Guild Wars 2

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, so getting lower than 60 FPS = crippled computer?

Yes, on a game that looks like it’s from 2010 (technologically), the best machine money can buy in 2015 should be able to 144Hz it.

Heck I don’t even see a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS.

Okay.

LINK

See it now?

LINK 2

How about now?

The jiterring and choppiness are detrimental to a smooth, responsive and overall enjoyable playing experience. 30FPS is generally unnacceptible in my eyes because of this. The only time 30fps is arguably acceptible is when it looks beyond amazing. Example 1, Example 2.

Seems like we simply have very different views on crippled computer then.
In my eyes something is crippled when it makes it impossible to do certain tasks. Having a bit lower FPS doesn’t really do that.
Matter of perspective I suppose.

I don’t really see all much difference on picture two.

And while I see some difference on picture one, it is not even close to that much difference in this game. It is all a matter of perspective.

Isn’t 30 FPS basically standard on console-games? And yet people don’t have any real issues with that.

If that tiny bit of difference is such a big thing I am starting to think that it is more a matter of complaining for the sake of complaining rather than having actual issues with it, seeing as it in no way or form makes the game even slightly unplayable.

Okay, well first of all it’s not a “little” difference. The number of frames being displayed each second is being split in half. If you only see a little difference when the number of updates you get to see is being literally doubled… (Read: 100% increase), I would say that is your problem.

Secondly, these are mere videos. When you are actually controlling the action (like you do in games), it helps when your actions are being represented as smoothly and losslessly as possible. When your computer drops down to 30fps from 60, you’re missing half of the data. Your brain has to make up and interpolate what is happening between each frame, which is detrimental to game-feel, and immersion. The lower the time between each frame is, the better experience you get.

Thirdly, this is all besides the point. The point is that Guild Wars 2 is poorly optimised. There is no machine on the market that can run it with complete smoothness. That would be the expected outcome, if the game actually looked great and had state-of-the-art technology, but it’s not. GW2’s engine is a poor effort from Anet.

When I play Guild Wars 2, I want a great experience in all areas. I don’t just want a functional one. That’s a pretty low bar to set. “Well, it works! We’re done here.”

Games are technology just as much as they are art. When I play GW2, I really enjoy the game-design, art design and lore, but the other half- the technical side- is very disappointing, and it detracts from the overall feel of the game. Instead of getting a great experience, I get a sub-par one. An amazing world, marred by technological inefficiencies that should not be still present two and a half years after the game released. (especially considering the game is to live on well beyond 2015 with the expansion)

lordkrall.7241:

Isn’t 30 FPS basically standard on console-games? And yet people don’t have any real issues with that.

Console games often have some combination of fairly slow camera controls, slow gameplay and low resolution. When the camera can’t be turned so fast, things move relatively little between frames and the screen is not made of that many pixels anyway, 30 FPS can be “enough”; the stop-motion effect of objects jumping multiple pixels between frames is not that obvious.

This is also why very low resolution videos and GIFs can sometimes look smoothly animated even at low framerates. Just not enough spatial detail (resolution) to notice the lack of temporal detail (framerate). Many console games where you can move very fast try to cover the “jump” between frames with motion blur postprocessing, though that needs to be very accurately calculated to not look immediately wrong.

On sharper computer monitors, even 60 FPS rarely looks like perfectly smooth motion w/o some form of motion blur, though at least it’s comfortably above the 20-30 FPS absolute minimum threshold at which things look more like motion than a series of still images.

lordkrall.7241:

Seems like we simply have very different views on crippled computer then.
In my eyes something is crippled when it makes it impossible to do certain tasks. Having a bit lower FPS doesn’t really do that.
Matter of perspective I suppose.

I don’t really see all much difference on picture two.

And while I see some difference on picture one, it is not even close to that much difference in this game. It is all a matter of perspective.

Isn’t 30 FPS basically standard on console-games? And yet people don’t have any real issues with that.

If that tiny bit of difference is such a big thing I am starting to think that it is more a matter of complaining for the sake of complaining rather than having actual issues with it, seeing as it in no way or form makes the game even slightly unplayable.

Only 25% (estimation) of people perceive more than 60 FPS, some wont even perceive 24 fps, others like trained pilots can go up to 200 +, USAF also discovered that some pilots would get sick playing at 30 FPS on theyr flight simulators.

Thinking about it it makes me wonder if you can see small objects moving fast like a tennis ball or a hockey puck ?

correct me if I’m wrong but does x32 architecture not limit also amount of CPU cores that game can use?

