Guild Wars 2

I’m curious how the following Nvidia control panel settings will effect performance/quality with Guild Wars 2. Any recommendations?

Ambient Occlusion
Anisotropic Filtering
Antialiasing – Gamma correction
Antialiasing – Transparency

I am interested in how these interact with the in-game graphics options as well. Basically looking for an Nvidia tweak guide. Thanks!

Ambient Occlusion adds a subtle shadowing effects to the game – I first used it in Dragon Age 2 and found it was most noticeable in the nooks and crannies on buildings / walls (for example in the corners where 2 walls meat at a sharp angle). It seems to be quite performance intensive and the effect is subtle but nice. I haven’t used it in GW2 yet because a lot of people have reported massive graphical glitching when AO was enabled in the Nvidia panel.

Anisotropic Filtering essentially sharpens up textures that get blurred by the game as a result of viewing angle or distance. I’m currently running 8x AF through the Nvidia Panel, because when I tried the ingame “Best Texture Filtering” option I found the results were very poor and forcing 8x AF does a much better job. The impact on performance isn’t that large, it’s small enough (aka max 2-3 fps) that I don’t really notice it and I really couldn’t live without this option.

If you really want to see the effects go to Lion’s Arch to the square just north of where all the portals to the other cities are and look at the cobblestones there – the more level your camera angle the blurrier those will look. Compare those textures with no texture filtering at all, only the ingame “best texture filtering” enabled and finally with 4x-16x AF forced through the Nvidia Panel and use whichever looks best to you.

As for the other 2 options I don’t really tweak AA-related settings manually, so I can’t really advise you there. I either leave AA upto the ingame settings or if it really bothers me I use Nvidia Inspector and google which game profile is most recommended to force AA and just use that.

Ditto on Aniso; performance hit is negligible but the results are not.

AA Gamma won’t do anything since its only for OpenGL.

AA Transparency can make for a significant performance hit (if it does anything—seems to depend on how textures are made but that’s just a guess) and, in some cases, gives PowerPoint FPS (check foggy areas with wrought-iron fences).

I admit, I’ve never used the nvidia control panel settings for gaming. I’ve always just left them to default, or let the game decide.

Is there actually a benefit to setting these manually?

Me too. Ive altered them but never saw that huge of an effect. Maybe im just not looking at the right things.

Never override AO unless you know the game and drivers both support it. At best you’ll eat FPS, at worst you’ll find all kinds of glitches.

Reason being is the driver needs to be able to pull geometry information from the engine. It can only do that if the engine provides it and the drivers have support for the engine.

Analogy: both people have to speak French, if you want to converse in French. A third party coming along and mandating you speak French isn’t going to work, if they don’t.

Thanks for the replies, I do have a lot of experience with driver settings/tweaking/etc… I was curious how others have found the NvCP works with GW2, in particular how about Antialiasing – Transparency.

I am leaving it on Multisampling at the moment but haven’t noticed much difference in game. Generally with FXAA on and SS you get a very soft image, so I am using FXAA and MS for Transparency.

For Anisotropic Filtering I am as well using Nvidias but left the in-game option selected, I presume the NvCP will override the in-game setting? I’ll have to test it a little bit to see.

Anyone find any optimal settings they are happy with. I’m using the latest beta drivers with a 680 GTX.

FXAA will cause the screen blurred, and it need a tool NVIDIA Inspector to enable antialiasing in GW2.
see these:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=357956
http://tieba.baidu.com/p/1859514771
sorry for my poor english

ps: Antialiasing Compatibility code for GW2 is 0×00401240