Guild Wars 2

Microsoft just released Directx 12. Which I think would benefit Gw2 overall.

With i5 and Gtx 970 @ 1080p, world boss event still gives Gw2 around 10 – 20 fps.

Now the question is would the dev’s consider recompiling HoT for Directx 12?

I can just imagine the benefit of Dx12 draw call improvements in WvW and world events. Would love to see Gw2 being upgraded to dx12 in the future. hopefully.

I doubt it. Too much work to maintain and debug basically 2 versions of the same client.

No.

You can’t just “recompile” to make it DX12.

They would have to build around an entirely new engine and that is not going to happen anytime soon if ever.

Ok someone please explain this to me (and don’t spare on the technicalities I have some software development experience). Why would switching over to DX12 inherently provide a performance boost? It seems to be more like the following scenario:

Chobits.2430:

No.

You can’t just “recompile” to make it DX12.

They would have to build around an entirely new engine and that is not going to happen anytime soon if ever.

In other words that it would take a lot of effort. Further why would running on a DX12 API provide performance boosts over running the same code against a DX9 API? Does DX12 have better algorithms?
What I mean is, if you’re going to draw a circle in DX9 does DX12 have a better circle drawing algorithm? From my understanding newer version of DX offers new functionality (as newer cards have newer hardware and circuits) but since at present GW2 runs everything against a DX9 API would changing all the references from DX9 to DX12 have any sort of inherent performance benefit, or would any benefit simply be a result of having to optimize the engine for DX12 (i.e. incorporating new functionality)?

You see I keep seeing people asking for this, and I’m not sure if it will necessarily have a performance benefit. In the case of world bosses it’s because your graphics card has to draw a 100+ unique models, all with their own animation and particle effects. I’m not sure if this is a short coming of the API or simply just a large workload being pushed onto the graphics card.

I would suggest using this topic: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/DirectX-11-12-request-merged/page/12#post5389925

The improvements really depend on the game and the bottlebecks. According to the devs the improvements performance wise are not big in GW2 while there are still other reasons why oucould do that.

It does not have to be true that that would have to rebuild the complete thing. They might have an layer between the Api and the rest of their code, so adding a new layer (to support another version) might be what they would need to do. In fact, that layer already exist at least parly. GW2 was announced as having DX11 and in the Beta there was even an option to select it (not sure if it was enabled) but eventually it never came in.

Back then I remember the reason for this was because they wanted to support as many machines as possible. These days you don’t really need DX9 for that, even wine is now getting DX 11 support http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940470/hey-gamers-directx-11-is-coming-to-linux-thanks-to-codeweavers-and-wine.html not to mention that support DX 11 or DX 12 means you can’t support DX9 as well.

A big advantange I see for DX11 and especially DX12 is the support for VR. If you want to build in deticated VR support, you would almost have to switch to DX11 or preferably DX12.

I suspect its more like a memory management issue, after playing 4 hours straight, I get 1 frame every 2 seconds unplayable, ….. restart pc and and fps is fair again…..(still not as smooth as core)

There was a developer response on Reddit in which they explained why they would not be upgrading to dx12. It basically boils down to the fact they would have to re-code the entire client for a very minimal increase in performance. You can read the full explanation here. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Berelious.3290:

There was a developer response on Reddit in which they explained why they would not be upgrading to dx12. It basically boils down to the fact they would have to re-code the entire client for a very minimal increase in performance. You can read the full explanation here. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Take what they say with grain of salt as the Dev isn’t clearly up to date on DX12 improvements and some of the bottle necks it removes. Because one Dev said X it isn’t the gospel after all.

Anet is looking for Sr. Graphics Programmer with
?Expert knowledge of current-gen graphics APIs (DirectX 9/10/11/OpenGL 4.X and DirectX12/Metal/Vulkan).

So who knows what happen!

Looking at my GPU using 100% of its ressources all the time, I don’t think DX12 would have any real impact at all. Maybe only on systems with really kitteny CPUs and bad RAM clocking.

