Guild Wars 2

How hard it is to simply making cull a toggle? Turn it on… you know what you get. Turn it off… you know what you get. In either case people can opt to go…

Actually I don’t care anymore. Anet can keep doing their thing. I’m not even sure why I keep playing this game. I’ve disliked every update since Cutthroat Politics; with Clockwork Chaos being the worse.

nehezbegar.1065:

@up u can tune the culling just change the WvWvW settings, it affects PvE too, they just didn’t change the tooltip.

They did with the last patch, go look again ;-)

Battlefield 3 can also utilize an i7 potential. My point is that if a quad core i5 3570k cannot be fully utilized then any future hardware upgrades will be useless.

I have played SWTOR, TERA and RIFT and had smoother game play in all of those games.

It has been a year since launch and there have been minimal performance upgrades to the game, if anything the removal of culling has downgraded performance for a lot of people.

Anet dropped the ball using a modified GW1 engine that cannot handle the game. Expect to never have any improvements, ever with GW2 until the engine is recoded and properly optimized.

Stormcrow.7513:

Battlefield 3 can also utilize an i7 potential. My point is that if a quad core i5 3570k cannot be fully utilized then any future hardware upgrades will be useless.

I have played SWTOR, TERA and RIFT and had smoother game play in all of those games.

It has been a year since launch and there have been minimal performance upgrades to the game, if anything the removal of culling has downgraded performance for a lot of people.

Anet dropped the ball using a modified GW1 engine that cannot handle the game. Expect to never have any improvements, ever with GW2 until the engine is recoded and properly optimized.

But have You seen as many ppl there as You see right now in GW2? I’ve never seen so many ppl in those games. GW2 is not a performance monster i agree, but is nowhere far from other games. When there is normal amount of ppl in the area i get the hard stable 60 fps. Right now with this huge amount of ppl on the screen it is normal that the performance drops. Wait 2-3 days and everything will go back to normal, ppl will come back to their normal daily activities.

And from what i know right now it is impossible to recode and redo the whole GW2 engine, they will do it for Guild Wars 3, guess why Blizz didnt radically upgrade their engine (they just slightly upgraded the current engine, adding some minor features, they just rised the texture resolution goin from 256×256 to 512×512 and 1024×1024 on characters, my eye may be kittened but the texture quality sure rised since 2004, thats why the game looks better now than in 2004)

Mark Katzbach.9084:

The culling settings are universal between WvW and PvE, unfortunately they were inadvertently not re-labeled for this update.

The settings to change your culling are labeled as “WvW Character Limit” and “WvW Character Quality”.

Sorry for the confusion. We’ve made the appropriate teams aware of this.

I have it set to minimum and in my experience my FPS is far worse than before this update.

I have an older PC, and I know fully well I’m not going to experience optimal gameplay… ever. I have every single graphics setting on as low as it can go, I have the lowest settings for character limit/detail, and still in cities/zergs my FPS slows to a crawl (as I expected with the announcement of no more culling). I’ve even turned off “show all player names” and yet they show if they’re beyond a certain radius, making it impossible to see anything. I understand that system requirements change and I’ve taken that in stride with my years of MMO experience, but I am a poor college student and use GW2 as a small escape from my multitude of mental health problems (and I know I’m not the only person that this provides reprieve for). I want to keep playing it so badly as I work towards my goals in my personal life, but when my system gets completely bogged down it kind of… bums me out. All that it takes to make this better would be a simple enable/disable culling option.

So, please ANet devs, enable culling again for those of us whose systems appreciate it. It goes beyond a video game we can turn off/on, for some of us.

Stormcrow.7513:

I have a relatively high end system and I am getting 15-30+ fps in LA with Highest/Highest settings.
Zerging in Chaos maps seems to be about 30 fps or so in a full server.

My issue with this patch is that no matter if I buy a “new” i9 7770k and 4x sli titans, the game will never ever run at 60fps.

It seems that Anet has chosen to fix the performance problem by moving the onus onto the end user rather than fix the blatant issue of a poorly coded client.

I have a mid range pc it is nothing special
Core i5 3330
8GB RAM
Ati Radeon 6850

I have been running the game at about 60 fps for ages- no problems.
Since culling was removed my performance is even better

According to you this should not be possible.
Maybe the problem is on your end somewhere?

