Guild Wars 2

The existing engine renders with directx9 and does not make use of the massive improvements available in modern multicore systems.

Directx9 came out 15 years ago and has been superceded by dx10 since Nov 2006. DX10 was the standard for 6 years prior to release!

The fact that the engine looks as nice and runs as well as it does is impressive, but why are we holding back on a 60fps+ or 4k experience in 2017 in order to maintain compatibility for windows xp systems? They’re all dead. Long dead.

Gw2 needs an updated engine if the push is to bring in new blood this year. No one playing modern titles like battlefield 1 in smooth 4k is going to load up gw2 and think “25 fps seems like a fun way to learn a daunting new mmo”

It has been explained before that upgrading to DX 11 will not improve performance in GW2. If you honestly think it will then you really have no idea what DirectX even is, much less what it does or why GW2 performance isn’t as good as it could be.

I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.

If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.

Ryan.6951:

I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.

If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.

Yet the devs haven’t announced any DirectX changes. Clearly you know something about their game that they don’t?

You should apply for a position at ArenaNet and tell them how to do it.

The answer to your query is: no.

There have been update to graphics recently, though. And the Devs are always creating new tools to work with the engine and accomplish amazing things.

Good luck.

P.S. There are some other threads about this issue, one not too distant, if you wish to see other opinions on the topic. (Google Search will supply them, if interested.)

All Matters Fecal.9560:

Ryan.6951:

I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.

If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.

Yet the devs haven’t announced any DirectX changes. Clearly you know something about their game that they don’t?

You should apply for a position at ArenaNet and tell them how to do it.

They are the same devs that said no to buildtemplates back then and now they wonna add them.

I always though that gw2 bad performance was more of a badly written engine issue rather than dx9 holding it back.

Wow the hostility here for asking a simple question. Fecal and Ori if you don’t know about something, at least don’t attack someone for asking about it. Using a strawman like “you must know better than anet hurr durr” is as useless as it is easily countered by “guess anet must know better than bethesda, capcom, microsoft, sony, 2k and everyone else publishing remasters hurr durr”

Let me be more plain. I’m not interested or speaking about ‘graphics’. They look fine. The art style compensates for minor flaws and overall the game is gorgeous.

But performance is bad on modern systems. Really bad. Anet wants to bring in new blood. Part of that is not putting off people who invest in their gaming for a great experience.

Some players do accomplish 60+ frame rates with their hardware. So, it’s not like everyone only gets 25 FPS.

Even I, on my potato computer, can do better than 25 FPS.

Regardless, at this time, there will be no new engine. Maybe, if and when, there is a GW3.

Ryan.6951:

Wow the hostility here for asking a simple question. Fecal and Ori if you don’t know about something, at least don’t attack someone for asking about it. Using a strawman like “you must know better than anet hurr durr” is as useless as it is easily countered by “guess anet must know better than bethesda, capcom, microsoft, sony, 2k and everyone else publishing remasters hurr durr”

Let me be more plain. I’m not interested or speaking about ‘graphics’. They look fine. The art style compensates for minor flaws and overall the game is gorgeous.

But performance is bad on modern systems. Really bad. Anet wants to bring in new blood. Part of that is not putting off people who invest in their gaming for a great experience.

I know you’re not talking about graphics. There’s always one guy suggesting that a dev team move to DX10/11/12/N because they think they know what’s better for their process/game/budget/work flow/performance simply because they see a DX number higher than the one the game is using so they automatically assume it’s the solution to everything. You are that guy.

Just because you saw a really cool DirectX 11/12 demo a couple months ago doesn’t mean it can just be automagically applied to any game architecture with a flick of a switch.

BTW, I’m getting well over 60fps on a 2nd gen i5 and a GTX 970 on high graphics settings in WvW and PvP lobby areas.

The devs have actually offered an opinion on this topic before. They’ve said that the amount of work required to update the renderer makes it unrealistic to expect major changes before a GW3. They aren’t as big as any of the studios you mentioned; those firms can afford to invest in new engines because the costs can be amortized over many titles. ANet has just the one.

That doesn’t meant that they’ll never do it. It just makes it extremely unlikely given that they are trying to release US$30 expansions every 18 months or so.

I do hope they do something about the performance, they did improve it technically but realistically, not really due to game becoming slightly more demanding. Now gw2 uses more than 2 cores sometimes.

When WoW Pandaria was launched , Blizzard implanted the Direct 11 .

They also released a Battleground called ‘’Ashran ’’ (100 vs100 mid lane – escord bosses ) , but later on they scaled it down to 40 vs 40 .

Direct 11 dont create miracles

Ryan.6951:

ill: when and where did they say this? I bet it was during the dark ages before last year when most of the game was in pretty bad shape. If this is recent I’d be surprised and pretty saddened.

Within the last year. I’m surprised that you’re surprised — changing the rendering engine is a business decision based on cost and benefit: the cost of retooling is always huge; the benefits are more modest than most people think.

I think its ridiculous, the costs should not be too amazingly high, unless they did not have a very good structure to work off of.
Which of course would pin them blame on ANet. Either for being too cheap, or for badly implementing a system for rendering which makes it too expensive to change. EVEN so, their parent company is Ncsoft…. they are not hurting for development cash.

To be fair, I am making assumptions about their work environment and how much NCsoft values them. It just does not give off a vibe of them being “industry leading” when they are stuck in the past with a… basically abandoned API. But yet again, maybe theres things I am missing, every devteam is different and have different challenges, which means while i came to this conclusion it can be far off of theirs, both could be right, mine could be wrong or theirs could be wrong. Or even, both are wrong. In the end its up to them, today I am just a voice.

Of course I am making assumptions based on my own work, so I do guess

Here’s a Dev quote:

“As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn’t buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can’t do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best”.

Ryan.6951:

I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.

If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.

If you really think a shiny new API will make the game run better then you don’t know what an API is.

The devs have explained before that the render thread is not the cause of bottlenecks in GW2, its the main thread because its overloaded with too many things to update right now. That is where the lag comes from 99% of the time according to the devs. And moving to DX10/11/12 will only ever affect the render thread. So it will improve the performance of a thread that isn’t limiting the performance of GW2. Plus, GW2 itself isn’t designed to run very well in parallel processing last we were told, which means it wouldn’t even be able to take advantage of the multicore abilities of newer directX editions, which means the majority of any improvement you might see to the render thread (again, not the cause of the lag) wouldn’t happen regardless.

It would be a massive project to update the engine to work with DX10/11/12, and it wouldn’t fix the lag. It would not make the game better to run.

All you did was see a shiny new number and a shiny demo and just assumed that a newer version would unequivocally mean that the entire game would work better. Which means you really don’t know a thing about what directX even is.

market share. there are still lots of windows xp users so the farther you reach out to the market, the more people will play your game. computers are expensive and people will still use 10 year old computers. this is why using the oldest supported technology and making it work optimally up to now is key for business. remember, gw2 is solely pc based and its a business tactic.

zealex.9410:

All Matters Fecal.9560:

Ryan.6951:

I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.

If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.

Yet the devs haven’t announced any DirectX changes. Clearly you know something about their game that they don’t?

You should apply for a position at ArenaNet and tell them how to do it.

They are the same devs that said no to buildtemplates back then and now they wonna add them.

I’d love to see a quote where they said there would be no build templates in this game. All they ever said, to my knowledge, was we don’t plan on adding them at this time. Since this is a different time, I’d call that accurate.