Guild Wars 2

Would be nice of Anet to comment on the optimization problems….

The engine would need some pretty heavy reworking to have any noticeable improvement. Easier said than done but it severely limits the direction they’ve been steering things (mass wvw and DE pve) It doesn’t scale past 2 logical cores and being only a DX9 renderer it has its limits where that’s concerned.

I’m running a 4770 @ 4.5, SLI Gtx 780s @ 2560 × 1440 with super sampling. No vsync. I run with no reflections/shadows as they are very cpu limited and can even tank this system in pretty calm circumstances (forget any kind of high player count with shadows… pre pve culling change, maw could still drop me into the mid teens even with effect lod) I also run animation on low to disable the smoke particle effects on fire in some areas (notably COF/Fire shaman world event) In these areas Animation medium+ instantly halves the framerate (from 60 constant to sub 30) The particle system scales with resolution but not with gpu power so it can be stupidly taxing on higher resolutions The dredge fractal at the gate bomb section is the worst I’ve seen performance, single digit frame rates when all the dredge are spaming their particle heavy attacks.

Even with these settings 25-30fps is a common occurrance in pve and wvw zergs. The engine so cpu bottlenecked that super sampling has ‘0’ effect on performance with this hardware (ie anywhere with subpar performance performs the same with or without supersampled output) , it just renders at double the resolution with reduced aliasing… The gpus are just bored.. they normally are around 20-35@ usage. The majority of the resource demanding settings don’t put much load on gpus in the first place. I was running 680s and a 2600k prior to this and performance didn’t change (granted the 780 upgrade wasn’t at all directed at this game))

Sadly throwing more/faster hardware at the game has little benefit. After a certain point you get hit with serious diminishing returns. It’s really unfortunate. I remember when my 5870 wakitten with a solid performance increase when blizzard added the updated DX11 renderer in Wow. That was awesome to see out of an old engine.

The game is still young and I’d be shocked if they didn’t have something in the pipe regarding the engines inadequacies. Like anything though it takes time and in this case a lot of testing. The game is really solid all around and personally for me the engine performance is its biggest limitation for real growth where game play is concerned. They have some great ideas and they’d shine even more brightly if they weren’t so hindered by technical limitations that effect everyone involved from us players to asset and game designers.

Anet owe it to themselves to makes this the best MMO it can be and I’m sure they’ll deliver… all in good time.

Great post and 100% accurate. I though, do not share your sense of optimism regarding engine updates.

Optimism is all I have left. Trying to keep up morale. Anet has an amazing art team and I’d love to see what they could do with the right canvas.

Well actually it scales up to 3 physical cores but no more. The game runs at over 50% cpu on a true quad core system (usually in the low 60%) so that’s more than two cores worth of work. I’m not talking overall CPU usage, just the game itself. And while some people have rigs that allow them to run all GPU exclusive features to 11 at 2560×1600, it’ll still not going to stress the video card one bit because it’s the renderer thread that gets all jammed up in a single core at that’s the limiting factor.

People may be happier by turning the frame limiter on at 30 and have a consistent frame rate 95% of the time that noticing the variation in frame rate. What’s less annoying, stop and go traffic on the highway or traveling at a nice constant but lower than highway speed on side road to go from point A to B in the morning.

The massive performance issues of GW2 is 100% why I don’t play anymore. I can’t stand the poor performance on my decent gaming rig no matter what settings I use it dips to unplayable frames in WwW. If there aren’t made any drastic improvements in optimization then GW2 will suffer immensely in the future.

Take note the population in GW2 in most area has grown a bit larger today than launch day. The more characters on in the area the more stress on anyone systems.

I get low 15FPS at some point…

I’m a part time system builder so I’ve had my share opportunities to test / play wink wink GW2 on a wide variety of hardware and it can be interesting. Had a chance to toy with a tri SLI Titan system shortly after they launched and while it was awesome for surround gaming in a lot of titles, as far as GW2 was concerned they may as well been GTX 650s. The ultimate goal would be to take more of the burden off the cpu and get the gpus involved more.