Morrigan.2809:

Ha! I love it
can’t wait for people who have complained about empty maps to see this! whoot

Yes out of the 31 maps guess how many now have players. Yeah, THREE. Awesome because that sure showed them. Actually, not it didn’t. All it did was move the people that were in one zone ignoring the world to another zone. The other maps that were empty are still empty unless there is an event.

Without a meaningful reason to actually visit the empty maps you are still going to have this happen. This just serves to reinforce that, by putting massive people into one area. Then the event ends and it’s a ghost town again.

Morrigan.2809:

Stormcrow.7513:

I have a relatively high end system and I am getting 15-30+ fps in LA with Highest/Highest settings.
Zerging in Chaos maps seems to be about 30 fps or so in a full server.

My issue with this patch is that no matter if I buy a “new” i9 7770k and 4x sli titans, the game will never ever run at 60fps.

It seems that Anet has chosen to fix the performance problem by moving the onus onto the end user rather than fix the blatant issue of a poorly coded client.

I have a mid range pc it is nothing special
Core i5 3330
8GB RAM
Ati Radeon 6850

I have been running the game at about 60 fps for ages- no problems.
Since culling was removed my performance is even better

According to you this should not be possible.
Maybe the problem is on your end somewhere?

I think you are at the character select screen in that though. I could be wrong of course.

Did you really just post your FPS on the login screen? EDIT: oh, it’s not just me noticing that :P

Well, whatever…

I play the game on an “high end” PC. Normally I play with a high FPS rate, but in events there are sometimes some frame drops down to ~ 25-20.

It has been explained in this thread several times by people who actually have at least an idea how programming works, and what components are used in a game. The main issue is, that the graphics card is not utilized by GW2 the way it should (that IS an issue you can blame the code for). The component mainly used by this game is the CPU. As far as I know, not even the CPU is utilized to its full potential. So in events, when there are many character models to render, the CPU will come near it’s limits (partly defined by the hardware itself, partly by the code and how it utilizes the CPU).

That’s something that should be fixed some day… That’s the reason why many people with high end PCs also have troubles playing GW2 on high FPS rates.

Something positive I noticed in this patch is, that they seem to have fixed the skill lags (those were a server side issue).

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Morrigan.2809:

Ha! I love it
can’t wait for people who have complained about empty maps to see this! whoot

Yes out of the 31 maps guess how many now have players. Yeah, THREE. Awesome because that sure showed them. Actually, not it didn’t. All it did was move the people that were in one zone ignoring the world to another zone. The other maps that were empty are still empty unless there is an event.

Without a meaningful reason to actually visit the empty maps you are still going to have this happen. This just serves to reinforce that, by putting massive people into one area. Then the event ends and it’s a ghost town again.

You know what?
I don’t need a reason to go visit maps I have been to before- that is what I do on a regular basis when I play, because I enjoy them for various reasons ( events, appearance, whatever)
I have never seen these empty maps that people speak of and I pretty much go everywhere in the game.
At the moment there is a large concentration of players around the invasion points- that does not mean the rest of the game is empty- it never was, now people can actually see that instead of having a guy 5 feet away from you vanish into thin air.

Rayti.6531:

Did you really just post your FPS on the login screen? EDIT: oh, it’s not just me noticing that :P

Well, whatever…

I play the game on an “high end” PC. Normally I play with a high FPS rate, but in events there are sometimes some frame drops down to ~ 25-20.

It has been explained in this thread several times by people who actually have at least an idea how programming works, and what components are used in a game. The main issue is, that the graphics card is not utilized by GW2 the way it should (that IS an issue you can blame the code for). The component mainly used by this game is the CPU. As far as I know, not even the CPU is utilized to its full potential. So in events, when there are many character models to render, the CPU will come near it’s limits (partly defined by the hardware itself, partly by the code and how it utilizes the CPU).

That’s something that should be fixed some day… That’s the reason why many people with high end PCs also have troubles playing GW2 on high FPS rates.

Something positive I noticed in this patch is, that they seem to have fixed the skill lags (those were a server side issue).

I should take some shots with the afterburner overlay on showing the usage with the frame rate in game. I really thought most people already knew everything you described, but apparently not.

