics and the delay is noticeable (even though I use an SSD). They do “pre-load” a lot of stuff and put that in memory. My question was, which memory is that placed in? If I increased either the system RAM or the GPU RAM, would the game not use up more of it to pre-load graphics and hence reduce the graphics lags?

I’m not talking about culling, but about the delay that the game creates by loading graphics on demand, rather than pre-loading them.

Is it a question of CPU speed (that loads the graphics to whatever memory)?

Because if I now have RAM that the game isn’t using, then it’s not doing everything it can to reduce the graphics lags.

VRAM. But you also need good bus speeds with that to be noticeable, meaning older computers are at a disadvantage. When I upgraded the video card (on a newer system), I had a slight improvement in rendering time in conjunction with culling, but the bulk of the delay is between server and client communication. Darn well loads slower than second life at times lol