I accidently stumbled across an interesting fact(?) the other evening whilst participating in the [new] Shatterer fight. I had spent significantly longer in the event as a result of only 8-10 people turning up (and no we didnt win ^^ but kudos to those people on blacktide who joined me in spending 2 hours trying!) and as such I believe that this contributed to the glitch I am about to describe:
At some point I became trapped in a crystal prison and fell through the bottom of the map…
…Not necessarily unusual?
Well, upon falling through the map I found myself swimming in a body of water which spanned, for what I could tell, the entire zone. To my knowledge there are no bodies of water directly in that part of the map. As such, this got me wondering if there was any possibility that some of the ‘seemingly random’ framerate issues etc are not just a result of hardware optimisation but also as a result of map architecture ‘optimisation’.
I have read about this before regarding Crysis 2: Upon enabling DX11 content, most specifically tesselation, there are masive performance hits in that game which are not proportional to what you see on-screen as the engine is applying the enhanced graphics effects on items which are technically in the scene but not visible to the player.
(Yes I know GW2 is DX9, but the principle is the same)
So, consider water reflections etc, if set to ‘all’ are there actually large bodies of water to which these effects are being applied and hence using resources (reflecting that oh-so-pretty ‘underzone’) even if they are not apparent to the gamer? This would certainly account for these issues and as such changing other settings wont make the slightest bit of difference.
Im sorry if this has been raised before but I was wondering if Anet would be able to elaborate on whether these quirks are known [for a given game region] as it would, at the very least account for some of the frame rate issues giving those people affected a better overview on which settings to change and the benefits to expect, especially when different zones will obviously necessitate different action. Its by no means a solution but I think the forum community might appreciate more than an ‘update your drivers’ response now and then, especially seeing how volitile a large number of the forum comunity seem at this time.
P.S. Im playing on an i5 oc to 4.2ghz (quad core), with a radeon HD7870 and most certainly have a playable framerate with some zones hitting 110+fps (circa 45fps in the shatterer zone during the aforementioned event) with all settings to the max and as such please dont see this post as me complaining – Just putting ideas out there seeing as forums are for feedback etc and not just a medium for venting anger about the Lost Shores (which incidently was amazing and played as well as was expected at around 30fps with the above rig on 5mbs broadband – EU).
