Guild Wars 2

Thanks anet, specially for the SMAA. FXAA was such a horrible implementation it made the game look so horrible.
Also nice to see new graphic things added like ambient occlusion.

Next thing I think would be needed is to increase the texture quality in some walls or buildings.

Just curious. Have you noticed any frame rate changes enabling ambient occlusion or SMAA?

I can enable AO but it seems that the new AA options are not available to me.
Anyone play with the new lighting option as well? Just seems to make the screen brighter for me

As I understand a quick read on AO, it seems to just be a more accurate way of doing contrast in lighting and soft shadows?

Stormcrow.7513:

Anyone play with the new lighting option as well? Just seems to make the screen brighter for me

That’s exactly how I understood it. Light adaptation tries to simulate how a dark cave for example lightens up because your eyes get used to the darkness. It’s less noticeable out in the open but if you go to a dark place like the large skritt cave in the center of Brisban Wildlands you’ll see a huge difference.

Honestly, I don’t really like the new light adaptation because it tries to make everything equally bright and results in less overall contrast. I prefer the dark places to be dark and the sunny places to be bright.

I can’t seem to find the new AA options either??

The new AA options: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Please-Post-7-28-Bug-Reports-HERE-merged/page/6#post5327390

They exist (you can go into %AppData%\Roaming\Guild Wars 2\" and set it via the XML settings file there), but they are not shown via the options UI.

Lord Arhan Warmark.7098:

As I understand a quick read on AO, it seems to just be a more accurate way of doing contrast in lighting and soft shadows?

AO simply simulates the darkening caused by objects blocking ambient, indirect lighting. The effect is usually quite subtle which always surprises me when people clamor for it.

synk.6907:

The new AA options: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Please-Post-7-28-Bug-Reports-HERE-merged/page/6#post5327390

They exist (you can go into AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2\" and set it via the XML settings file there), but they are not shown via the options UI.

Can you explain more detailed how to activate SMAA via XML settings? change value to true or something like that?

As the devs said, it was accidentally still tagged as dev only rather than a public option that will be fixed in a patch soon. You lived without it so far why rush when it’ll be fixed in a few days.

Done some tests:
AO improvements are noticiable, but the performance hit seems quite irregular, being quite big (8-12fps) during the day and very small (1-3) during the night.

SMAA High is definitely the best. SMAA low improves a lot the edges without blurring the image and the performance hit is really small. But High improves where Low doesn’t and performance hit is less than 1fps.
Also it works with SweetFX (in my case Lumasharpen and Cineon DPX).

Could not test the new lighting option in my laptop.