Guild Wars 2

I just recently upgraded from a 6550D to a Radeon HD 7950. It runs just about any game max settings 50-60+ fps such as Batman: Arkham City, Far Cry 3, Crysis, Battlefield 3, etc. I was kinda disappointed that when I put this game to max settings I’m only getting 25-35 fps depending on the zerg around me, and this pushes my card to its limits (based on heat and fan usage)…much more so than other games. The thing is, though, there really isn’t much of a difference on my graphics settings. If I go to highest performance, I might get kitten fps, but that isn’t as big of an improvement as I’d expect. There is absolutely no difference in fps for me between native/supersample either. Would really like to see this game optimized better.

You will have low fps at crowded wvw combat even with gtx 690. (Ultra settings)
I’ve tried and approved it. (+8gb 2133mhz ram 2600k@5ghz)

Good to hear something is being done… I have in the timespan of gw2 used a 3770k and just recently a 4770k (I upgrade every year) always with 16gb or more of ram and always off an SSD with the following graphics card setups in order
First a 6990 (was horrible as I couldn’t disable a card) then 2x 570’s didn’t work too badly when I dissabled SLI and just ran off one, a single 680gtx ran great then some patch towards the end of the year changed something and frame drop spikes happened whenever I turned my camera fast (the clock on the card drops, the usage drops and the cpu usage is still at 40% to 60%)

Now I am using a 780gtx and it STILL gets horrible fps for what I should be expecting with the cpu NEVER going over 60% (and I have sat with logs going for hours)

-shrugs- I guess some folks can’t play over 40fps… but really with my gear and a system that flogs metro last light, and can run supcom FA in 1000unit matches during settons clutch without any slowdowns….

Aridia.3042:

Please look into Gendarran Field where the centaurs are firing their catapult. There’s something seriously wrong there. When the rock hits the ground and it creates a buff of clounds, it would kill my fps and then lock up my pc before it returns to normal when the smoke clears. Running the game on i5 with gtx 670 so it’s not the pc.

Not only there. In any part with catapults the clouds kill my FPS.

Please! Remove the effect.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

Hopefully they can make it so our video cards are utilised even more. Cause right now, our video cards are horribly under utilized.

God Of Fissures.8627:

Chase.8415:

Never.8571:

Geemo.6018:

The so called next generation mmo uses an old generation 32bit client. So it doesn’t matter if you have 32gb of ram because Gw2 will only use 2gb max.

You do realize the limitation for 32-bit is 4GB, right?

Operating systems take 1-2 gigabytes by itself, therefore increasing the consumed ram would actually break a large group of computers that run under 32 bit.

I honestly don’t even know why Microsoft continues to produce 32-bit operating systems. Most modern processors are 64-bit compatible and everyone should be running 64-bit anyway.

Also I have been increasing in framerate, especially when they removed culling. They’ve done a fantastic job on performance updates for one year.

[/quote]

Many new mobile devices and netbooks still only have single core, 32-bit processors.

Chase.8415:

They haven’t sold 32 bit computer in a few years at stores, the problem is everyone in the market has a computer that is several years old. A shocking 40% of the world still runs Windows XP!

Games will not adapt until people replace their computers at home.

This is misleading because that statistic is mostly made up of businesses that refuse to upgrade, and not home users. And of those consumers still on XP, how many would actually buy a newer game like GW2? People who do not play hardcore games such as GW2 are not part of ANet’s market.

Take a look at the Steam survey to get a more accurate look at gaming pcs. Only 7% of people are using Windows XP, over 80% are using Vista, 7, or 8. Over 90% are DX10 capable. These are the people who actually buy and play games, i.e. the market.

I think the decision making process in this performance group needs looking at:

I think it is quite simple. Have you seen the twitch streams of them playing? If they pulled a computer off a shelf in a store, and tried to play, they would do a bit more for us. They have top-end computers, and their ‘fixes’ for this game fit their computers, not ours.

Keysha.2815:

I think it is quite simple. Have you seen the twitch streams of them playing? If they pulled a computer off a shelf in a store, and tried to play, they would do a bit more for us. They have top-end computers, and their ‘fixes’ for this game fit their computers, not ours.