That said DX11 done right increases rendering efficiency a good amount. It allows you to leverage that in it a few ways. You can increase performance substantially at your current scenes budget or you can increase your scenes budget and maintain your current performance target or a healthy balance of both. Generally though most studios just use DX11 as an excuse to throw on excessive tessellation and more advanced forms of SSAO and it eats up the budget fast for a vary subtle visual difference. This may work for shooters and such but in an openworld MMO environment those gains can be better used for increased performance ceiling (aka more zerk less fps turd)

Given MMO design is a moving target with content being added throughout a titles life and player interest and involvement shifting as well (one week an area is disney land busy the next its a ghost town), it would be nice to have that added head room. Its too easy to design a map and you have your budget but then the realization hits you that “Oh crap, I still have to account for the 100s players who are going to occupying this small area as well.” Its hard to not get greedy

Aesthetically GW2 is in a good place, I’ll be the last one to fault the art style or visuals as a whole so the added performance benefits are the way to go without doubt. Which coders do I address my bribes and gifts to :p

EDIT:
@ DJRiful

Same here. I gave up shadows completely in any large world DE and in WvW for that reason now. Now with culling an option I leave them off most of the time. Its cool to see LA full for a change but I’m still getting used to it.

I have been experiencing a gamebreaking microstutter that either I haven’t noticed before or because I just made a new toon, I am more inclined to notice.
It might be the server lag because of the free weekend. My latency to their servers is about 260 ms or so. I have tried every possible fix in the graphic setting and it seems that it is only when I put the game in sub that I lose the stutter. I will not play the game in sub lol.

I hope that this clears up before the weekend, I cannot handle micro stutters, they drive me nuts.

I played with AMD graphics and nVidia too. Never had any problem.

My computer which is Gateway reaches very low FPS as well, I’ve done a lot of things to try to combat this situtation, yet like this says, no matter what you do it wont help

well if i use “auto-detect” in options my frame rate will drop to about 20fps in LA.. god forbid i try it in open world. i am literally forced to use “best performance” settings to keep it at a steady 50fps(30fps in wvw).

here are my stats: radeon HD 6850 OC, 3.2ghz quad core CPU, 8 gigs of ram. cpu and gpu are water cooled. any other games run smooth(payday 2, even League of legends capping on 60fps at high settings) but gw2 is playable only on low settings for me atm..

pls fix this anet. i want to enjoy the game like i did 4 months ago on high settings

@MaideN

Something is NOT kosher there, I have a weaker rig and get better frame rates.

What version of the graphics driver you are running? Are you using stock settings in the CCC? I know you are water cooled but have you checked the temps lately? Are you using SweetFX at all?

Assuming you have a conventional hard drive, have you defragged it lately? GW2 puts the entire set of game assets into one huge file. I just finished playing and noticed the game read 17GB while playing for 2 1/2 hours. Extra head seeks can disrupt frame rate.

Anything else running in the background while you are playing? Is anything auto updating?

Throwing out ideas.

graphics driver: latest (13.4)
ccc settings: as advised by the devs (on this forum)
temp. cpu: 32 28 30 28(idle) / 44 42 44 40(while playing)
temp. gpu: 34(idle) / 40-ish(while playing)
sweetFX: no
defrag: yes
background programs: skype, cpu temp monitor, gpu temp monitor
nothing updating..

i’m working with computers (hardware) for about 15y now and all i can say is i’m speechless about this problem. i checked every piece of hardware and everything is working as it should.

p.s.: i have to say again, that 11 months ago when i got the game i was able to play on almost maxed out graphics then in slowly came down to medium settings and now to “best performance”. i did tweak the cpu a bit and i am getting some better results in LA (28frames now – 20 before) but open world is still a no-go.

Open world should be better than LA or any city. I’m dumbfounded as to why you aren’t getting better FRs.

whoa my bad on that part XD as “open world” i was referring to WvW(or huge group events in any land)

@ MaideN

What are the current graphics settings for Guild Wars 2 set to?
Sometimes people don’t bother tweaking that and just opt for auto-detect which puts reflections on all (which is a potential fps killer).

Also are you running on supersample instead of native? LOD – Ultra and Shadows Ultra are both buggy. I also think the auto detect could set your culling detail and limit too high.

DJRiful.3749:

The game engine is poor at start ever since I load GW2 into my system. LA low 40 FPS… WvW down 25 FPS lowest.

A system pushing at 4.7 to 4.8Ghz 6 cores 3930k (12 virtual cores) $600 CPU and GTX TITAN to run this poorly.

p.s. no i didn’t build this system for GW2 but to run other high end games at 1440p without issues. Going back to old MMO like World of Warcraft, that game dump out 300FPS in DX9 and DX11 mode at max.

