Guild Wars 2

Don’t you think that if it were this simple to fix the issues with the Cider client it would have already been done?

This doesn’t necessarily fix things, but it helps. This particular tweak just fixes that fact that cider doesn’t care how much ram your video card has. My iMac with 512MB of RAM has cider hardcoding it to 256MB.

Just saying thanks. Had a screen freeze problem and couldn’t play. This adjustment for some reason worked well for my system. So far no problems. Thanks much!

How about odd values? My Intel HD Graphics 3000 has 384mb VRAM. Can it handle that value? Or is it only 128, 256, 512 etc?

Briix.6872:

How about odd values? My Intel HD Graphics 3000 has 384mb VRAM. Can it handle that value? Or is it only 128, 256, 512 etc?

Install 8GB of RAM and it will go up to 512MB.

What, seriously? And how big of a change will this make? Is it noticeable to use 512MB and not 256MB?

It was very noticeable for me when I did it a while back. Currently, I think I’m getting better performance with this client than I am when I use bootcamp to boot into Windows 7. Though that probably is due to the fact that I can set the video settings to Best Appearance in Windows, so it’s doing more work.

This helped my game run considerably more smooth! thanks for the info, it bumpped me up a lot going from 256/128 to 1024/512, everything renders quite a bit more refined now!

Running so much smoother now, gone from medium settings to max while getting about 10fps increase as well. Much appreciated!

If I got a FPS increase it would be around 5FPS but the important thing is that the game runs smoother now which allowed me to turn up a couple of settings.

Implemented and works as expected. Strange that this isn’t already a part of the file but the results people are posting make sense. Utilization of the buffer means everything is “smoother” as it is already in working memory. As far as what I’m seeing it’s about a 8fps increase running on 15" MBPr stock config.

Well, it didn’t not work I think I got a bit of a boost on my 2009 MBP 13".

Thanks so much for this tip!

This MUST be an automatic thing, and if cider still doesn’t do that (incredible) this option should be configurable from the game.

Do you know if the mac client will see some official improvements?

I have a question, does anyone have their map not showing fully? I have attached a screenshot of whats going on with mine when I use this configuration. I don’t like that my map is doing that, so I’ve switched back to the original configuration. However, I have seen a marked improvement in fps (especially in lion’s arch) and would really love to use this configuration. I know I sound nit-picky, but when I go into full map mode I don’t expect it to act like I’m still using the mini-map. Don’t know if it makes much of a difference, but I’m working off a Mid-2011 iMac, Mountain Lion, 4GB ram, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512MB, 1920×1080 display. Any help would be appreciated.

@otherworld.4012

I see the map correctly, it must be something else. Are you sure before it was ok?

Yeah, its completely fine with the original configuration file that came with the game, it just does it when I try this one. I just wanted to see if it was just me, or if other people were having the same problem. I have no problem using the original, I just liked the increase in fps I got with this file and hoping there was a solution. No big deal

Could you test something?
In the settings there’s an option to change the size of the UI. Try both larger and smaller settings and test if it has an effect on the map display.

Also, instead of switching out the whole file with the downloaded one, try if the problem still persists if you just change the one line in your own file. It’s not too difficult, you can open it with TextEdit, it’s really just a text file.
Of course make sure to have a backup

Probably a stupid question, but I cannot the folder or the file required here. I tried the search My Mac. I can find Library>Application Support> but there is no folder for Guildwars 2.
I have 256MB RAM on the graphics card, and hoped that the customized config file would improve the performance.

Any help is appreciated.

There are 2 /Library folders on a Mac system, one in your user folder, and one that is hidden by default. OP may have linked the wrong one.
Open Finder, click on “Go to” while holding alt/option key. You should see a second /Library folder pop up in the menu. That’s the one.

If you have a card with 256MB, there’s nothing for you to change though, that’s the default setting.

And this one?
“AGPVertexRam” = “128”

ikir.4923:

And this one?
“AGPVertexRam” = “128”

I believe that should be half the amount of your VRAM, so if you have 1024 AGP should be set to 512.

OK thanks so much, i’m going to try!

Thanks Naqaj, that solved my problem. I will keep this in mind as I am about to upgrade my RAM from 4 to 8GB and read on the forum that this should also give me a higher VRAM. Is that the case?

florida.7540:

Thanks Naqaj, that solved my problem. I will keep this in mind as I am about to upgrade my RAM from 4 to 8GB and read on the forum that this should also give me a higher VRAM. Is that the case?