I’m looking currently on usage of each core with game launched and last of my 4 cores is barely used and sometimes even paused in work cause of no serious work to do while first core is a little bit loaded by a game

Lord Trejgon.2809:

correct me if I’m wrong but does x32 architecture not limit also amount of CPU cores that game can use?

I’m looking currently on usage of each core with game launched and last of my 4 cores is barely used and sometimes even paused in work cause of no serious work to do while first core is a little bit loaded by a game

No I think that’s just a result of the lack of thread-safe code in the engine.

sminkiottone.6972:

Only 25% (estimation) of people perceive more than 60 FPS, some wont even perceive 24 fps, others like trained pilots can go up to 200 +, USAF also discovered that some pilots would get sick playing at 30 FPS on theyr flight simulators.

That is just a matter of getting used to it. If you play long enough with 60 FPS or even higher FPS you will definitely notice the difference between lower numbers of FPS as soon as you go back again.

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, so getting lower than 60 FPS = crippled computer?
Heck I don’t even see a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS.

It’s the latest PCMasterrace BS – people consider anything below 60FPS to be dirt. While there is a clear difference between 30 and 60, the only real benefit of 60 is frame drops are less noticeable, while at 30, even a drop of 2-5FPS is noticeably laggy. If you were to have a fully locked, 30FPS, with no frame drops, it won’t be noticeable.

What people are actually saying, without really saying it: 30-40 FPS is playable, but I want 60FPS because reasons (I had different wording for this, but decided to tone it down). It’s the same thing with resolution (minimum 1080p, some are even going as far as to claim the minimum is 1440p for a “good” computer).

The main reason for the low performance on high end systems: DirectX 9. ArenaNet is targeting ultra-low end systems without really considering high end system capabilities. When they started developing GW2, that was a valid reason. Now though, DX10/11 compatible PCs are the vast majority. I’d actually like to see them do a proper hardware survey now, similar to the one they did before the BWEs.

lordkrall.7241:

You didn’t ask anything at all. You claimed something. It is a rather large difference.

It is also extremely unlikely that they would tell us stuff like this on the forums before they release the deep dive blogs in the near future.

He asked two questions, lmao.

Visiroth.5914:

Rainmaker.7594:

Also, it’s not so much a matter of the hardware as it is the software. Microsoft won’t release newer versions of DX on older OS, so DX12 that someone mentioned is a very bad idea because it won’t work on Win7. OpenGL and 64-bit isn’t controlled by MS.

Microsoft is offering win10 & DX12 as a free upgrade to win7 users so that point is moot.

Go read the preview announcement again, not everyone will be given a free upgrade to Win10 from older versions. Some people that are running Win7 and Win 8/8.1 will/are still going to have to pay for an upgrade.

As for skill lag in WvW and big world events, that has to be localized, because it *does not’ effect everyone. Same with the European lag, that’s a European issue and I highly doubt has anything to do with the games engine, otherwise it would affect everyone that plays.

Having said that, it’s not has hard for them to change/add support for DX11/12 as you think, the engine is easily adaptable than people believe it to be. Whether or not it’s a valuable use of resources and money is an entirely different issue.

The issue with DX9 is the fact the rendering engine is single threaded. So when the game has a lot of things going on (100 player’s in combat for example) the DX9 engine cannot keep up with the Calls to the API. That is why the game bottoms out like it does. Yet in other areas (Open world exploration, dungeons…ect) you can get above 100FPS on latest gen hardware.

Dx12 does not make sense as that’s a windows 10 DX API. DX10, 11, 11.2 is what makes more sense for support. Moving to a DX that supports multi-threaded rendering is what GW2 really needs. If they can take the time to port the engine over to a newer rev of DX and work on multi-threading the engine I feel we will gain 50% performance on average for the low end side of the game. Your bottom 20FPS will become 30FPS, for example. And that is where they need to start.

Continuing on with DX9 in 2015 does not make sense, and its a bad business decision.

DX11 support would be a massive, massive task for the programming team to develop at this point, especially when the game is frequently updated and they can’t just drop DX9. they have enough trouble keeping the mac version afloat.

I always thought it was, once it gets above 30fps with no drops the difference isn’t noticeable to most people. There are people out there that have above normal eyesight and would notice the difference.