I will more than be happy to donate my computer to help with this cause, and they can give me one of theirs while they use mine =P

After almost a year of discussing posts about the performance of the game we finally get a response from Anet about the subject.
This is a good start but I will be surprised if any performance gains will ever be made.
The engine is fundamentally flawed and cannot support the content that is being delivered.
I am willing to wager that we will all be posting a new thread about the game’s terrible performance again in another years time.

Behellagh.1468:

How many of your precious 8 cores does WoW use or any other MMO you may have loaded? How many are Dx11 only? How many with both Dx9 and Dx11 run significantly better when you check the Dx11 box? Not just look better but also have a faster frame rate with the same settings? How many are 64-bit clients?

Write your own 3D rendering engine and then we can talk about how “easy” it is to do all these things you think are trivial.

This isn’t about our ability to create a 3d game engine. This is about a professional company selling a product that is incomplete.

is it possible for them to switch engine or is that like starting from scratch? what is the flaw of the unreal engine?

Sky.7610:

is it possible for them to switch engine or is that like starting from scratch? what is the flaw of the unreal engine?

At this point, it isn’t feasible for them to do an overhaul like that. I personally love the Unreal Engine but that is asking too much at this point.

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

I appreciate the acknowledgement of the issue, but I fail to understand why performance wasn’t a primary concern in the time frame between 2007 (the year development started) and the end of 2010 (when the first demo events began). The game was not live during that 3 and a half year span.

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

You heard it here from Bill folks! Better ready your pitchforks! If no improvement is made in 2 weeks, there will be a special event featuring the lynching and grilling of Bill with pitchforks! Add the event to your calender people!

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

TY for the info, can’t wait this for myself. It would be nice having GW2 run smoothly in large scale fights. Especially, when I know it is only using 50% of my PC’s potential but performs like kitten.

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

Thank you for the update. What about load times?

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

Meaning you aren’t getting down to the core flaws of the engine and are only focusing on culling spell effects and player models during big fights and engagements with lots of people.

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

Bill, I have a $500 video card. Could you please, utilize more of it’s resources and rely less on my CPU? I would very much appreciate it.

Elbegast.6970:

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

Bill, I have a $500 video card. Could you please, utilize more of it’s resources and rely less on my CPU? I would very much appreciate it.

This thread is becoming funnier by the minute.

Espionage.3685:

I don’t have an amazing PC by any means (a Phenom II X4 @ 3.3Ghz, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB of RAM), but performance in a lot of cases is lower-than-expected, especially during world events and WvW. I’ve tried plenty of different drivers, OS setups, settings, etc. but I’m 99% sure my processor is the bottleneck.

Your graphics card is OK.

You are correct about your bottleneck. AMD CPUs are junk – get an Intel.

You can buy a Xeon E3 series (like an E3-1230), pop it into just about any LGA 1150 motherboard. Get at least 16 GB of ram and you should be set. These upgrades would set you back a little over $500, but the Xeon E3 is the performance equivalent of an i7 CPU with an i3 price tag.

My system is:

i7-3770S
GTX-680 (3 GB)
32 GB Memory

The game runs smoothly on my system with all settings maxed out, and I run it at 2560×1440 resolution. I recently built another system using the Xeon and it’s as good as my main one, although it was nearly $200 cheaper to build.

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

While although not 100% relevant to the other posts, any news to be said about the mac client? There has not been a posted update to it since last October. While although I get it’s a cider port and will suffer some drop in performance due to translation, I use bootcamp on my same rig and actually gain 25-30+ FPS with even higher settings turned on.

Appreciate you posting here and any information you may be able to give. Thanks!

Solid Gold.9310:

It’s a CPU, graphic card hungry game.

Oh, I was worried my floppy drive wasn’t up to spec. Thanks!

Malediktus.9250:

GW2 is largeadressaware can use use upto 4GB if enough RAM is available

Run gw2 and check your memory usage. You will see that gw2 never reaches 2gb of ram no matter what’s going on in game. Try harder next time.