If you use the Intel Integrated Graphics then yes, it will go from 384MB to 512MB.

Thanks for creating these. I am sad to report that the performance on my Mid-2011 Mac Mini’s Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 8GB RAM was unchanged, though I did suffer the strange partial-map issue expressed earlier in the thread. But I’m glad to see these kinds of efforts are making progress for others.

so what should my ram and cpu usage be at for this?

dang, i need to clarify, what is Vram? I’ve got 16 gigs of ram on this mac. but i don’t know if that’s the same

Hollow.9758:

dang, i need to clarify, what is Vram? I’ve got 16 gigs of ram on this mac. but i don’t know if that’s the same

VRAM is dedicated Video RAM, the 16GB you have installed is System Memory and is not the same unless you use the Intel Integrated Video and then it “Shares” 384MB or 512MB of the System RAM.

Thank you for posting the tweak file as I saw in increase of 10+ fps & smoother gameplay. FPS on max setting is close 43+ fps, but usually set things to medium for 65+ fps. Usually play the game in windowed mode.

The default:
“VideoRam” = “128”
“AGPVertexRam” = “64”

Increased to:
“VideoRam” = “1024”
“AGPVertexRam” = “512”

Using Macbook Po late Oct 2011 with 17’, 8GB mem. HD 3000 & ATI 6770.

I find it very odd that the default was set so low at first. Oh-well, I’m happier now with the change.

otherworld.4012:

Yeah, its completely fine with the original configuration file that came with the game, it just does it when I try this one. I just wanted to see if it was just me, or if other people were having the same problem. I have no problem using the original, I just liked the increase in fps I got with this file and hoping there was a solution. No big deal

Diff’ing against the original config file, I went through setting by setting. It appears this line is what’s causing it.

"FBOBackBuffer" = "Y"

Simply change “Y” to “N” and you should get the map back to normal.

However, this may reduce the amount of FPS gain you were seeing using this configuration before. At least when you work with the Map. However, if there are other areas of the code that render-to-textures, you’ll also see FPS drops there. It is likely this covers anything dealing with the “interface” or pieces that float on top of the actual 3D world (names, targeting circles, buttons, inventory windows, etc.)

Highly Technical Talking Out My Rear-End as to Why You’ll See an FPS Drop

Since only the map seems to have these symptoms, I’m going to talk about that. However, considering the map uses the back-buffer to render, it’s highly likely that you can substitute “inventory window”, “hud”, “hot buttons”, or any other bit of the interface here.

From what I recall from the one OpenGL class I took in college and what I can find online, this option forces GW2’s calls to render in the back-buffer to go into a Frame Buffer Object (FBO), then reinterprets any call to transfer the back-buffer to a destination object into binding the FBO to the intended destination.

All this has to do with how the map is rendered. I’m guessing that GW2 renders the map into the back-buffer, then takes the results and moves them across the bus to become a texture, then renders that texture into a surface on your screen. This is nice because you can render/scale/zoom with textures more easily while keeping your actual world rendering and updated in the background.

FBO’s are faster because you eliminate that transfer step that normally stalls the CPU. However, it appears that somehow the way the back-buffer is used by GW2 to render the map into a texture doesn’t jive well with how Cider creates the FBO. Likely, there’s some sort of call that limits what portion of the back-buffer is later transferred into your texture object while the FBO is just defaulted by Cider to be the size of your screen. That would match up with the symptoms.

I don’t want to be the bearer of the bad news but since I’m a software developer who writes applications for Mac OS X I do feel that it is necessary to shed some light onto this topic because there seems to be some confusion here.

Cider does not use the X11 driver because Mac OS X does not use X11. Instead it uses a Quartz-based driver. Quartz is the native graphics architecture that Mac OS X uses. This means that changing anything in the [x11drv] section does not have an impact on the GW2 client. I.e. changing the VideoRam setting to 32MB gives you the same FPS as changing it to 4096MB.

But why would you change the VideoRam setting to 32MB? To check whether it even has an impact on the client.

32MB is just enough to hold the frame buffer of the game on a 27 inch iMac. The frame buffer in turn consists of a front and a separate back buffer and both consume 28MB of VRAM which in turn means that only 2MB would be left available for textures and 2MB for shaders and geometry data. So the expectation here is that if this setting would be evaluated by the Cider graphics driver, that the game should either no longer run at all or if it runs then the majority of the screen should be black or covered with random colors. Neither is the case though and the game runs fine no matter what value you assign to the VideoRam setting.

