Guild Wars 2

Hi, this may be a stupid question… with the increased map sizes and increased viewable distance will this change the PC spec requirements on the game? Thank you

Will the view distance be really increased? It still looked very… foggy to me in the announcement. Which is what I found to be a negative point actually.

I don’t think the increased map size itself would otherwise have an effect on the specs.

They said on live announcement that view distance is inceased

Strangely enough, I noticed immediately on the game page they have changed.

For Heart of Thorns.

Windows® XP Service Pack 3 or better
Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI X1800, Intel HD 3000 or better (256MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)
35 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

For Path of Fire

Windows® 7 or better (64 bit only)
Intel® Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better
4 GB RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS, ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
50GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

Thank you, very useful for people with old PCs like me.

There is now way, that PoF 50GB big.

That’s like base game + HoT

Jethro.9376:

There is now way, that PoF 50GB big.

That’s like base game + HoT

Everyone runs with the same client, so it will take GW2 + HoT into account.

But I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near 50gb unless they go overboard with textures. Probably higher than usual to cover for Season 4 as well.

Will Lucky.8703:

Jethro.9376:

There is now way, that PoF 50GB big.

That’s like base game + HoT

Everyone runs with the same client, so it will take GW2 + HoT into account.

But I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near 50gb unless they go overboard with textures. Probably higher than usual to cover for Season 4 as well.

Base Game + HoT is ~34GB big on my PC.
That given, i guess PoF alone will be arround 16GB. That’s almost double HoT

The video card requirements concern me, I play from a laptop with an Nvidia 810M. With the current game I get good frame rates and video quality. If PoF really does require an 8800GTS as a minimum I will not be heading into the crystal desert.

We may need some sort of clarification from the Devs on this.

It could simply be related to the size of the maps in the expansion pack and the strains of those.

I am starting to think the change in video card requirements may be wrong, or perhaps due to rendering more distant objects which should be adjustable.

The following is just me thinking out loud…

The new minimum video card requirement is the Nvideo 8800GTS. The card was released in 2012 and has a maximum of 640MB of video memory, this limits the size of textures that can be loaded. Also, the game uses DirectX which also limits textures. Developers can work around this by shuffling textures but that increases CPU demand and the CPU requirements have not changed (they are actually rather low). The previous required video memory was 256MB and the 8800GTS was available with 320MB and since the new requirements don’t specify required video memory it’s not likely that the number of textures being loaded have changed much. In addition, the other limitations of DirectX 9 should eliminate any requirement for more advanced shaders.

That leaves us with video card performance (power) and memory (non video) requirements. The previous video card requirements had very minimal performance requirements and the jump to the 8800GTS is more than triple the previous requirements. Since textures and shader requirement shouldn’t have changed, it appears to come down to the number of objects rendered. The memory requirements also doubled which could be due to more map data being preloaded.

The increase in objects could be due to the new maps being more complex (having more objects), but the maps in the announcement video didn’t seem to have an excess of objects.

So that would leave rendering objects in the distance, and that should be adjustable.

I am not an expert on game programming, my experience is limited to working on a graphic adventure game in the mid 90’s for Epic that was dropped before it was finished. That was back in the early days of DirectX.