You know what?
I don’t need a reason to go visit maps I have been to before- that is what I do on a regular basis when I play, because I enjoy them for various reasons ( events, appearance, whatever)
I have never seen these empty maps that people speak of and I pretty much go everywhere in the game.
At the moment there is a large concentration of players around the invasion points- that does not mean the rest of the game is empty- it never was, now people can actually see that instead of having a guy 5 feet away from you vanish into thin air.

Absolutely there are people around. If you are one of 3 or 4 servers you will see people. Though I did some checking and even on those I hardly saw anyone in the bris wildlands, or hinterlands etc. Still I’m sure it must be nice to see other players around. Sadly not everyone plays on those few servers.

I will go ahead and say that I’m in favor of merging the lower servers. It would populate the world, and that’s a good thing. Playing alone sucks, it really sucks in gw2 because it’s clear much of the content was designed around group play. It’s also pretty clear much of the content was designed with a much higher population in mind. I think they initially thought players would goto those areas, but that’s just not what has happened. Now this is off topic, and I would be more than happy to discuss this further let’s take it to a different topic though.

Go away and … never … come BAACK !
Go away and … never … come …. BAAAAAACCCCKK
GO AWAY … AND … NEVER … COME … BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCKKKK !

…
..

We did it my love ! We got rid of culling ! Finally !
eats fish*

Time to upgrade that PC from 2010?
For me the best part of this update.

the problem is that anet has been too kind to people on ancient or very low-end machines. the game’s still running on DX9 and it massively prioritizes CPU power over any peripheral GPU, probably because casual players on low-end machines are more likely to have stronger processors than graphics cards.

even then, the engine’s resource management is horrendous. even with your GPU gathering dust, multiple CPU cores are wasted because the engine is optimized solely for single-thread management like it’s still 2005 or something.

there’s no consumer hardware on the market that can run this game at a consistent 60+ in any and all areas. your performance is tied almost entirely to your clock speed, something that’s far harder to upgrade than a GPU, and once you’ve clocked to ~4.5ish (enjoy that hefy liquid cooling price tag to boot) you’re pretty much done.

anet basically tried to aim for way too wide a market and ended up pleasing no one.

aspirine.6852:

Time to upgrade that PC from 2010?
For me the best part of this update.

You people actually managed to make me facepalm in real life. That’s quite an accomplishment, it really takes grand levels of ignorance for that.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Morrigan.2809:

Stormcrow.7513:

I have a relatively high end system and I am getting 15-30+ fps in LA with Highest/Highest settings.
Zerging in Chaos maps seems to be about 30 fps or so in a full server.

My issue with this patch is that no matter if I buy a “new” i9 7770k and 4x sli titans, the game will never ever run at 60fps.

It seems that Anet has chosen to fix the performance problem by moving the onus onto the end user rather than fix the blatant issue of a poorly coded client.

I have a mid range pc it is nothing special
Core i5 3330
8GB RAM
Ati Radeon 6850

I have been running the game at about 60 fps for ages- no problems.
Since culling was removed my performance is even better

According to you this should not be possible.
Maybe the problem is on your end somewhere?

I think you are at the character select screen in that though. I could be wrong of course.

Yes sorry about that, my mistake that is indeed the loading screen.
Just checked in LA and it fluctuates between about 45 fps to 55 fps

Which still feels smooth to me and I have a noticeable improvement since I have always avoided LA because the game feels so choppy there.

At launch my game was running at barely 20fps so for me it makes a huge difference.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Rayti.6531:

Did you really just post your FPS on the login screen? EDIT: oh, it’s not just me noticing that :P

Well, whatever…

I play the game on an “high end” PC. Normally I play with a high FPS rate, but in events there are sometimes some frame drops down to ~ 25-20.

It has been explained in this thread several times by people who actually have at least an idea how programming works, and what components are used in a game. The main issue is, that the graphics card is not utilized by GW2 the way it should (that IS an issue you can blame the code for). The component mainly used by this game is the CPU. As far as I know, not even the CPU is utilized to its full potential. So in events, when there are many character models to render, the CPU will come near it’s limits (partly defined by the hardware itself, partly by the code and how it utilizes the CPU).

That’s something that should be fixed some day… That’s the reason why many people with high end PCs also have troubles playing GW2 on high FPS rates.

