Guild Wars 2

Back when the game launched, I was running on a different PC: a desktop with an AMD CPU & a GPU. I think the CPU as an AMD Athlon X2 something like it, and the GPU was one of the 5xxx series. maybe a 5670? Can’t recall entirely. Anyway, point is, the game was REALLY laggy, just nearly unplayable.

I rebuilt my PC a few months later, gutted everything out of it and put in new. New Mobo, CPU, GPU, RAM, even a new PSU. The game ran PERFECTLY after that, max everything, supersampling, just beautifully at 1920×1080. This was over a year ago, and I had to sell the PC shortly after It was still AMD based, using an APU, wasn’t the newest one, I think it was one of the older entries. Llano or something like that, a 6xxx series AMD GPU, 6870? something close to that. IT was a mid ranged card, around 170 dollars at the time. And, 8 gigs of premium memory.

So I went almost an entire year without a PC, I finally got my hands on a laptop, a few months ago and being that it was just that, a laptop, I didn’t even bother putting Gw2 on it, that is until recently. It’s not an impressive laptop. It has a 520m nvidia chipset in it, along with a i5 2410m from intel (Sandy Bridge). Rocking 6 gigs of memory, a stick of 4 and a stick of 2, so i don’t think it’s dual channeled.

Anyway, I come to find out that gw2 runs super smooth! (30 FPS) I have every maxed out, exception being Shaders, I have set to medium and I do not have Supersampling enabled. It’s at 1600×900 so a pretty high resolution to boot.

I do have the chip OC’d.. The core I went from 740 to 900, and memory I increased from 800 to 920. Contrary to popular belief, my laptop did not explode or melt from the OC as I have been running it in many games like this. FF14, WoW, Skyrim, Re6, D3, TERA, SWTOR, ESO, etc..

I should also mention that the laptop case it self is made of Aluminum, and I have it set on a 60 dollar cooling pad. Yeah, I know alot of people think cooling pads are useless, BUT I have never seen my GPU exceed 70 degrees under max load (hovers around 65), nor have I seen my CPU go over 85.

TL;DR

All that said, has the game undergone alot of optimization? or are Nvidia drivers just a better fit for the game?

I was gone for a bit as well, and have noticed similar results. While I don’t think any optimizations were specifically announced, the game does seem to run much better, even on the same hardware that I ran it on previously.

Loading screens, however, seem at least twice as long as they used to. If that’s the cost of a decent framerate on high-ish settings, however, then I’m prefectly OK with load screens being longer.

Optimizations have been done, but what those optimizations are have not been specified, and they’re not usually part of the patch notes either. You’ll find the occasionally mentioned in forum threads.

Alright good to know! Was a little perplexed as to why a low end laptop gpu was preforming better than my so-so desktop gpu.

I remeber doing PvP when the game launched and enemy players in zergs were invisible to me, couldn’t even see em, even after I died. lol Something to do with culling? Has that been fixed? It really killed PvP for me, turned me off so fast.

I honestly don’t really believe that you’re running the game on high settings besides shaders and sampling on a 520M. Even given how CPU bound the game is, a 520M is just useless as a gaming card.

Culling is an option now, it’s Player Model Limit. You can always put it on lowest with all character nameplates on (which is what I have), so you can see where people are but you won’t necessarily see their character, which helps framerates in big zergs immensely.

I’m sure you don’t, but Why would I lie about it? Before I bought the laptop, I read all kinds of reviews on the chip stating how useless it was, and that it would never play anything.

Welp, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Very happy with it

Could be that I don’t die by the mantra: It must be 60 FPS or I don’t touch it

I play all my games around 25-30FPS and don’t mind- on HIGH settings

i really don’t get what the loaded title has to do with anything
i have a desktop running a niv gpu that handles the game well enough
and a perfectly capable amd laptop which i’ve never had any issues with

It’s titled that because the details in my post reflect what I’m asking

my bet is, it is the optimizations…and possibly updated drivers too…
from experience, updating from windows 7 32 bit to windows 7 64 bit, fixed game crashes and added higher graphics texture options too.