Guild Wars 2

I use two Radeon 5570s with a crossfire bridge. I bought the sku# that offered 2GB of ddr3 memory per card. For what I am about to say it is important to note that my computer has 4GB of discrete video memory. The gpu and memory type are not top-of-the-line fast, but the issue I raise concerns the size of available memory.

Yesterday, I participated in the champ train. Each port was taking longer than usual. Changing the graphics option “Character Model Quality” from “Low” to “Lowest” improved port time from 20-50%. That is a huge difference for such a small change. It also proved to me what I had suspected. Correct me if this is wrong, but there is a texture reload (or refresh) that happens when porting, even when not zone crossing. It had to be just the character models loading that took the extra time, at least, I hope that is all there was.

What I want to suggest is that a query for graphic card memory be made when the game initializes. That number should be used as the threshold for swapping textures in and out of memory. This computer’s 4GB should not be going through a reload state during champ train ports. I should see almost instantaneous ports. I should be able to load into an area with only geometry and splash changes. The port screen should only hide the visual changes in the fulcrum. There is no reason to get texture information again from motherboard memory or the hard drive. Only texture changes updated by the server should need to be made, like player gear swaps. All unchanged values should be reliable, and should be used to update a port the same as normal frame updates.