Something positive I noticed in this patch is, that they seem to have fixed the skill lags (those were a server side issue).

I should take some shots with the afterburner overlay on showing the usage with the frame rate in game. I really thought most people already knew everything you described, but apparently not.

Yeah thought about that too. I haven’t run any testing software whilst playing GW for quite some time now. I’m curious if something changed in the utilization of the hardware components…

And no, quite the contrary is the case. Most people don’t know these things, but I also don’t think that this is strange. There should be no reason for customers to know these things and why there are issues. It’s also not their job to fix it, so I understand the complaints in the forums too.

There should be done several things, starting from code optimization (my graphics card really feels unemployed right now and want’s to do something now and then) and also introducing more options in the graphics settings, so everyone with a more or less normal PC can play the game and still be able to enjoy it. I for my part wouldn’t enjoy choosing between seing all characters with standard models that look crappy and seeing all characters in high detail and have a dia show.

So I consider myself lucky that currently I don’t have any problems. But it’s not OK to say “Hey I’m good, all the others: buy a better PC!” (Especially when it’s based on lack of understanding of the mechanics behind)

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

aspirine.6852:

Time to upgrade that PC from 2010?
For me the best part of this update.

You people actually managed to make me facepalm in real life. That’s quite an accomplishment, it really takes grand levels of ignorance for that.

Facepalm all you want. It’s not ignorance, I just do not care if he or you have some kittenty PC and want to play the best looking mmo around.

Morrigan.2809:

Yes sorry about that, my mistake that is indeed the loading screen.
Just checked in LA and it fluctuates between about 45 fps to 55 fps

Which still feels smooth to me and I have a noticeable improvement since I have always avoided LA because the game feels so choppy there.

At launch my game was running at barely 20fps so for me it makes a huge difference.

Screens, or it didn’t happen :P
Jokes aside. That sounds like the performance I experience since patch. They really seem to have done several things. The best of all is that I really have no skill lags any more.

I wouldn’t trust the performance in LA right now though. Most of the people normally idling there are now spread all over the maps due to the event and also are idling in DR now. There is no guarantee it will stay that way in LA when the event is over.

But all in all it was a good patch and an attempt to make the performance better whilst turning culling off. I think that’s a step in the right direction. What bugs me are the visible name tags, but as far as I have seen it, lots of people already complained about that, so that will likely get fixed (someday).

aspirine.6852:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

aspirine.6852:

Time to upgrade that PC from 2010?
For me the best part of this update.

You people actually managed to make me facepalm in real life. That’s quite an accomplishment, it really takes grand levels of ignorance for that.

Facepalm all you want. It’s not ignorance, I just do not care if he or you have some kittenty PC and want to play the best looking mmo around.

No one is saying that everyone should be able to play the “best looking MMO around,” people are saying that if we were able to play the game just fine before this patch, we should at least have the OPTION to continue to play it successfully. You can continue to play on your super fancy expensive PC with all the shinies and a million people but not everyone can/wants to.

aspirine.6852:

Time to upgrade that PC from 2010?

Send me 500 euros, no prob man.

/narrowmindmoar?

Morrigan.2809:

Ha! I love it
can’t wait for people who have complained about empty maps to see this! whoot

Lol. Zones weren’t empty because of culling, zones were empty because nobody was there.

What setting do you change to reduce the “Supernova” graphics that surround the boss/champion? There’s a ball of light around each boss/champion that I can’t see the ground to land the GTAoE and I can’t see the boss the hit with melee.

Shiren.9532:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

The culling settings are universal between WvW and PvE, unfortunately they were inadvertently not re-labeled for this update.

The settings to change your culling are labeled as “WvW Character Limit” and “WvW Character Quality”.

Sorry for the confusion. We’ve made the appropriate teams aware of this.

I have it set to minimum and in my experience my FPS is far worse than before this update.

Same here! + Ugly Nameplates everywhere!