Engine is known to be very poor since Beta Week launch.

I had a feeling the game isn’t fully utilizing the GPU VRAM leads to constant loading from HDD to CPU which drags down the FPS.

Culling engine is terrible. GW2 base on Umbra Culling http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/

I believe it is poorly use or something.

Explains why I can hear my hard drive kick into over drive during WvW battles. And explains why 2 guildies so far have burned out their hard drives. But I still notice high GPU usage which would make sense if the “engine” is sending data to the GPU that should be sent to the CPU causing overload on the GPU.

The high GPU usage without the FPS to show for it just means poor optimization. We’ve seen it time and time again from poorly ported console-to-PC games like Prototype 2.

I’m not sure about the hard thing though, I run my game off an SSD so I can’t test that.

Throwing out my two cents as I recently upgraded.

I went from a 3.5Ghz 1055T AMD to an Intel 4.4ghz 4770k and my FPS more than doubled. Before I had to tone down some shadow/environment settings, now I’m max on everything.

Running a relatively tame GTX660 @ 2550 × 1440. I turned on Vsync because of some weird hesitation issue every few seconds, and running around the busy parts in LA gives me 30+ fps every time. All the bottom boxes are checked.

My conclusion is the same as the rest, the game is horribly CPU bound. If you are going to upgrade for GW2 performance, go for CPU first. Even at my (relatively high) resolution it helped MUCH more than a video card.

If the game is so CPU bound as everyone claims, it would use more than 25% of my 3770k.

It doesn’t, so that leads me to believe that something else is at work here.

God Of Fissures.8627:

If the game is so CPU bound as everyone claims, it would use more than 25% of my 3770k.

It doesn’t, so that leads me to believe that something else is at work here.

Looking at the CPU usage in task manager isn’t conclusive proof a game isn’t CPU bound, as it shows the average of your cores. It’s been beaten to death that this game doesn’t efficiently use multiple core procs, and you should easily be able to note that in your task manager.

The biggest thing to remember about my upgrade is that I went from 6 cores to 4 cores, but my single core threaded performance skyrocketed. That’s the issue here.

Sitting in LA one of my cores is hovering around 80%. Minimizing the window (I run windowed mode) drops that usage to 10%. All signs point to CPU utilization problems. There’s no other way to explain the performance gains I’ve had.

I never hit below 40FPS in LA when its busy atm.
That said though im runnign a £500 CPU thats OC’d, GW2 shouldnt requir that kind of hardware.
GPU wise GW2 is relativly tame if u have an uptodate GPU.
I run GW2 with every settings maxed EXCEPT reflections due to the underground rendering issue. So i have it on Terrain & Sky. I have SuperSampling ON, and i even downsample at a resolution of 3200×1800 which is the highest my single HDMI cable allows.
With that caped at 60 FPS my GPU is usualy between 50% and 75% usuage in LA (when it isnt CPU bound – so not by the MF)

Cullign settings are at
Character Limit: Highest
texture Limit: Medium.

WvW FPs can still dip down to 25 FPS though only in very very large zergs.

GW2 is incredibly CPu bound, BUT its bound by the single thread performance aswell as the number of threads available. there are some situations where GW2 wil lrequir more than 4 threads, so an i7 can and will show better performance in those situations.

SolarNova.1052:

GW2 is incredibly CPu bound, BUT its bound by the single thread performance aswell as the number of threads available. there are some situations where GW2 wil lrequir more than 4 threads, so an i7 can and will show better performance in those situations.

I wonder, can GW2 spawn more then 4 Threads? If so what is the max threads it could spawn. Been thinking about ‘toying’ with GW2 on a dual socket E5 Xeon (32threads, 2×8core+HT) just to see how CPU bound GW2 is.

You seem to have some ideas on CPU and Threading, what would your take be on this?

GW2 spawns over 40, most are utility and have very specific, run infrequently or get synced with another thread.

God Of Fissures.8627:

If the game is so CPU bound as everyone claims, it would use more than 25% of my 3770k.

It doesn’t, so that leads me to believe that something else is at work here.

I could be just mistaking it for my GPU fan sound, my computer is so loud it’s hard to tell where the sounds are coming from :P Sounds like an F18 taking off.

I have a theory that network congestion/latency issues (either client or server side) might be dramatically reducing fps. I started a thread about it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Frame-rate-fps-tied-to-network-congestion

Hope some of you find it interesting.

