Guild Wars 2

Hi, I have a reasonable laptop, but not a gaming specific one, so it plays GW2 on mid-settings before the frame rate becomes unplayable. Anyway, I’ve been messing about with the settings and trying to find the best set-up for the things I care about.

One thing that I’ve noticed looking at screenshots people post here is that the textures on the player models look much better than mine (materials in particular look better, with cloth look more like cloth and metal looking more like metal). So I was wondering which settings affect the character models, and which ones don’t have a big impact on frame rate. I may not be able to use them on max, but it would help to know exactly which setting to tweak as I haven’t been able to figure it out through experimenting.

Honestly the only setting that doesn’t hit the framerate is the anti-aliasing, but since there are only two options for it…. In my experience every other setting affects fps in some way, if you really want better character models either upgrade your computer or learn to live with lag/worse graphics. GW2 is still an amazing looking game even barely above the lowest settings, a few tips to keep in mind are; shaders hit your fps really hard, so do shadows. Animation kills your fps when around lots of people, like the huge meta events. Textures kill fps period. And Environment gets worse the longer you play (due to temp memory caching) and the more environmental objects you’re around (Maguuma Jungle sucks in other words). It took me about 2 months to find acceptable settings for my computer that don’t compromise the graphics too much. Good luck!

If you set Animation on low, you will not be able to see some important stuff. Eg. some pve events are about pouring water on structures on fire. If Animation is on low, you can’t see the fire!

Before I upgraded my computer, I used the following and it worked pretty well and keeping FPS decent (ish) and having great looking character models.

ALL settings low except
Render Sampling set to Native
Shaders set to medium/high

You can fiddle with a few others after that if you wish, but they made the biggest difference for me.

The settings that affect player models the most are:

Textures: High
Render Sampling: Native
Shaders: High
Best Texture Filtering: Checked
Use High-Res Character Samples: Checked

Shadows and Post-processing will have some minor effect.

One of the easiest ways to increase your frame rate is to set Shadows to Low or None, and Reflections to None. I wouldn’t recommend setting anything else to Low or None/Disabled unless you’re really desperate to increase performance. The Medium settings still look very nice, but once you dip into Low you really start to lose a lot.

Brilliant, just the info I needed, thank you everyone