Changing the Enable3D setting in the [macdrv] section on the other side, from 1 to 0 does have a very significant effect on the game since it no longer starts up when you do this. Changing the setting back to 1 makes the game work again. This is as expected because when you look into the [wine] section of the config file you’ll see that the GraphicsDriver setting is set to macdrv.

But why then would changing a setting that the game doesn’t use change the FPS in the game?

Because you are (a) looking at the FPS meter that is built into the game and because you do (b) not a proper performance comparison. The FPS meter in the game is not a performance measurement tool and it only gives an indication of where you are performance wise. It is good enough to give a general idea about the performance but it is not precise enough to do actual comparison between similar levels of performance. The in-game FPS meter tends to fluctuate a lot because it integrates only over a 1 second time span which is not enough to filter out changes in the CPU load caused by the game engine itself and that occur because of load changes in the background processes (there are always dozens of processes running in the background while you play). I.e. just logging into the game, going to an area where no other mobs or players are, looking right at a wall and just standing there while not using any abilities of the avatar causes the FPS to constantly change by around 10 FPS. Doing a 360 turn with the avatar and looking back onto the wall “improves” the FPS for a few minutes by up to 20 FPS.

So in short: if you want to measure performance improvements then you have to use a tool like Apple’s OpenGL Analyzer that is available for developers. You also need to make sure that you do the comparison on a freshly booted system to rule out any side effects from caching/other applications and you need to find a place in the game where there are no other mobs or players and where you can look onto something that triggers backside culling (this type of culling has nothing got to do with the culling problem in WvW – “culling” has multiple different meanings in software engineering) of anything that might be drawn in the distance (i.e. wall, tall hill, large tree). Otherwise those mobs or players will have an impact on the FPS value and thus the performance comparison.

Thanks for the explanation. I noticed the “GraphicsDriver” = “macdrv” line, and I was pretty sure the suggested modifications did no impact on my machine, but my graphics card is not very powerful, so I could not say for sure “it doesn’t change a thing” because maybe people with better cards could have real improvements.

Korval.2197:

I don’t want to be the bearer of the bad news but since I’m a software developer who writes applications for Mac OS X I do feel that it is necessary to shed some light onto this topic because there seems to be some confusion here.

If we’re confused how are we seeing better performance?

diabluz.2860:

Don’t you think that if it were this simple to fix the issues with the Cider client it would have already been done?

Not familiar with Transgaming, are you? We’d be lucky to see them produce something like this by 2015.

Thanks for this stuff, OP; my performance has increased drastically since installing this config file.

Tick Tock.9602:

Korval.2197:

I don’t want to be the bearer of the bad news but since I’m a software developer who writes applications for Mac OS X I do feel that it is necessary to shed some light onto this topic because there seems to be some confusion here.

If we’re confused how are we seeing better performance?

See the explanation in my previous post.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to have a faster Mac OS X version of GW2 just like anyone else here but as long as ArenaNet doesn’t develop a native client either in-house or by outsourcing it to a porting house, our options to improve the FPS are very limited short of buying a late 2012 or newer Mac.

What you can do to improve the FPS are:

1) Go through the “Render Sampling” settings. It is by default “Native” which may not be a good choice for your graphics card. Try “Subsampling” and “Supersampling” instead. One of those setting might give you more FPS.

2) Run the game in windowed mode by checking the Window checkbox in the preferences dialog. Then make the window smaller than the screen. The FPS that you can achieve is directly dependent on the amount of pixels that the game needs to draw. Consequently a lower screen resolution or running the game in a window that is smaller than the screen will give you better FPS.

3) Reduce the quality of reflections. Reflections require multi-pass rendering which lowers the FPS.

4) Reduce the quality of shadows. Same problem as the previous one.

5) Turn off “Depth Blur”.

6) Turn off “Vertical Sync” if you are usually below 60 frames per second while out in the open world. Having that option turned on if you do not get more than 60 FPS consistently can significantly cut down your FPS. I.e. if you hover around 50 FPS then turning v-sync on will cut your FPS to 30 because the LCD screen is refreshed 60 times per second and 60 is not evenly divisible by 50.