GW2, as has been stated already above, uses just over 40 individual threads.
However only, roughly, 3 of those are the main threads, and they are the big ones. of those 3 you have the ‘main’ thread.
When the ‘extreme’ situations i mentioned previosly occure, the main thread maxes out performance wise ,like it usualy does, and thus FPS drops, BUT at the same time due to these intense situation the other 2 threads also max and the other 30 odd smaller threads also increase in their work load.
What u end up with is the main thread using one whole cpu thread, the other 2 big threads ocupy a cpu thread each along with a handfull of smaller threads, then the 4th and final i5 cpu thread gets full with the other smaller threads. Once this happens ur at 100% i5 total utilisation.
In an i7 however all those smaller threads get laid of onto the extra 4 CPU threads and thus overall utilisation isnt maxed out. With that you gain a few FPS.

however as i said, these situations are few and far between.

As for a Xeon CPUs, at stock the new Xeons have great single thread performance and with the extra cores/threads they do well vs normal consumer grade i5’s and i7’s. HOWEVER when said consumer i5’s and i7’s are OverClocked, they surpase the Xeons single thread performance and become much better for gaming, and atm a normal i7 with its 4 cores and 8 threads is more than neough for any game, a 8 core 16 thread Xeon would show 0 performance gains due to the number of CPu threads availabe. Any performance gain that is shown would be completly down to stock for stock clocks/performance, and as i have already said, the non Xeon CPU’s can OC, even the non K editions have roughly 300 or 400 mhz of OC in them.

Combatter no it has nothing to do with “lag”.

SolarNova interesting, but I think it’s more than just that to be honest. I think the game is sending unnecessary data to the GPU when it should be sent to the CPU or vice versa I can’t remember when but I was doing some tests that backed this theory up. To put it simply the game was sending CPU data to the GPU for no reason at all.

AAAANNNNNDDDD still nothing. Time for a necro to let this utterly infuriating issue come to light again. I have a high end AMD CPU and just recently got a 780. The game still runs like a flipbook a disturbingly large percent of the time.

The Spiral King.2483:

AAAANNNNNDDDD still nothing. Time for a necro to let this utterly infuriating issue come to light again. I have a high end AMD CPU and just recently got a 780. The game still runs like a flipbook a disturbingly large percent of the time.

You need to run Intel to get good performance in this game.

This issue has been beaten to death. And Anything above a GTX650/HD7790 is going to waste, due to that CPU bound issue.

After you buy into Intel, tweak your systems hardware settings to be 100% efficient. You will get 38-40FPS in LA on a busy night, 110-135FPS in the open world with a few players in sight, 45-55FPS in combat with 6+ other players, and 15-25FPS in 80+ player zergs (WvW, World Boss Train..ect).

And thats with all settings on Ultra, with Char Limit to Low and Char Quality to Medium.

The issue sits at Anet’s Feet. And unless they redesign the game engine from the ground up, this is how the game is going to be for the rest of its life.

sirsquishy.8531:

The Spiral King.2483:

AAAANNNNNDDDD still nothing. Time for a necro to let this utterly infuriating issue come to light again. I have a high end AMD CPU and just recently got a 780. The game still runs like a flipbook a disturbingly large percent of the time.

You need to run Intel to get good performance in this game.

This issue has been beaten to death. And Anything above a GTX650/HD7790 is going to waste, due to that CPU bound issue.

After you buy into Intel, tweak your systems hardware settings to be 100% efficient. You will get 38-40FPS in LA on a busy night, 110-135FPS in the open world with a few players in sight, 45-55FPS in combat with 6+ other players, and 15-25FPS in 80+ player zergs (WvW, World Boss Train..ect).

And thats with all settings on Ultra, with Char Limit to Low and Char Quality to Medium.

The issue sits at Anet’s Feet. And unless they redesign the game engine from the ground up, this is how the game is going to be for the rest of its life.

Is there a place where the tweaks are listed?

Like I said in another thread. I have a GTX 580. Modest. I have everything on maxed at 1920×1080 AND forced 4x SSAA and 2x SGAA Alpha and it’s not maxed. On the other hand, my i5-3570 @ 4.5Ghz is maxed. Which is funny because it’s the best gaming CPU available. Even still, the primary thread of the game maxes out it’s associated core, even though that core is operating at 4.5ghz and I only got 50-60 FPS in LA because of it. It’d be fantastic if the game was either more processing efficient or could use hyper-threading so the i7’s would actually have a purpose.
I know 60 fps sounds like a good number, but that’s the minimum before it starts to bother my eyes, and it’s even lower in a huge crowd.

