Guild Wars 2

TL;DR: If you have TBD display and feel a bit let down by your performance, it may be be to your benefit to find a 1080p display to play on instead.

I’m mostly posting this here because all sorts of searching on the forums by almost all the words in the title and have turned up zero information on this sort of setup.

I have a late 2012 15" Mac Book Pro (Non-Retina) and a Thunderbolt display. I run GW2 via Boot Camp with my MBP closed in a Arc stand powering the TBD. Even thought the display is 2560×1440, I’d scale back to 1920×1080 to maintain at least a decent frame rate while not resorting to sub-sampling.

I discovered this week while over at a friends house that using a Mini-DP to HDMI adapter to power his 27" 2560×1440 display actually worked awesome. It was way better than Boot Camp + Thunderbolt Display which in turn was better than running the OSX Client. I’ve tested on my TV and found that (as expected), running Mini-DP directly at 1920×1080 gives me somewhat better than slideshow performance in WvW. So, for this particular MBP, it looks like native 1920×1080 is the upper bound for GW2 in Boot Camp.

EDIT: Quick bit of information I forgot to post. I’m using Windows 7. Due to assumptions Windows 7 makes about PCIe, Thunderbolt has certain limitations though the only documented limitation is hot-plugging devices. YMMV using Windows 8 and/or future releases of the Boot Camp drivers.