If DX12 isn’t going to help this game what is? Honestly.

The fact this game doesn’t look like Crysis yet takes more resources than anything I’ve come across is mind-boggling.

direct x 12 would help this game. since this game is cpu bound. also since this game use direct x 9 and is limited to 1000 animation by fps in instance. and after your fps drops. direct x 12 is capable of over 600k animation drawcall. would help a lot in big event and zerg in wvw. also direct x 12 can use all your graphic card in the system as one what ever the brand or size. and many pc with i7 processor all ready have intel hd graphic inside apart from the other graphic card that you add to play game (NVidia, amd,etc…) look at it this way before direct x 9 all game would update the game to the latest dx version. after gaming company decided that it did not bring enough improvement it cost to much and was complicated process. direct x 12 is the easiest version to upgrade to ever for game company. and between direct x 11 and direct x 12 it brings over 70% performance boost. so from direct x 9 to direct x 12 it should bring even more. direct x 9 was in use in 2003 we are now in 2016 everything as evolve pc hardware software etc.. optimize the game would be a good idea. will also say that windows xp as less then 1% of user in the world and many of those can be business pc, and july 29th 2016 is the last day to upgrade free to windows 10 for any one that as windows 7, windows 8, windows 8.1. after that date the majority of pc will be windows 10. from a business point of view optimize the game so that it can continue in the future is a good idea. they plan (gw.2) to make another expansion pack. if so they plan to continue the game. and since they make money when they sell expansion pack they cannot say they have no money to pay devs to optimize the game.

will also add that right now even with the best pc. because of the direct x 9 limitation. you will experience fps drops in big event or big zerg in wvw. it is not because the pc cannot handle it. it is because the dx9 is limited. what is the difference in dx 12.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Talks-DX12-DX11-Efficiency-Improvements

switching between Direct3D 11 and 12 slightly reduces GPU power consumption but dramatically reduces CPU power consumption.
To put these numbers in perspective, a 50% reduction in power consumption is about what we would see from a new silicon process (i.e. moving from 22nm to 14nm), so to achieve such a reduction in consumption with software alone is a very significant result and a feather in Microsoft’s cap for Direct3D 12. If this carries over to when DirectX 12 games and applications launch in Q4 2015, it could help usher in a new era of mobile gaming and high end graphics. It is not often we see such a substantial power and performance improvement from a software update.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8388/intel-demonstrates-direct3d-12-performance-and-power-improvements

Microsoft execs expect frame rates to more than double when comparing DX12 to the current DX11 API. But that estimate looks to be conservative if Futuremark’s new API Overhead Feature test is to be believed.

remember that DirectX 12 is about making the API more efficient so it can take better advantage of multi-core CPUs. It’s not really about graphics cards. It’s about exploiting more performance from CPUs so they don’t bottleneck the GPU.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2900814/tested-directx-12s-potential-performance-leap-is-insane.html

the difference from dx 11 to dx 12 is that it can use all core and thread not only one core and one thread like dx 11 was doing.

will always have problem with someone that say that something new and up to date will not solve some issue. if something is updated it is uselly to solve some issue.

Lord of the Rings Online which is from 2007 got a dx11, how come this game from 2012 doesnt have it…

Upgrading to DX12 isn’t as simple as you make it out to be nor will is provide the improvements that you are hoping for.

DX9 is more CPU intensive. DX11 or DX12 update would help improve FPS and increase texture details etc.

Problem is Anet refuse to spend and money on it!

They claimed DX11 support would come within the first year after launch, but here we are in 2016 and they have not mentioned anything about it since!

The Ventari Ele.5812:

They claimed DX11 support would come within the first year after launch, but here we are in 2016 and they have not mentioned anything about it since!

Source?

EDIT:

This is what I found but didn’t find the actual post; only what was quoted.

For those of you who have been asking about DX11 support for Guild Wars 2, our goal with GW2 has always been to provide a gorgeous fantasy world while at the same time running on a wide range of gaming PCs.