Toroxus.9256:

Like I said in another thread. I have a GTX 580. Modest. I have everything on maxed at 1920×1080 AND forced 4x SSAA and 2x SGAA Alpha and it’s not maxed. On the other hand, my i5-3570 @ 4.5Ghz is maxed. Which is funny because it’s the best gaming CPU available. Even still, the primary thread of the game maxes out it’s associated core, even though that core is operating at 4.5ghz and I only got 50-60 FPS in LA because of it. It’d be fantastic if the game was either more processing efficient or could use hyper-threading so the i7’s would actually have a purpose.
I know 60 fps sounds like a good number, but that’s the minimum before it starts to bother my eyes, and it’s even lower in a huge crowd.

A human’s Eyes cannot detect Frame Rate above 32FPS. (Science Research says 24, But my own research…I Say 32FPS).

If your eyes bother you below 60FPS, you need to investigate your Monitor. There is probably a refresh rate issue going on that causes the Light to Flicker to your eyes, causing Headaches and eye pain/Discomfort.

sirsquishy.8531:

A human’s Eyes cannot detect Frame Rate above 32FPS. (Science Research says 24, But my own research…I Say 32FPS).

If your eyes bother you below 60FPS, you need to investigate your Monitor. There is probably a refresh rate issue going on that causes the Light to Flicker to your eyes, causing Headaches and eye pain/Discomfort.

I know this is strange for the internet but: I formulated my hypothesis and tested it myself before I spoke. I can see the difference between 50 and 60 fps on monitors that display at 60Hz and were confirmed by a friend’s semi-high speed camera. 30Hz is like a slideshow and will give me a headache eventually. On the other hand, my BF can’t see the difference between 30 and 40 and I know most people can’t, so I can’t really push the “I DON’T GET 60 FPS AND IT’S TERRIBLE, GET ALL THE KING’S MEN TO FIX IT” point too hard because I’m not that selfish.

By the way, I found that CL 7 makes the game more stable in terms of audio over CL 9.

Toroxus.9256:

sirsquishy.8531:

A human’s Eyes cannot detect Frame Rate above 32FPS. (Science Research says 24, But my own research…I Say 32FPS).

If your eyes bother you below 60FPS, you need to investigate your Monitor. There is probably a refresh rate issue going on that causes the Light to Flicker to your eyes, causing Headaches and eye pain/Discomfort.

I know this is strange for the internet but: I formulated my hypothesis and tested it myself before I spoke. I can see the difference between 50 and 60 fps on monitors that display at 60Hz and were confirmed by a friend’s semi-high speed camera. 30Hz is like a slideshow and will give me a headache eventually. On the other hand, my BF can’t see the difference between 30 and 40 and I know most people can’t, so I can’t really push the “I DON’T GET 60 FPS AND IT’S TERRIBLE, GET ALL THE KING’S MEN TO FIX IT” point too hard because I’m not that selfish.

By the way, I found that CL 7 makes the game more stable in terms of audio over CL 9.

If you have an old school Monitor (Tube), Set the Res to 1280×800@60hz. Bring up a Grey-White Screen. And Have anyone look at it from the side of their eye (Peripherals). 90% of the people I have tested can see Flicking at 60HZ. Now if you set it to 72Hz, seems people that are near sighted are the only ones that can still see the flickering. Then at 80-120hz anyone I tested could not see the flickering.

The same can be done on LCD’s, But remember LCDs are not the same as Tubes (They dont project Light outwards, its from the side of the panel). Some LCDs that have bad inverters or bad LED power lanes will have a flicker that is similar to Tube Monitors at 60hz. Again can only be seen to the side (Very few can actually see it straight on…even with the Tubes. But almost every could see it from looking out of the corner of their eye).

So, I doubt its a FPS issue, as much as its a HZ/Lighting issue.

sirsquishy.8531:

If you have an old school Monitor (Tube), Set the Res to 1280×800@60hz. Bring up a Grey-White Screen. And Have anyone look at it from the side of their eye (Peripherals). 90% of the people I have tested can see Flicking at 60HZ. Now if you set it to 72Hz, seems people that are near sighted are the only ones that can still see the flickering. Then at 80-120hz anyone I tested could not see the flickering.

