Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’m just wondering if GW2 will make an update to allow more usage of the gpu then the cpu, It’s kinda frustrating that most games are reliant on GPU usage and GW2 does not have that kind of performance. I mean the game is visually beautiful so what is the reasoning behind not allowing a better GPU usage in game?

It’s not like they went out of their way to make to prevent the GPU from being the primary limiter of performance rather than the CPU. It simply ended up that way. The decisions they make early on in engine development, which they outlined in a reddit post last year, made the game engine scale poorly when many players are present.

Which is likely why PvP and Raids are limited to 10 players in total because beyond that the main thread becomes the limiting factor rather than the rendering thread which the performance of the GPU would impact.

Also most other games are built using game engines that is also sold to 3rd parties so you have market forces driving continuous improvements, cross platform support, multiprocessor scaling, and multiple API support. ANet rolled their own, an improved version of their original GW engine. Building a game engine from scratch is costly in terms of time and manpower (which is equal to $$) and licensing an existing game engine costs isn’t cheap either and is an exercise in figuring out if you can work around the engine’s limitations when you want to add something the the engine designer didn’t anticipate.

People complaining about why games do not use up their shiny GPU’s full potential shows misconception of how much GPU affects the performance with MMO games, and a lack of understanding of how game engines works.

CPU bottleneck is a common limiter of any MMO, the CPU needs to translate and calculate players coordinates in the visible screen, on skill and spell trajectory, etc on the fly, so the more players on your screen, the slower your game runs, and there is also a limit to how much the game CPU can process before passing on instructions onto the GPU for rendering.

Where as GPU handles the rendering and physics engine, in which physics engines is rather light in most MMO, so it will never hit its full potential.

A good example to compare against is Black Desert Online.

BDO have a ‘full suite’ physics engine built into it, but because not many people play it, the load on the CPU is very light, so GPU doesn’t need to wait for a long time for the instructions to be received from the CPU; and because of the environment graphics that needs to be renders is very high resolution, and physics engine itself is already very heavy, the GPU will be constantly 80%+ usage.
But when their world boss battle starts, the game slows down so much due to the number of players there and constantly spamming skills (very fast actioned), the game becomes so unplayable that you find GW2’s world boss battles to be playable on a totally different level.

Yes, GW2’s engine has its limitations, but there is also the physical limitations of how many instructions the CPU can process.

It also demonstrates the community base of the game, that GW2 is truly running with a healthy player population.

As any mmo, mechanics and scenarios involving tons of players are the focus, while visuals come to a second place. By nature, this type of games rely a lot more on the cpu while being light on the gpu.

As Gw2, it is in fact one of the best optimized mmo out there. This is a thing any traditional mmo player will tell you. There’s no game out there that can manage such massive fights as boss fights or ZvZ in EB while keeping aceptable-good framerate.

Ok, maybe in huge fight’s with all map at one place we can talk about mmo factor, but lets make its clear. Game engine old, directx 9 old too. There is nothing to defend. I had GTX 1080 and 40 fps in LA or Aerodrom with 20 ppl afking around. Huge fight, lot of ppl? Why i had 60 fps with vsync in ankor fight’s in TESO with 30-40 ppl around or FF14 word events. Coz they run on directx 11. Coz they use my graphic card, while gw barely run coolers on it =_=
But anet spend few years for 64bit client to solve out of memory crashes in word bosses and huge events, so we need to wait few years more…
I even ok with 40 fps in city but look at it, i upgraded my rigs to have graphic glitches in 4 years old game…i need to turn off shadows to solve it…I finished new Deus ex optimized for AMD on Nvidia card without any issue, but i have graphic glitches here.

Game developers have to take into consideration so the game can also runs on older computers.

Just because you think there is nothing happening doesn’t mean that it’s actually true. Any city in Gw2 still requires a lot of cpu power. Partially because NPCs aren’t stationary like most mmo out there, partially because in cities combat isn’t disabled and boons and skills still work, and partially because gw2 has an insane drawing distance and cities are usually open areas with tons of objects and things going on.

Then, you’re not making any point by only mentioning the gpu. Once you reach a certain level of gpu performance, the gpu becomes one of the least deciding factors in performance. And that point is rather low, a gtx 960 or r9 380 have plenty of performance to play this game at 1440p ultra +60fps.
Once you reach this level, cpu and its frequency, ram frecuency, pcie speed and optimal settings are way more important than the gpu.
Without mentioning them you aren’t making any point.

Btw, glitches are exclusively a driver/gpu issue. Gw2 has nothing to do with it and Nvidia is the only one to blame, specially with its historical issue horror with Gw2.

Performance when in crowded places, like wvw zergs for example, are pretty much server limited. There’s only so much you can do to your own system before you hit a brick wall that you can’t influence any further.

Man i had i7 6700k working on boost speed 4.4Ghz its most be enough for this. And directx 11 will use more gpu instead cpu for some stuff, and directx 12 can even use all threads on i7 not only half. It’s could increase performance dramatically. And i talking about old engine and old directx 9 which cant utilize all new rig’s perfomance, CPU including. So i dont see your point here.

And yes TESO have npc walking around, big city’s and other stuff and 60 fps, can be lower while HDD loading but if you use SSD no lags at all. But i want to play gw, thats why i and other ppl posting all this here. Coz we want push dev’s to improve they game.

And i had problems with gw2 on this gpu. And only with gw2 so far. So yes i will blame gw devs with they shiny caves and shiny House in Gendarran Fields(was fixed) and now for this issues. If its gpu/driver issue then dev’s need to forward information to nvidia about it, not i. I submited support ticket with screens, video and all info they asked, i posted on forum i did even more then user must do in this situation.

And game developers always has something to do with any issue between they game and user hardware coz its they game , they code and they writed how it interacts with each other. The question is whether they do something or not.

On my machine, upgrading from GTX 560 kitten GTX 1060 only allowed me to improve graphic quality.
Performance is the same as before.
So GPU is not useless.
Still, reading that gw is the best optimized mmo out there made me laugh quite hard.
I litterally played a ton of mmo (over a hundred).
Gw2 is indeed one of the best, but clearly not the best.
I never (i mean it, NEVER) experienced lower fps in big fights in realms online (big fights being the only good thing in that other game).

I believe the system to use more resources for viewing vistas is good.

What i’d love to get is an equivalent of what they did in perfect world :
a big button to reduce visual quality on the fly in player crowded areas.

Not everyone can get OP computers at home.

That said, gw2 remains my favorite game right now (i’m even thinking about trying the first gw).

Nice, my first and second graphic card names somehow got melted into kitten. Why ?

Just noticed while rereading my post that important words were eaten.
Gw2 is indeed one of the best optimized mmo, but clearly not the best optimized mmo.