Guild Wars 2

Even at the launch screen, GW2 takes 100% CPU and causes the fans to go crazy…this doesn’t seem right, as it really should not be doing a whole lot…

See attached screenshot.

Running latest Mountain Lion on Macbook Pro Retina 15"

As a side-note and as can be seen in the screenshot, all images and textures appear extremely pixelated on the Retina display and don’t scale properly…

Actually that’s using a relatively small amount.
There are a couple of VERY important things to point out here, the first is that it is not a 64bit program (note how other things in your list have (64 bit) next to them but Google Chrome and GW2 don’t). This means that it takes up a lot more resources for the computer to run, it’s why Google Chrome is such a massive resource hog.
Second important thing: You’re running Google Chrome at the same time. As I’ve just said, Google Chrome is a massive resource hog. Quit GC, it will put less strain on the system. In fact quit anything that isn’t GW2… You should never be running other programs (including all that stuff in your menu bar) while trying to play a game, you’ll create a massive bottleneck on the system.
Third, and most important thing: GW2 is a Cider port – it isn’t running natively on your system and is instead being run through a Cider wrapper – that means your computer is having to run the cider wrapper, and then try and run GW2 inside of that. That means a whole lot of things – like running a game designed with DirectX graphics on a system that can only use OpenGL.
(Also, GW2 will run the fans quite high when using the OSX client no matter what really… I have a high spec’d MBP and the only time the fans aren’t loud is when I turn the graphics down to low… But I play with max graphics so yeah.. xD)
(Having your sound turned up that loudly might also have an impact – this might just be me being crazy, but I always feel like the higher up I turn the sound the louder the fans run – possibly just my brain not coping well with all the excess noise and imagining it through)

Hope that sheds some light on the situation for you? But seriously, quitting all those other programs will help a lot.

I’m a software engineer myself and I’m well aware of certain limitations. I don’t need an Apple genius-bar response telling me I should close all my programs before running another program; my MBP Retina isn’t made in 1996 with 16MB RAM running Windows 95.

The overhead of processing a 32 bit program in a 64 bit environment is negligible in this context, and not reason for the CPU usage to spike up to 100% when there’s nothing but a sprite shown in a window. Hell, the game uses less CPU (roughly 50%) when it’s loaded at the character selection screen. Also, I’m sure even a 32 bit Cider port of the launcher won’t need to use all the address space of 4GB of RAM (it’s only using 193MB) – so your advice of me closing Chrome (using a few hundred MB of RAM and nearly 0% CPU) in this context is moot.

I’m not complaining about frame rates, so I don’t care if I have Chrome running in the background. Point is, I haven’t even loaded any graphics or processor-intensive things with the game yet, so it shouldn’t be hogging 100% CPU. By your argument, all cider programs and the likes should run 100%+ CPU.

Doesn’t your processor have a quad core? 25% out of a grand total of 400% isn’t too bad, but I agree, it really shouldn’t be using that much on the login screen.

I know during game play, my MBP late 2011 runs around 200% and spikes my men usage up to about 2gb or more at times. I typically run with all other programs closed (other than a few finder windows and activity monitor), but that is only out of hakittenrome used to drag me down significantly, especially after being open for a long time or with many tabs open. When I ran with 4gb that would max out my system leaving me with about 10mb… Yes MB, of free memory, I’d have about nearly 2gb of inactive (blue on pie chart, my system never relinquished it oddly) and 2 gb active used and my game would lag and frame rate spike like nobody’s business, forcing me to purge after every 1-2 hours of game play.

If I’m to understand correctly, the cider port isn’t really optimised to maximise the use of multiple cores just yet, but it is beta, so odd memory and CPU usage is understandable, but inconvenient. Maybe it will run better someday, if they ever develop a native client.

I’d love to hear a devs take on why our loading screen starts the system resource hogging before we’re even in game.

Yeah, it’s 25% out of 4 cores (8 with Hyper Threading). Memory being spiked isn’t my concern either. I have 8GB RAM (lowest for Retina), and that’s plenty for most things – it’s not like I play this a lot here on this laptop for it to be caching that much data into memory anyway.

But yeah, 100% CPU usage (on any core) for a launcher screen is WAY too much.

And yeah, I realize this whole thing is beta…but still a bug nonetheless – so I don’t expect too much attention given to it; but good to still report it.

Absolutely! I’m hoping Ashley keeps moonlighting on our forum so (with any luck) she can report them to the powers that be and maybe get a fix out there for us some day.

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32010
The 100% usage on the updater is actually a known issue with Wine as well, (Cider is built on Wine or something like that, so it’s pretty much the same thing, the difference being that Wine is OpenSource and Cider is managed by a company -transgaming-)
Since nobody on Wine really paid attention to it or tried to fix it I don’t think there is much we forum users can do. The people on the Wine site are well versed in Wine wrappers and most certainly know more about how it all runs >.>

The one thing I did notice is that running GW2 with a -dx9single command seems to reduce the CPU usage of the updater. I’ll let you know how it works IN game and see if that actually fixes any performance issues.

I know when my game runs it usually runs at 200~210% CPU, which doesn’t really bother me… It runs fine.

I’ve even run it while having photoshop cs6, dream weaver and illustrator going, plus a safari browser window with 5-10 tabs and was still functional… Though not recommended. But yeah, it just seems this thing doesn’t really know how to manage multiple cores very well. But it’s playable.

Kyllaa.1385:

I know when my game runs it usually runs at 200~210% CPU, which doesn’t really bother me… It runs fine.

I’ve even run it while having photoshop cs6, dream weaver and illustrator going, plus a safari browser window with 5-10 tabs and was still functional… Though not recommended. But yeah, it just seems this thing doesn’t really know how to manage multiple cores very well. But it’s playable.

That’s because it doesn’t manage multiple cores at all >.<. Pretty sure it is a single core program (party because it can only emulate 32 bit windows).
You said your computer has 8GB RAM I believe? That explains you be able to run so many things at once (partly). GW2 is 32bit and so can’t make use of more than 3GB of RAM, so you have 5GB of RAM that is free for use by the system/other programs.

Ok, unfortunately the dx9single command is not a fix for the CPU issues. I’ve checked and my own CPU usage for GW2’s launcher is only 14% regardless. Is this possibly a NVIDIA specific issue? Can others check the CPU usage and their graphics cards?

That’s quite possible. I do, however, have issues with 10.7 not relinquishing inactive memory. When I ran 4gb, I would frequently run out of memory after 1-2 hours of play degrading the game performance to 4fps and stutter/lag constantly (10mb free memory that would dip to 4mb). My only fix was a purge. Hence my now 8gb lol. So, true, it’s probably the 8gb of men that makes my extreme multitasking possible, but even with all that, I was only using about 250% of my whole CPU. But anyway, lol, we don’t program this stuff, so I guess we’ll never know ;p

MysticHLE.7160:

Yeah, it’s 25% out of 4 cores (8 with Hyper Threading). Memory being spiked isn’t my concern either. I have 8GB RAM (lowest for Retina), and that’s plenty for most things – it’s not like I play this a lot here on this laptop for it to be caching that much data into memory anyway.

But yeah, 100% CPU usage (on any core) for a launcher screen is WAY too much.

And yeah, I realize this whole thing is beta…but still a bug nonetheless – so I don’t expect too much attention given to it; but good to still report it.

This happens on the PC as well and it has since beta 1. There was a discussion somewhere about it rendering kicking in on the launcher.