I used to be able to run Guild Wars 2 on my laptop, but somewhere about 3 months ago, I just stopped being able to run it. I mean, I can run it and it will work, but it’s extremely laggy, to the point where I can barely walk anywhere in the game. Somewhere, the performance took a skydive and just left me without a parachute, because the only computer I can play on now is the family computer.

GTX 670 superclocked
4770k
16GB corsair vengeance

I still get massive FPS drops in zergs sometimes…..dont worry about it bro.

with all due respect to some people, there is several reasons (can be one or 4 depending in the case)

1. your comp sucks

2. your comp is tweaked so badly or you dont know anything about configuration, two same comps can run different depending in what state they are

3. arenanet has if not many or less people working on this compared to another things, its been a year and i can assure they have so much fancy people which does practically nothing or one click here and click that a day and for make it worse they go to work on mondays at 10 am for drink a cup of coffee

4. the pace in what they work for add/fix is…frozen speed.

so that is why

Good to know you guys are taking steps. GW1’s optimization is so awesome, if you guys can do it back then, I’m sure you can do it now.

After running a performance test at max settings I was able to reach 85% cpu usage and 2010mb of ram which is just below 2gb of ram. A 64bit client would allow the usage of 128gb of ram and of course a 64bit cpu has twice the computing power over a 32bit cpu. Instead of sinking all of your resources in trying to pump out more content maybe you should come out with a 64bit client.

Sunlyte.3768:

Espionage.3685:

I don’t have an amazing PC by any means (a Phenom II X4 @ 3.3Ghz, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB of RAM), but performance in a lot of cases is lower-than-expected, especially during world events and WvW. I’ve tried plenty of different drivers, OS setups, settings, etc. but I’m 99% sure my processor is the bottleneck.

Your graphics card is OK.

You are correct about your bottleneck. AMD CPUs are junk – get an Intel.

You can buy a Xeon E3 series (like an E3-1230), pop it into just about any LGA 1150 motherboard. Get at least 16 GB of ram and you should be set. These upgrades would set you back a little over $500, but the Xeon E3 is the performance equivalent of an i7 CPU with an i3 price tag.

My system is:

i7-3770S
GTX-680 (3 GB)
32 GB Memory

The game runs smoothly on my system with all settings maxed out, and I run it at 2560×1440 resolution. I recently built another system using the Xeon and it’s as good as my main one, although it was nearly $200 cheaper to build.

You are right about current AMD CPU being crap. But I just can’t agree with your recommendation of 16GB of ram. Take a look at your process manger and check it yourself. 8GB is enough for GW2 and 99% of the stuff out there. The 32GB memory in your rig is absolutely wasted if you don’t heavy photoshop or ramdisk.

Regarding server cpu, note that they don’t support overclocking so if you are going to overclock a desktop cpu, it’s gonna outperformer the server counterpart.

Geemo.6018:

After running a performance test at max settings I was able to reach 85% cpu usage and 2010mb of ram which is just below 2gb of ram. A 64bit client would allow the usage of 128gb of ram and of course a 64bit cpu has twice the computing power over a 32bit cpu. Instead of sinking all of your resources in trying to pump out more content maybe you should come out with a 64bit client.

+1
I don’t know how feasible them making a 64bit client is, but I really hope they consider it or are working on it.
What are the limitations of the Unreal engine atm? Without going to do a google search I am a bit clueless on whether or not a 64bit client is possible or whether optimization is a huge endeavor.

Geemo.6018:

After running a performance test at max settings I was able to reach 85% cpu usage and 2010mb of ram which is just below 2gb of ram. A 64bit client would allow the usage of 128gb of ram and of course a 64bit cpu has twice the computing power over a 32bit cpu. Instead of sinking all of your resources in trying to pump out more content maybe you should come out with a 64bit client.