But even if you reach more than 70 FPS you will still not necessarily be happy with the Mac OS X version of GW2. I’ve been running the game on a late-2012 27 inch iMac with the GTX 680MX graphics card with 2GB VRAM and while the FPS is good, the responsiveness of the client to user input is bad. This is most noticeable when doing a simple 360 degree turn with the avatar or in WvW. Turning the camera is very jerky compared to the Windows version. Although note that the Windows client does in fact have the same problem but it is by far not as noticeable there.

Whatever the game does is in any case not helped by the fact that the Cider port has to translate Direct3D shader programs and API calls into OpenGL shader programs and API calls at runtime and that the DX9 API design is very different from OpenGL. The only good thing is that DX11 is design-wise closer to OpenGL. But then GW2 is still stuck in DX9 land so that doesn’t help either.

Korval.2197:

But even if you reach more than 70 FPS you will still not necessarily be happy with the Mac OS X version of GW2. I’ve been running the game on a late-2012 27 inch iMac with the GTX 680MX graphics card with 2GB VRAM and while the FPS is good, the responsiveness of the client to user input is bad. This is most noticeable when doing a simple 360 degree turn with the avatar or in WvW. Turning the camera is very jerky compared to the Windows version. Although note that the Windows client does in fact have the same problem but it is by far not as noticeable there.

This has everything to do with how the Cider wrapper handles system memory.

Korval.2197:

Whatever the game does is in any case not helped by the fact that the Cider port has to translate Direct3D shader programs and API calls into OpenGL shader programs and API calls at runtime and that the DX9 API design is very different from OpenGL. The only good thing is that DX11 is design-wise closer to OpenGL. But then GW2 is still stuck in DX9 land so that doesn’t help either.

Again, this is the wrapper’s fault. Transgaming has left the wrapper where it is for over a year and a half now (if not longer). No significant engine changes have been made to it in a very long time; ask any City of Heroes player about Transgaming. You’ll be lucky to see any major updates to the wrapper in the next leap year.

Korval.2197:

I don’t want to be the bearer of the bad news but since I’m a software developer who writes applications for Mac OS X I do feel that it is necessary to shed some light onto this topic because there seems to be some confusion here.

Cider does not use the X11 driver because Mac OS X does not use X11. Instead it uses a Quartz-based driver. Quartz is the native graphics architecture that Mac OS X uses. This means that changing anything in the [x11drv] section does not have an impact on the GW2 client. I.e. changing the VideoRam setting to 32MB gives you the same FPS as changing it to 4096MB.

This would be true if the performance remain the same… after editing the VRAM line my performance increased A LOT.

How much is “a lot”? How did you measure it?

Korval.2197:

Cider does not use the X11 driver because Mac OS X does not use X11.

Your logic is flawed.

Cider is based on Cedega which was Transgaming’s proprietary fork of Wine. Wine uses X11.

Yeah but X11 XQuartz is not installed by DEFAULT on 10.8 mountain lion:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293

You can get it here if you like:

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

That has nothing to do with whether or not changing the X11 settings has any effect on performance. I don’t have Xquartz / X11 installed. Why would changing those settings affect me at all?

I merely replied with where you could get it, calm down Chief. I don’t know if you have X11 installed or not.

I’d would try these system tweaks, i really want too. i’m just pretty sure i’ll mess something up.

I do have Xquartz installed. is that why I had a dramatic change when adjusting the VideoRam setting?

Hollow.9758:

I’d would try these system tweaks, i really want too. i’m just pretty sure i’ll mess something up.

Mess what up? If it doesn’t work you can dump the whole Guild Wars 2 folder in the trash and the game will build a new one for you.

vince.5937:

Korval.2197:

But even if you reach more than 70 FPS you will still not necessarily be happy with the Mac OS X version of GW2. I’ve been running the game on a late-2012 27 inch iMac with the GTX 680MX graphics card with 2GB VRAM and while the FPS is good, the responsiveness of the client to user input is bad. This is most noticeable when doing a simple 360 degree turn with the avatar or in WvW. Turning the camera is very jerky compared to the Windows version. Although note that the Windows client does in fact have the same problem but it is by far not as noticeable there.

This has everything to do with how the Cider wrapper handles system memory.

There is no need to speculate since we can use the OpenGL profiler and Instruments to find out what causes the jerky behavior.

This is the test case:

a) Log into the game and make sure that you are not in the Mount Maelstrom playfield.

b) Waypoint to Bard’s Waypoint in the Mount Maelstrom playfield.

c) turn your character via the keyboard by 360 degrees.

Observed result: very jerky movement, lots of dropped frames.