Focusing on DX9 allows us to do this, as it’s a much wider supported graphics API than DX11 is and we wanted our game to reach as many of our fans as possible.

We will be evaluating supporting DX11 post launch. ~RB2

Unless evaluate means something other than what I think it means, they never said they would add DX11 support.

EDIT 2:

Found the link.

https://www.facebook.com/GuildWars2/photos/a.135044094208.103264.114036714208/10151048222709209/

stephanie wise.7841:

direct x 12 would help this game. since this game is cpu bound. also since this game use direct x 9 and is limited to 1000 animation by fps in instance. and after your fps drops. direct x 12 is capable of over 600k animation drawcall. would help a lot in big event and zerg in wvw. also direct x 12 can use all your graphic card in the system as one what ever the brand or size. and many pc with i7 processor all ready have intel hd graphic inside apart from the other graphic card that you add to play game (NVidia, amd,etc…) look at it this way before direct x 9 all game would update the game to the latest dx version. after gaming company decided that it did not bring enough improvement it cost to much and was complicated process. direct x 12 is the easiest version to upgrade to ever for game company. and between direct x 11 and direct x 12 it brings over 70% performance boost. so from direct x 9 to direct x 12 it should bring even more. direct x 9 was in use in 2003 we are now in 2016 everything as evolve pc hardware software etc.. optimize the game would be a good idea. will also say that windows xp as less then 1% of user in the world and many of those can be business pc, and july 29th 2016 is the last day to upgrade free to windows 10 for any one that as windows 7, windows 8, windows 8.1. after that date the majority of pc will be windows 10. from a business point of view optimize the game so that it can continue in the future is a good idea. they plan (gw.2) to make another expansion pack. if so they plan to continue the game. and since they make money when they sell expansion pack they cannot say they have no money to pay devs to optimize the game.

will also add that right now even with the best pc. because of the direct x 9 limitation. you will experience fps drops in big event or big zerg in wvw. it is not because the pc cannot handle it. it is because the dx9 is limited. what is the difference in dx 12.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Talks-DX12-DX11-Efficiency-Improvements

switching between Direct3D 11 and 12 slightly reduces GPU power consumption but dramatically reduces CPU power consumption.
To put these numbers in perspective, a 50% reduction in power consumption is about what we would see from a new silicon process (i.e. moving from 22nm to 14nm), so to achieve such a reduction in consumption with software alone is a very significant result and a feather in Microsoft’s cap for Direct3D 12. If this carries over to when DirectX 12 games and applications launch in Q4 2015, it could help usher in a new era of mobile gaming and high end graphics. It is not often we see such a substantial power and performance improvement from a software update.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8388/intel-demonstrates-direct3d-12-performance-and-power-improvements

Microsoft execs expect frame rates to more than double when comparing DX12 to the current DX11 API. But that estimate looks to be conservative if Futuremark’s new API Overhead Feature test is to be believed.

remember that DirectX 12 is about making the API more efficient so it can take better advantage of multi-core CPUs. It’s not really about graphics cards. It’s about exploiting more performance from CPUs so they don’t bottleneck the GPU.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2900814/tested-directx-12s-potential-performance-leap-is-insane.html

the difference from dx 11 to dx 12 is that it can use all core and thread not only one core and one thread like dx 11 was doing.

will always have problem with someone that say that something new and up to date will not solve some issue. if something is updated it is uselly to solve some issue.

Very nice post. Thank for Your time.

Holy kitten DX 12. Yea, it’s utter crap that I have to downclock my GPU just to avoid GW2 crashes, and no amount of tweaking the settings makes the game run smooth either way. But GW2 has far bigger problems right now than how it looks and how it runs. The fact that they can’t be bothered to update the forum footer (right on this same page) should give you an idea of how concerned they might be with this.

©2010–2013 ArenaNet, LLC. and NC Interactive, LLC.

Buy
Guild Wars 2
today!