This is just plain wrong……

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

As I said in my previous post, with a 8core cpu, there are still moments in large groups of players (especially in wvw), where my FPS is a single digit. So, gaining even just 5-7 more fps with a said update/patch will technically double our FPS.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

Even when I watch developers play their own game on Twitch, I can see the same poor performance, low frames, and whatnot on the developer’s own PC’s. Even the developers can’t run this game at a solid 60 FPS … it’s hilarious

This game is NOTORIOUS among just about everyone who plays it for having poor performance on just about every system. I know people with 3000 dollar liquid cooled desktop rigs who still experience framerate drops in WvW and the Clockwork Chaos.

This has been a constant source of frustration for me, ever since the Beta… I’ve been telling you guys for a YEAR now that your game needs to be optimized and everyone tries to shout me down… “GET A NEW PC LOLOLOLOL” … Spoiler alert, everyone has experienced huge framerate drops in this game. It’s got nothing to do with the hardware you’ve got.

So, don’t take this the wrong way – but you need to tell the “Performance Team” or whatever they’re called to pull some weekend shifts or something… cause the performance situation in GW2 is downright godawful. It makes me wonder if you guys are even playing your own game over there…. You should fire it up sometime and see how things really are.

Super Adventure Box just makes it that much more obvious how WRONG this game is made.

What kind of excuse can you conjure when your game runs at 0,05 FPS looking at a couple of scraps from Minecraft’s Creeper?

It’s awful, awful, awful.

This is the kind of performance most developers expect in their Alpha builds – when they haven’t bothered to do anything about it yet – not the gold product.

And – hey wait! – wasn’t the sole reason for having deliberately outdated graphics so that most people, even with older rigs, could play your game? You know, for sake of having a larger audience? Did you just completely do away with that fun idea?

Something to note if you think its your cpu list your motherboard as well. A few of my friends thought it was the cpu as well till i pointed out that the motherboard they were running was the real issue. After they upgraded the part they found that the issue was fixed.

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

It´s so good to read that.
I´ve hoped for something like that
since beta and most of the time this topic
was mentioned, it was more or less ignored.

It´s great to read that it´s being worked on,
thank you very much.

Afya.5842:

Geemo.6018:

After running a performance test at max settings I was able to reach 85% cpu usage and 2010mb of ram which is just below 2gb of ram. A 64bit client would allow the usage of 128gb of ram and of course a 64bit cpu has twice the computing power over a 32bit cpu. Instead of sinking all of your resources in trying to pump out more content maybe you should come out with a 64bit client.

This is just plain wrong……

Wrong in what aspect?

Nuka Cola.8520:

From what i’ve learned they have a failure of an engine with outdated servers, they can’t do anything anymore.

Wow better uninstall and get off the forums.

Afya.5842:

You are right about current AMD CPU being crap. But I just can’t agree with your recommendation of 16GB of ram. Take a look at your process manger and check it yourself. 8GB is enough for GW2 and 99% of the stuff out there. The 32GB memory in your rig is absolutely wasted if you don’t heavy photoshop or ramdisk.

Regarding server cpu, note that they don’t support overclocking so if you are going to overclock a desktop cpu, it’s gonna outperformer the server counterpart.

You’re citing outdated info. Unlike older versions of Windows, Windows 7 and up will make far more efficient use of memory if it’s available – meaning that it will actually use available memory rather than attempt to keep memory free.

Much of the “lag” spikes people notice can be attributed to loading textures from virtual memory (swap) or from having to hit the disk and swap stuff from memory to the hard drive. Even an SSD will become a bottleneck in this scenario because the interface to an SSD is still MB/s while memory is well into the GB/s range.

CPU overclocking doesn’t provide much in the way of enhanced performance but it does introduce stability issues. If you want to overclock then obviously a Xeon wouldn’t be the best choice…but if you want a stable, fast system then a Xeon is a great choice.

There is no reason to limit yourself to 8GB believing it’s enough when in reality, 16 GB or 32 GB would make your system a lot more responsive in general, and ensure that the game can keep all of its assets in memory.

Sunlyte.3768:

Afya.5842:

You are right about current AMD CPU being crap. But I just can’t agree with your recommendation of 16GB of ram. Take a look at your process manger and check it yourself. 8GB is enough for GW2 and 99% of the stuff out there. The 32GB memory in your rig is absolutely wasted if you don’t heavy photoshop or ramdisk.