This ruined my lovely Guild Wars 2!

actually small thing about culling and PvE and me.
with the culling in FoTM at the bonus fractal (Jade Maw) I’ve never get fps under 10 – AND I saww all the party with their actual models.
after the patch so – without culling – I don’t see my teammates (I have some pinky models) AND if fight with jade maw fps dropped under unbelievable level making me unable to make TRYWIAL jumps that I never had problem with.

so I would like to have culling in dungeons back

shimmerless.4560:

the problem is that anet has been too kind to people on ancient or very low-end machines. the game’s still running on DX9 and it massively prioritizes CPU power over any peripheral GPU, probably because casual players on low-end machines are more likely to have stronger processors than graphics cards.

even then, the engine’s resource management is horrendous. even with your GPU gathering dust, multiple CPU cores are wasted because the engine is optimized solely for single-thread management like it’s still 2005 or something.

there’s no consumer hardware on the market that can run this game at a consistent 60+ in any and all areas. your performance is tied almost entirely to your clock speed, something that’s far harder to upgrade than a GPU, and once you’ve clocked to ~4.5ish (enjoy that hefy liquid cooling price tag to boot) you’re pretty much done.

anet basically tried to aim for way too wide a market and ended up pleasing no one.

Exactly. It’s a poor plan to tie yourself to an older technology in order to support a lower common denominator and then turn around and implement a feature that relies on a known weakness of that technology.

I’m currently (as in this week) trying to spec out a new PC for a friend who wants to start playing GW2. This update may have just upped the cost of admission for her. Playing GW2 with my wife and I is 90% of the reason she wants a new PC. Guess we’ll just see how it goes…

Orion Star.3651:

My framerate slows to a crawl while were doing scarlet events.

I turned off player names… and things run great.

I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.

Vol.5241:

I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.

Nice attitude, if it weren’t for the lil issue that those “potatoes and toasters” ran the game for one year just fine until this patch.

Also, “majority of playerbase” – numbers or don’t make claims.

Vol.5241:

I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.

But Anet’s goal has always been to lower the common denominator to allow more people to play (for better or worse). Just stating that you think less people should be able to play today does not make it a goal that Anet agrees with.

Kahzi.5467:

Mystic.5934:

If you want amazing, buy a new computer. If you don’t, turn your settings down. You don’t get to drive a Tesla after buying a Honda. New games = require newer computers. No way would I ever expect my 466Mhz iBook (purchased sep 2000) to be able to play GW2, much less at highest settings.

See, you’ve just made a logical point that sounds great, until you take your own advice and actually try to run GW2 on high end hardware.

I have a good computer. My water-cooled i7 is clocked near 5 GHz. My video card is never 100% utilized. I get 20 fps in large WvW battles and dynamic events (like claw of jormag) on high settings. That’s not amazing. The problem, in many cases, is not the hardware people are using but that the software is poorly optimized and/or the developers have been overly ambitious.

If you can show me a reasonable consumer hardware setup that can achieve 60 fps @ 1080p in large WvW battles and dynamic events, on high settings with culling disabled, then you’re a time traveler from the future.

I mean… we COULD do that. Or you can go into your options and turn down the culling settings to be relatively equivalent to a couple months ago (before they removed it from server side). That’s why those options are there. I can’t believe people are even bothering to reply, just turn the kittening culling settings down. You don’t have to turn all the quality settings down, just culling.

AndrewSX.3794:

Vol.5241:

I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.

Nice attitude, if it weren’t for the lil issue that those “potatoes and toasters” ran the game for one year just fine until this patch.

Also, “majority of playerbase” – numbers or don’t make claims.

They’ll run the game just fine right now if you TURN YOUR kittenING CULLING SETTINGS DOWN.

Not happy about how this works.

In places with extreme numbers of players, the game now enforces either an FPS drop compared to what I used to have, or having to put up with an ugly mass of nametags (even though I have the nametags for players option turned off).

These floating nametags for unrendered player avatars serve no purpose whatsoever in PvE other than to make the game more ugly. It’s not as if they’re going to attack you like they might in WvW.

Kahzi.5467:

Einsof.1457:

Buy a new gfx card or tone down your settings! THIS IS AMAZING. love you anet!

There is no consumer hardware on the market that can deliver 60 fps in a reasonable configuration (ie, not 4x SLI Titans) using high settings when many players are on screen. The game engine scales poorly. Rather then address this issue, or design content that doesn’t force hundreds of player to one area, we’re given stop gap measures like culling options. It’s sad.