According to Instruments the CPU load was between 340% and 390% while we were turning (400% is the max value for the 4 core CPU I’m running this on)- double the amount before we started the turn. The stack trace probes indicate a high amount of texture uploads (glCompressdTextImage2D() and glTexImage2D()) plus shader compile and link operations plus a lot of framebuffer flushes.

The OpenGL profiler gives us more details: while turning, the game has uploaded 1,600 (!) compressed textures and 138 uncompressed textures to the GPU. For each texture load operation the pixel store attributes and the texture environment parameters were changed. 20 pixel and vertex shaders were compiled and linked and lots of drawing happened.

Now it is clear what is going on and why the same problem exists on the Windows side, though less pronounced. The game generates an extremely high amount of textures even if most of the view is blocked by a mountain right in front of the avatar. The uploads happen in a way that is inefficient for OpenGL (state changes are bad) and a number of shaders had to be translated from HLSL to GLSL, compiled and linked.

To make this easier to see, assume that one texture upload takes 1ms. At 1,600 textures this means we spend 1.6 seconds just in uploading textures. No wonder that turning is so slow.

vince.5937:

Korval.2197:

Whatever the game does is in any case not helped by the fact that the Cider port has to translate Direct3D shader programs and API calls into OpenGL shader programs and API calls at runtime and that the DX9 API design is very different from OpenGL. The only good thing is that DX11 is design-wise closer to OpenGL. But then GW2 is still stuck in DX9 land so that doesn’t help either.

Again, this is the wrapper’s fault. Transgaming has left the wrapper where it is for over a year and a half now (if not longer). No significant engine changes have been made to it in a very long time; ask any City of Heroes player about Transgaming. You’ll be lucky to see any major updates to the wrapper in the next leap year.

There is no magic pixie dust that could be applied to the Direct3D -> OpenGL translation problem that would make it much faster. Translating the API calls and HLSL shaders to GLSL shaders is costly no matter who implements the cross-compiler.

Canada Steve.8593:

Korval.2197:

Cider does not use the X11 driver because Mac OS X does not use X11.

Your logic is flawed.

Cider is based on Cedega which was Transgaming’s proprietary fork of Wine. Wine uses X11.

The goal of the Cider project is to provide a Win32 implementation on top of Mac OS X. The goal of the Wine project is to provide a Win32 implementation on top of POSIX compatible systems. POSIX systems have traditionally been using X11 as their graphics interface while Mac OS X uses the proprietary Quartz architecture instead.

Consequently Cider uses a Quartz-based driver instead of the X11 driver that Wine uses.

If Cider would use X11 then the GW2 app would have to come with an X server since there is no X11 installed by default on Mac OS X. But looking through the GW2 app package shows that there is no X11 server. Instead we find a library called “libquartz”. Okay maybe Transgaming went to the troubles of creating an in-process X11 server that is linked into the wineserver or the cider process. So let’s check with Instruments: nope, none of the threads references anything X11 related.

Looking through the cider process (the thing that gets started when you double click GW2) we see references to Cocoa (the native windowing/app API), we also see references to CGL calls to set up OpenGL pixel formats and contexts (they wouldn’t be there if this thing would use X11) and we see references to “macdrv”.

So considering that you can not rely on the presence of a X11 server on a Mac and the fact that there is no X11 server built into the Cider port, the question is how something that does not exist on the machine can draw something on the screen. That’s a bit mysterious.

Finally, changing the GraphicsDriver entry in the config file from “macdrv” to “x11drv” causes the game to stop working – it no longer starts up with that change. Reverting the change to “macdrv” makes it work again.

Rie.6789:

I do have Xquartz installed. is that why I had a dramatic change when adjusting the VideoRam setting?

What does dramatic mean? For me dramatic would be an increase of 40 to 50 FPS. Anything around 10 FPS is ignoreable because that is the amount by which the in-game FPS meter fluctuates over time. Up to 20 FPS is debatable since you can produce that increase by turning your avatar by 360 degrees in the right spot. It’s also not clear how the change was measured.

Dramatic for me, meant I no longer had delays when moving around. Even in very crowded areas, I don’t have moments when the screen stops and then starts moving again. before I tweaked that, I had that happen quite often, even when the area was relatively open.

Rie.6789:

Dramatic for me, meant I no longer had delays when moving around. Even in very crowded areas, I don’t have moments when the screen stops and then starts moving again. before I tweaked that, I had that happen quite often, even when the area was relatively open.

Agreed.