The same can be done on LCD’s, But remember LCDs are not the same as Tubes (They dont project Light outwards, its from the side of the panel). Some LCDs that have bad inverters or bad LED power lanes will have a flicker that is similar to Tube Monitors at 60hz. Again can only be seen to the side (Very few can actually see it straight on…even with the Tubes. But almost every could see it from looking out of the corner of their eye).

So, I doubt its a FPS issue, as much as its a HZ/Lighting issue.

Well, then someone call consumer reports for every monitor or TV that I’ve seen dip under 60fps. AKA: All the TVs on the shelves in stores, and every computer monitor. I wonder if I can see the difference between 60 and 120Hz. I know those fake “120Hz” TVs just look like 30fps that’s blurry, but I have yet to actually get my hands on a real 120Hz monitor.

First off, I don’t see flickering even when I force the FPS to be 1, and I think that’s because it wouldn’t make much sense for an LED/LCD to constantly redraw when there is nothing to redraw on screen. Or it could be that the response time of these monitors is 1ms, which is 1/1000 of a second to redraw the screen compared to the 1/60th of a second to redraw the frame. So technically, in order to see the redrawing, or flickering in your test, on these screens, my eyes would have to see at 1000fps, which I think we’ll both agree is not the case.

Again, the state of the game currently is horrible. ANET are seemingly either being naive to issues or ignorant in general performance debugging etc.

As far as them refusing help from nVidia, the same story is true of AMD. It seems that Arena Net is attempting to take the “we can do it ourselves, go away” approach to the help either company is offering.

I doubt this “help” that those companies are offering is free. I’m positive they charge an arm an a leg for that kind of “help”. If I were in charge of a small game company that hap programmers that “could” (but hasn’t) wrote optimization code, then I would make the same choice.

I realize everyone will think in the opposite direction and say something like “shows what you know, your company would fail because no one would want to play your slow un-optimized game”

…but companies that are paying licensing fees to epic for unreal engine, and paying valve to allow them to have their UE3 game on steam are making NOTHING.

sirsquishy.8531:

A human’s Eyes cannot detect Frame Rate above 32FPS. (Science Research says 24, But my own research…I Say 32FPS).

If your eyes bother you below 60FPS, you need to investigate your Monitor. There is probably a refresh rate issue going on that causes the Light to Flicker to your eyes, causing Headaches and eye pain/Discomfort.

This is entirely incorrect, and is the same wrong information that is peddled across the web in countless forums.

The human eye does not “see” in frame rates, it views light particles (photons) striking the back of the eye. 24 fps+ creates a seemingly fluid motion of static images. The eye and brain itself can easily tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps, because our brains can process the light photons striking the eye faster than 60 times per second. In fact the eye can detect frame rates in excess of 120 per second with high accuracy.

The issue the person you quoted has is a well know issue with non static frame rates without motion blurring when gaming, where the brain is expecting data at a faster rate (ie 60fps) but when it dips lower (to 30fps) it is forced to “wait” on the expected data. The difference is an extremely small fraction of a second, but that occurring several times over the course of a few minutes can cause nausea and headaches.

Its similar to why people get seasickness. The eye sees one thing, the body feels another (via the inner ear), and neither can be computed by the brain as valid information because they conflict. Hence nausea.

If we could not detect frame rates above 30 fps care to explain why “The Hobbit” movie is in 48p?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

Also to note is this;

The USAF, in testing their pilots for visual response time, used a simple test to see if the pilots could distinguish small changes in light. In their experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to “see” the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This simple and specific situation not only proves the ability to percieve 1 image within 1/220 of a second, but the ability to interpret higher FPS.

What’s really strange about the whole thing is that the graphics options have little to no effect on the frame rate, other than resolution. I had a core2duo and GTX 550ti, and framerate was exactly the same no matter what options I set. Okay, cpu bound, that makes sense, right? Well, now I’ve got an i5 4670K and a GTX 760, and it’s the same story. FPS is higher than it was with my old machine, still not great but now playable, but no graphics option other than resolution has even the tiniest bit of effect on the frame rate.

Oh, and if i set ANY graphics options in my nvidia driver, I get flickering texture issues in GW2 and only in GW2.

Fix your dang engine, ArenaNet!