I experience utterly abysmal draw distances for shadows in general and especially high quality shadows. I also experience utterly abysmal LOD (Stuff changes in detail short distances away from me, not as noticeable as the shadows though)
Both settings are set to Ultra.
Is this normal? The Shadow Draw Distance reminds me of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 & Borderlands 2 I can create/provide videos of the problem if need be, it isn’t specific to any particular area in the game either (But there are some areas where it is much more noticeable).
Windows 7
Asus P6T Motherboard
Geforce 560Ti 2048MB Video Card
Intel i7 920 @ 2.66GHZ
6GB DDR3 RAM
Auzentech XFI Forte Sound Card
considering stock speed of modern CPU is now 3.5GHZ and around 4.5 GHZ clocked this could be your main issue.
also the i7 920 is an ancient CPU by todays standards : ( so as a result the game is lowering it all to compensate for the very slow CPU.
Does this game even feature dynamic graphical quality scaling tied to general performance? If it doesn’t then hardware shouldn’t have an effect on anything other then frame rate and/or the game crashing from a lack of RAM/Video Memory…
I have been thinking of upgrading motherboard & CPU, just need to DO it which is the issue. I hate spending large amounts of money I’m thinking of the Intel 4770 CPU (Not K as I don’t overclock and the K model lacks features) and ASUS Sabertooth 87 or Deluxe motherboard. Sabertooth comes with longer warranty and more rigorously tested components but lacks the absolute bleeding edge in technology.
Yeah, the dynamic shadow render distance is some of the worst I’ve seen in a video game. High and medium have the shadows showing up literally in front of your character. Ultra is only marginally better. It’s been that way since the beginning. It’s made even more apparent by the fact that the static shadows are just giant blobs that look nothing like the dynamic shadow, so when the fade in the shape changes completely.
There is absolutely nothing we can do about it, either. No amount of hardware upgrades on our end will fix the issue. ANet really needs to overhaul their graphics engine, but they’ll never do it. Costs too much money and takes too much time.
There are plenty of other MMOs with similar issues (Rift, WoW) but others that have great render distance on shadows (TSW, FFXIV:ARR).
I’m having one issue with Shadow at Ultra that I drop FPS every 2 seconds from 60 to 45 repeatly. But on High, it stays constant 60FPS. (Normal map like outside of LA without anyone around.)
I think there is a bug.
I never had issue with Ultra before one of the patch in January or February totally kill it.
I can create/provide videos of the problem if need be, it isn’t specific to any particular area in the game either (But there are some areas where it is much more noticeable).