Guild Wars 2

After I saw the mac beta client release and did a victory dance, I’ve been trying to figure out the best bang for the FPS buck graphics/game tweaks.

Please share any graphics/sound/game tweaks that you did to get more FPS.

spec:
retina MBP, OS X 10.8.2, 2.3Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, GT 650M

Full Screen – 1680 × 1050
Refresh – default
Frame Limiter – 60
Interface – Normal

Advanced Settings:
Preset – start with auto detect

Animation – Medium
Anti-Aliasing – None
Environment – Low
LOD – Low
Reflections – None
Textures – Low
Render Sampling – Native
Shadows – None
Shaders – Low
PostP – None

Didn’t check boxes – Best Texture Filter, Depth Blur, or Vertical Sync

Sound: Can have an affect on FPS
Sound Quality – 30%
Music Interval – 70%
Mixing Buffer Size: Lowest Latency

FPS: 30-35

I’m VERY grateful for the mac client, and realize it will be optimized over time, but thought if we share tweaks and game settings, we can self optimize.

A lot of folks also say to reset the SMC, which in an intel MBP amounts to basically a shutdown, disconnect AC power for 15 seconds, reconnect, wait 5 seconds and power on.

I noticed after installing GW2, I received a “Macbook Pro Retina EFI update 1.0 Display Issues” but it seems to be fixes for HDMI out.

If your performance is currently above 30 FPS, why do you care? Your eyes and brain can’t perceive much difference above that.

Seriously; people spend too much time watching a silly FPS number and not enough time just enjoying the game.

The previous comment is absolute tripe and has been Scientifically proven many many many times. If you look in to it, BBC has been testing with 300 (three hundred) FPS broadcasting for their sports scenes because in rapid action sports scenes the current broadcasting framerates just aren’t cutting it on large display areas.

If you seriously believe you can see NO difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS (simple test) then you, sir, are either a genetic anomaly or you just haven’t tested. Don’t believe the hype, test things for yourself.

As for Mac client tweaks – I have been tweaking with mine and will report back if I find any specific options which help a lot. Although if you’re playing on a mac laptop, you may want to install smcFanControl (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol) and crank the fans up to max before you start playing. Fighting high temperatures back down is difficult, keeping the hardware cool in the first place means your GPU never gets hot enough to start dropping frames and underclocking in the first place.

Hope this helps!

On Bootcamp, I play everything high 1920×1200 with 30-40 fps. On Mac, I am forced to go down to 1680 × 1050 med/low to get a slightly lower performance.

chrisaw.9763:

If you seriously believe you can see NO difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS (simple test) then you, sir, are either a genetic anomaly or you just haven’t tested. Don’t believe the hype, test things for yourself.

In all seriousness, this depends on a game. For some games, going from 30 to 60 offers almost no improvement. Some other games look choppy even with 60. In my experience, GW2 at 35 fps and high settings looks and plays much better than GW2 at 60fps and low settings.

Be very careful when quoting scientific experiments, as the context may wary greatly – whether humans perceive an image change or not greatly depends on the context. For normal video imagery (with fluent changes in the picture) you don’t need much. Movies are in 24 fps – and they look good because the frames include motion blur. I am looking forward to seeing the Hobbit though