Regarding server cpu, note that they don’t support overclocking so if you are going to overclock a desktop cpu, it’s gonna outperformer the server counterpart.

You’re citing outdated info. Unlike older versions of Windows, Windows 7 and up will make far more efficient use of memory if it’s available – meaning that it will actually use available memory rather than attempt to keep memory free.

Much of the “lag” spikes people notice can be attributed to loading textures from virtual memory (swap) or from having to hit the disk and swap stuff from memory to the hard drive. Even an SSD will become a bottleneck in this scenario because the interface to an SSD is still MB/s while memory is well into the GB/s range.

CPU overclocking doesn’t provide much in the way of enhanced performance but it does introduce stability issues. If you want to overclock then obviously a Xeon wouldn’t be the best choice…but if you want a stable, fast system then a Xeon is a great choice.

There is no reason to limit yourself to 8GB believing it’s enough when in reality, 16 GB or 32 GB would make your system a lot more responsive in general, and ensure that the game can keep all of its assets in memory.

Nah, 16GB or 32GB will do nothing for GW2 and the large majority of games and other programs.

And the moment you have to load textures from the main memory instead of the GPU memory you are already screwed, since the main memory bandwidth is so much lower than the GPU memory (we are talking 25GB/s for DDR3 1600 vs over 150GB/s for $200 class GPUs) and if you are loading from hard drive or SSD the game will simply freeze for a sec (or more).

For some tests.
http://www.thetechbuyersguru.com/RAMgaming.php

Sunlyte.3768:

There is no reason to limit yourself to 8GB believing it’s enough when in reality, 16 GB or 32 GB would make your system a lot more responsive in general, and ensure that the game can keep all of its assets in memory.

Nothing of the sort. Even the most demanding games/software currently on the market do not go beyond 2Gb of SHARED – RAM, VRAM and Swap altogether – memory. Not for any particular reason, but simply because that’s where it’s at right now.

Uploading 15Gb worth of compressed data to memory is not only absurd, it would do nothing to increase your performance because a competent engine: a)Won’t try to cache this much stuff in the first place because it’s never needed; b)Will know how to smoothly withdraw and retire assets between RAM/VRAM/HDD whenever possible. It’s called “streaming”. We’ve had it since forever now.

Keep in mind that RAM is used for lower-tier assets and cache. Anything to do with graphics – the actual chunk of the work – will reside somewhere in VRAM. Textures, frames, shaders, everything. Everything done there is lightning-fast by necessity of being displayed 60 or 30 times per second.

tl;dr – You don’t need more than 4Gb RAM in any case. GW2 doesn’t know what it’s doing.

BillFreist.1527:

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

If you double the FPS in 2 months I will buy $1000 worth of gems…I am not kidding…

Swoo.5079:

Nah, 16GB or 32GB will do nothing for GW2 and the large majority of games and other programs.

And the moment you have to load textures from the main memory instead of the GPU memory you are already screwed, since the main memory bandwidth is so much lower than the GPU memory (we are talking 25GB/s for DDR3 1600 vs over 150GB/s for $200 class GPUs) and if you are loading from hard drive or SSD the game will simply freeze for a sec (or more).

For some tests.
http://www.thetechbuyersguru.com/RAMgaming.php

Your benchmark links are not related to GW2 and they only focus on frame rates. The game can be slowed for reasons other than frame rendering performance, especially with large groups of players in a single area, and these would not show up on synthetic tests like the ones you provided.

32 GB is overkill for most people but 16 GB is not. Windows 7 doesn’t have any breathing room with 4 GB and with 8 GB you’re only giving it a little. My system idles with 5 GB memory occupied (no programs running) and it’s responsive – everything opens and loads within seconds.

Textures are not the only thing that a game loads into memory, and thanks for pointing out the obvious about the graphics card onboard memory being quicker than system memory – and yet system memory is still a lot faster than the fastest SSD. Windows will cache the files frequently accessed by the game client if there is additional available memory – with 8 GB there’s not.