(no mention of HoT or that GW2 is free, although it’s been half a year, and even look at the page at the link)
And yeah, from what I know, this really would be too much work, so I’d excuse ANet for this one at least (if for nothing else!).

stephanie wise.7841:

direct x 12 would help this game. since this game is cpu bound.

Yes, DX12 would help this game. Even DX11 would help this game.

Bcause the bottleneck is not only the DX-version itself, but how the GW2-client processes requests. So A-Net has to recode some important parts of the GW2-client for implementing DX11 or DX12 and optimize it for multicore-cpus. This recoding of the client could already remove some bottlenecks and could increase performance and stability of the client.

Focusing on DX9 allows us to do this, as it’s a much wider supported graphics API than DX11 is and we wanted our game to reach as many of our fans as possible.

I’m sorry but I don’t belive that with DX11 you can’t make same things that they are doing with DX9c.

I was hoping on DX11/12 also, and I was sure that it would help improve FPS, but someone said that even DX11 wouldn’t help. This game is porly opimised and even with DX11/12 it wouldn’t support multithreading.
DX11 and above does support multithreading, but core game doesn’t, so it wouldn’t have any effect about that.

DX11/12 would improve performance a bit, but not much.

I can only hope they will use DX12 for GW3, with some public engine like Unreal Engine 3/4. At least there is full database of tricks with those engines, unlike the one we are using now (from GW1 … like 10 years old code).

And from what Anet said, they either don’t know how to optimise that game to acctually use all of CPU and GPU power, or they just refuse to spend money on it’s development.

However you turn this, it’s bad news for everyone who was hoping to get 60fps at WvW battles and other populated events. There just won’t be such luxury here. Probbably the only down side of Guild Wars 2.

I feel like I may be able to clear up some things here.

GW2 stays on DX9 and 32bit client which kinda.. lags a lot, and sometimes even crashes on huge battles/worldbosses (i see you Tequatl).

For the vast majority of players, the lag is unrelated to both of these.
All software have a thing called threads. You can think of each thread as a highway lane: They run in parallel, and they each perform different tasks simultaneously. They are what applications use to scale with multiple cores on CPUs, as each thread can only run on one CPU core at a time.

Each application has a thread known as the main thread. For games that thread is usually the thread that’s in the driver’s seat of the frame. It determines what to process and when on a higher level, such as “process OS messages”, “update the game state”, “process animations”, “send state to the render thread”, etc. All the different things that go into a game frame. The majority of game engines do some of these on a different thread, but in many cases the main thread still determines when it should happen.

So since threads are useful for scaling things, you’d think that you could simply create more threads and get more work done. But while it’s true that you have more computing power with more threads, threads also have downsides. For one, you cannot modify data in memory while another thread is reading that same data. In order to do this one thread has to wait for the other to stop using the data, meaning work is done in serial even if the code itself is running on multiple threads. To make matters worse, the OS is not guaranteed to put a thread back to work the very moment the other thread has finished. It can actually take a long-ish time (long being a very relative term). Due to this, software engineers are forced to properly design their applications to work well in parallel. Doing this after the fact is usually on the range of non-trivial to very hard.

Which brings us to GW2. GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it’s a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say “Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you’re too busy”, but sadly this is not that world.

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.

And about crashing on Tequatl: Here’s one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

I doubt they have the resources to ever go through with this; imo we would only see a different engine if they decided to go down the path of GW3.

Always remember the motto… Gemstore Items for $$$ > any other form of content/improvements!

All I know is that the game puts mass amounts of players together to tackle content and to compete in wvw, so something needs to be done to improve the user experience.

Chicot.3865:

Lord of the Rings Online which is from 2007 got a dx11, how come this game from 2012 doesnt have it…

yup and compare the graphic in GW2 and LOTR side by side and you will exactly why the latest API != the best looking game. GW2 is already a gorgeous looking game with great performance. Try ESO and you will see how badly wvw can go wrong with a poor engine.