I’m using a 650, or there abouts, without SLI and I have my settings pumped all the way up. I haven’t even experienced a stutter in the heart of the zerg during these events.

Get a better system, get a better connection, or lower your settings. Those are your options.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

AndrewSX.3794:

Vol.5241:

I don’t think the majority of the playerbase should suffer because a select few decide to play the game on potatoes and toasters.

Nice attitude, if it weren’t for the lil issue that those “potatoes and toasters” ran the game for one year just fine until this patch.

Also, “majority of playerbase” – numbers or don’t make claims.

They’ll run the game just fine right now if you TURN YOUR kittenING CULLING SETTINGS DOWN.

You haven’t tried pre patch culling and lowering to “Lowest” both culling settings, do you?

Pre culling: some players didn’t get renderized at all. Players renderized are accurate.
Postcullig 2x lowest: every player is renderized. every player look like a stickman. or with weapons always drawn out.

It’s not the same thing. And runs (and plays/look) horrible.

if you can’t get down the high stand cause you can afford a new rig every 3 year, then there isn’t much to discuss.

My system only shows the “holder” player models for a very short while…. longest I’ve ever seen is about 20 seconds (at the bank in LA….must be 50 players in a huge ball around him)….they usually load much faster). I haven’t touched my settings for this (AFAIK). The nameplates ARE a big off-putting, but they can be turned off (and I do at times). I’ve never seen a player nameplate with that setting turned off (unless you mouse over the player or target them).

I think a lot of this issue is simply confusion over the settings that we have available and using them to suit what each player wants. From my understanding, culling is a server side process and cannot be turned ON/OFF for individual clients (players).

At the moment, I like the changes and from the way ANet announced this change, I think this was more of a “test” than an absolute permanent change. Still, I’d vote to keep it if someone asked me.

BTW, I’m running a 2 year old i5 dual core system and the one thing that really improved my performance was upgrading my memory to 16GB (obviously, 64 bit OS is a must here) and turning off my swap file (not suggested if you run a lot of background processes with GW2, but it’s just a reboot away to test it). While you are there, I suggest doing a defrag with no swap file and then turning it back on if you need to. Not sure how much performance increase you are going to see if your swap file is on an SDD, however.

Mystic.5934:

If you want amazing, buy a new computer. If you don’t, turn your settings down. You don’t get to drive a Tesla after buying a Honda. New games = require newer computers. No way would I ever expect my 466Mhz iBook (purchased sep 2000) to be able to play GW2, much less at highest settings.

You don’t need new, I have an Intel i5 processor and a GTX660 card with only 8gb ram and GW2 runs fine for me with all max settings. I’m not getting a gaudy 120+ fps but after 60 it’s all just bragging rights.

Brother Grimm.5176:

The nameplates ARE a big off-putting, but they can be turned off (and I do at times). I’ve never seen a player nameplate with that setting turned off (unless you mouse over the player or target them).

My screenshot begs to differ.

(Note: Screenshot taken with “Character Model Limit” setting set to lowest, to enforce a maximum number of unrendered avatars.)

Unrendered avatars always show nametags for me, regardless of the player nametag settings. This turns busy events into splashes of alphabet soup completely covering the actual game graphics. The alternative is to set the “Character Model Limit” to higher values, leading to FPS loss. It’s a no-win situation: ugly game or slower game than I was used to.

fenriz.2781:

I have an older PC, and I know fully well I’m not going to experience optimal gameplay… ever. I have every single graphics setting on as low as it can go, I have the lowest settings for character limit/detail, and still in cities/zergs my FPS slows to a crawl (as I expected with the announcement of no more culling). I’ve even turned off “show all player names” and yet they show if they’re beyond a certain radius, making it impossible to see anything. I understand that system requirements change and I’ve taken that in stride with my years of MMO experience, but I am a poor college student and use GW2 as a small escape from my multitude of mental health problems (and I know I’m not the only person that this provides reprieve for). I want to keep playing it so badly as I work towards my goals in my personal life, but when my system gets completely bogged down it kind of… bums me out. All that it takes to make this better would be a simple enable/disable culling option.

So, please ANet devs, enable culling again for those of us whose systems appreciate it. It goes beyond a video game we can turn off/on, for some of us.

Are you running programs in the background? Turn off your anti virus as well.