If your graphics card only has 1 GB of onboard RAM and you play at a reasonably high resolution with all effects enabled (and why wouldn’t you) then 1 GB is going to fill up fast, forcing the system to swap data from the onboard ram to system memory, and if system memory is full then it has to go to the virtual memory, your hard drive.

You’re also ignoring sound files, data and various tasks that the game client may perform that require a lot of memory even if it’s for a short period of time.

There’s little reason to take the “bare minimum” approach, and this is about improving GW2 performance not “how to scrape by with the least amount of hardware so we can keep complaining to ANet and demand that they make GW2 compatible with Windows XP”.

Draco.2806:

Nothing of the sort. Even the most demanding games/software currently on the market do not go beyond 2Gb of SHARED – RAM, VRAM and Swap altogether – memory. Not for any particular reason, but simply because that’s where it’s at right now.

The GW2 client is subject to a “2GB limit” as 32-bit applications cannot address more than 4 GB, and the other 2 GB is reserved for system resources. This has nothing to do with the memory on your graphics card because that memory is addressed and controlled by the GPU – not the CPU and the system’s memory controller. So there is a “particular reason” and if the GW2 client was recompiled to x64 it would have access to a larger portion of memory.

Uploading 15Gb worth of compressed data to memory is not only absurd, it would do nothing to increase your performance because a competent engine: a)Won’t try to cache this much stuff in the first place because it’s never needed; b)Will know how to smoothly withdraw and retire assets between RAM/VRAM/HDD whenever possible. It’s called “streaming”. We’ve had it since forever now.

You’re missing the point. The memory made available to each program that’s running is a share of the physical memory in the system. The game is not the only program that’s running, and the more programs that you have running – including system processes that run in the background – mean there is less physical memory available for each. In order to ensure the program can operate, whatever shortfall there is gets sent to virtual memory (hard drive). This is controlled by Windows virtual process manager and not by the game or any other application.

a) Not just about caching; the game needs memory to perform calculations, sorts and other operations. These operations write to and read from memory, and in doing so can bump a game file out to swap even if the operation itself didn’t need a lot of memory. If the game needs it, this will manifest itself as lag but it’s not “dropped frames” or lag that occurs due to an underpowered GPU. It’s not all about loading the visual elements into RAM; the game stops or stutters if it has to wait for your system to make certain data available to it.

b) Streaming just means that you see stuff on your screen before the entire scene is loaded. That’s why sometimes you enter a new zone though a waypoint and you don’t see the ground or only see a few buildings. It’s less about memory optimization and more about reducing the wait time on loading screens.

Keep in mind that RAM is used for lower-tier assets and cache. Anything to do with graphics – the actual chunk of the work – will reside somewhere in VRAM. Textures, frames, shaders, everything. Everything done there is lightning-fast by necessity of being displayed 60 or 30 times per second.

No, it’s used for quite a bit more than that. The operation of the program relies on ram, and the underlying OS has many processes running in the background that require a share of the RAM and can cause sluggish performance if you don’t have enough. VRAM is used by the GPU for the textures and related data to rending the scene, and it is not connected to or shared with system memory.

tl;dr – You don’t need more than 4Gb RAM in any case. GW2 doesn’t know what it’s doing.

More outdated info. The bare minimum anyone should be considering is 8 GB, but I maintain my recommendation for 16 GB if you want butter-smooth performance. You’re apparently claiming that 4GB is enough and yet you also seem to believe that GW2 doesn’t run as well as it should on your system.

And hey, I did say that GW2 runs smooth for me 99% of the time at a super-high resolution that most of you probably aren’t even close to (2560×1440).

The game’s 32-bit client is large address aware (ECHO … Echo … echo) and on 64-bit Vista/Win 7/Win 8 it can use up to 4GB.

Since devs already answered some questions I’ll try and throw mine in:

Can we get a Statement regarding DX11?
I’m sure at least 95% of the Players use it already, if not even more.
Also, did you even try to check how many players use it? Should be relatively easy (cmd) i guess