However, when the games visuals are not breaking any boundaries in gaming graphics, I expect a game to run at 60fps or better when you throw sli/crossfire at it. GW2 has some serious issues with it’s engine. It can’t even take advantage of multi-core CPUs!

it’s nice and all to add a better DX version but with 500×500 textures (with a 3 or more stretched scale) it’s not gonna make the game look better all of a sudden, they first need to make an ultra option for textures (1K or 2K textures) before they even think of adding better DX versions.

Lord Trejgon.2809:

correct me if I’m wrong but does x32 architecture not limit also amount of CPU cores that game can use?

I’m looking currently on usage of each core with game launched and last of my 4 cores is barely used and sometimes even paused in work cause of no serious work to do while first core is a little bit loaded by a game

Absolutely no issue.

Being a turn/real-time strategy gamer, I never had a system that would play FPS games at an awesome speed. Because of that, anything over 25 fps looks okay to me. The problem is when framerate stutters. So I would rather play at a constant 30fps than 60fps with occasional drops to 30fps or less.

I consider the whole "my game engine can render pores on a face at 200fps, if you are running a triple SLi/CrossfireX setup on a 4K monitor basically a form of self … well can’t say that here but it ranks up there with saying a “decent” car must have 0-60mph times in under 8 seconds or it’s not worth looking at.

Rashy.4165:

What people are actually saying, without really saying it: 30-40 FPS is playable, but I want 60FPS because reasons (I had different wording for this, but decided to tone it down). It’s the same thing with resolution (minimum 1080p, some are even going as far as to claim the minimum is 1440p for a “good” computer).

“Because reasons”. What are you implying here? That it’s arbitrary? Illogical? Not grounded in reality? 60 FPS is objectively better than anything below it. It’s the standard on PC, and any developers that fail to meet it are doing a disservice to their players.

Rashy.4165:

The main reason for the low performance on high end systems: DirectX 9. ArenaNet is targeting ultra-low end systems without really considering high end system capabilities. When they started developing GW2, that was a valid reason.

When GW2 first game out I had an ultra-low system. I Had an Intel Q6600, which was a pretty solid quad core, but fairly old. GW2 ran terribly. I upgraded my GPU from the old NVidia one I was using to a Radeon HD 7870 and it still ran terribly. Granted, I could put some settings up a bit, but there’s no stopping the CPU bottleneck in LA or other high-people-density areas.

GW2’s performance is bad across the board, on any hardware because the engine is poorly optimised, which- by definition- means that it makes poor use of any hardware components available.

Zaklex.6308:

Go read the preview announcement again, not everyone will be given a free upgrade to Win10 from older versions. Some people that are running Win7 and Win 8/8.1 will/are still going to have to pay for an upgrade.

Source on that? According to this page, everyone will get an upgrade, the only exceptions being some weird small print.

We announced that a free upgrade for Windows 10 will be made available to customers running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 who upgrade in the first year after launch.*

…

*Hardware and software requirements apply. No additional charge. Feature availability may vary by device. Some editions excluded. More details at http://www.windows.com.

Seems like as long as your hardware can run it, you’ll be eligible for the free upgrade within the first year of release. And I can’t see the system requirements being too much different from 8/8.1.

But you will need Dx12 video cards to run all of Dx12. Dx11.x cards will not support all Dx12 features.

So as a developer do you target the portion of Dx12 that is supported by existing Dx11 hardware? Whose hardware? Intel’s embedded GPU on Haswell or Ivy Bridge? Does the renderer need to be structured differently to maximize Dx12 performance compared to maximizing for Dx11?

Honestly some people here are over simplifying the problem. It’s just not replacing calls to Dx9 with Dx11, Dx12, mantle and poof, super improved performance.

Behellagh.1468:

But you will need Dx12 video cards to run all of Dx12. Dx11.x cards will not support all Dx12 features.

So as a developer do you target the portion of Dx12 that is supported by existing Dx11 hardware? Whose hardware? Intel’s embedded GPU on Haswell or Ivy Bridge? Does the renderer need to be structured differently to maximize Dx12 performance compared to maximizing for Dx11?

Honestly some people here are over simplifying the problem. It’s just not replacing calls to Dx9 with Dx11, Dx12, mantle and poof, super improved performance.

I think you are missing some information. Here is a quote from Microsoft about it, from this article.

“The power and frame rate wins we demonstrated come from improvements in CPU usage in the OS runtime and device drivers. And this was on DX11 devices.”

Bearing in mind these performance boosts with DX12 are apparently up to 50% , things look pretty good.

There will be DX11 support in HoT. But that’s a surprise.