This guy’s post helped me some:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p

I’m playing on a lowly dual core amd pc built 5 years ago, and was expecting the worst with the removal of culling i.e. logging in to play microsoft powerpoint. Was pleasantly surprised to see my frame rates staying relatively stable and playable during all the zerg events and what not. Yeah the generic models look wierd (my culling settings were at low not lowest), but think the tradeoffs were worth it. Well done Anet.

Hope you get things sorted.

No we don’t need it back.

Morrigan.2809:

Stormcrow.7513:

I have a relatively high end system and I am getting 15-30+ fps in LA with Highest/Highest settings.
Zerging in Chaos maps seems to be about 30 fps or so in a full server.

My issue with this patch is that no matter if I buy a “new” i9 7770k and 4x sli titans, the game will never ever run at 60fps.

It seems that Anet has chosen to fix the performance problem by moving the onus onto the end user rather than fix the blatant issue of a poorly coded client.

I have a mid range pc it is nothing special
Core i5 3330
8GB RAM
Ati Radeon 6850

I have been running the game at about 60 fps for ages- no problems.
Since culling was removed my performance is even better

According to you this should not be possible.
Maybe the problem is on your end somewhere?

Go to Lions Arch, look at the bank entrance from the mystic forge. Turn the WvW culling settings(they are changed to character quality and amount I think) to Highest/Highest and report your fps. (yours is set to Med/Med)

Agreed. Lose the names. Ruins everything that’s good about this update.

Brother Grimm.5176:

The nameplates ARE a big off-putting, but they can be turned off (and I do at times). I’ve never seen a player nameplate with that setting turned off (unless you mouse over the player or target them).

According to reports, the nameplate setting only works for players nearby (who aren’t culled), e.g. it only affects the players you would have seen under the previous culling rules. I assume this is an oversight and will be fixed soon…

From my understanding, culling is a server side process and cannot be turned ON/OFF for individual clients (players).

No, that’s how it used to work. The whole point of this update was to move it to a client-side process.

BTW, I’m running a 2 year old i5 dual core system and the one thing that really improved my performance was upgrading my memory to 16GB (obviously, 64 bit OS is a must here)

That’s strange, you must have a lot of stuff running in your background. GW2 is still a 32-bit app and unless it is using elaborate memory hacks (which I doubt) it still can’t utilize anything past 4 GB. It sounds like you have 12 GB of system/background overhead.

and turning off my swap file

Yes, that would be it.

After a bit of testing, I found that the only way to have no nametags (PCs and NPCs) in a busy LA, is with the Character Model Limit set to “highest”.

great, now that the carebears are complaining about it, they will bring culling back. aka, wvw is going to be a mess. again.

Or they could implement it with all settings working as advertized.

Like, not show nametags when the settings to show nametags are turned off.

The removing of culling was great and now I can see how many people at each event, which is super cool! Glad to finally see the amount of people playing around.

But I’d love something like in a game I will not name:

If you pressed F10, every other players (players only) would disappear from the screen, leaving the field empty and a massive increases in FPS. You wouldn’t see them anymore, but they would still be there. I think this functionality could be combined with the removal of culling. Maybe only show dead/downed players so even then we can act fast if we activated this option.

Also because I like taking screenshots of scenery without names or players in the way :P

I think it’s great we can now see everyone, but as this event demonstrates, it’s sometimes too much of a clutter and we should be able to turn it off.

Before this update my FPS while standing still in LA would hang around kitten. When walking around in LA it would drop to about 30-35.

Now however, EVEN when my character limit is set to the lowest, my FPS in LA while standing still hangs at 20-25, and when walking around I’m looking at a 5 FPS slideshow. Yay.

Not to mention that even when I set my character quality to high, or even highest, people will still appear with the standard low-res armor and wield their 2-handed weapons in 1 hand.

For me it was perfect how it was before. At least allow us an option to turn the culling settings back to how it was. It’s just no fun for me looking at a slideshow whenever there are more than X ammount of people on my screen. I won’t spend a dime on upgrading my computer because I will simply not spend money on making this 1 update that I don’t even care about at all work out for me. It worked fine before so why can’t it now?

Funny, even my lowly macbook pro has better performance with the culling removed. I love it now… crazy how many people there are around AND better framerate.