Guild Wars 2

Hello peeps,

I’ve recently switched from Windows to Mac OSX because I use my desktop more for programming work, than for actual gaming. However, I do want to play some Guild Wars 2 every now and then.

I ordered and just received an iMac 27" with a Nvidia GTX780M, which has 4GB of VRAM. However, I can not seem to run the game fluently. I have some weird ‘frame-lock’ going on everywhere. No matter what I try (tried resetting SMC) I do not gain any performance increasing. Maybe I’m doing something wrong trying to reset the SMC, probably not…

In any case, the speed is locked. No matter what graphics settings I try, nothing changes this frame lock. Not even setting it to 1024×768 with everything turned down to the very lowest settings possible.

Framerates I get;
- Lions Arch: 19FPS flat,
- Battlegrounds: 30FPS flat,
- Other areas: 30FPS flat.

Now you would suspect I have turned on V-sync or a frame locker. The locker is set to ‘Unlimited’.

It’s not my hardware either, because I play games like Borderlands 2 and Bioshock Infinite on 2560×1440 with everything set to high. No problems there on in anything else. Does anyone else know a good solution for my problem?

Thanks guys!

P.S. I know this is a Wine port and Windows will probably get me a better frame-rate; However, I’ve had contact with someone that made a YouTube video and he says (and proves) to get 60FPS in battlegrounds and outdoor area’s. Same hardware and same OS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQQLtwXrktA

Yeah I’m not sure how he’s managing 60fps running the game in OSX.
The FPS that you’re getting at the moment is the same or better than what most people running the OSX client are getting – as I’m sure others here will be able to tell you.

I’m honestly baffled O_o. Reading their comments, I assume it was you in the conversation with them, they obviously haven’t done anything in particular to make it run better – but it certainly is a weird case of someone getting much better performance than anyone I’ve seen on these forums.

It’s also true to be running on Mac OSX, as you can clearly see that it has “High-res character textures” disabled, like Mac clients always have. He’s not really making us believe Mac is capable of running it.

I’m gonna take the liberty of checking the Guild Wars 2 application contents to see if there are specific .ini settings that might help. I’ll keep you posted on my findings.

Yeah I believe them, in the top left corner next to the shortcut icons you can see the “Mac Beta” title. So they’re definitely running it in OSX.
Good luck, there is one specific .plist file, it’s not difficult to find, which contains all of the important settings. It might be called either cider.plist, preferences.plist or settings.plst – but either way it’s in the root folder or a folder directly below it.

I’ve been investigating for about an hour now, found a lot of interesting tweaks. There is a Wine config out there. By default it states:

“VideoRam” = “256”
“AGPVertexRam” = “128”

But upping this will not result in any behavior differences.. Just as editing the “CiderSettings.plist” command line options.. I’ve asked it to show detailed information by adding -perf. But no changes in that, it’s almost like it’s ignoring everything.

EDIT: I’ve found a config file in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/GuildWars2/ that is exactly the same as the default one in the application contents.. So I’m gonna try editing that one instead.

Yep, there are two. I’ve played around with the VideRam setting in both of them before, but was unable to procure a result from it.
There is one particular setting in the config file – MTD3D. By default the value is 4, but when the client was initially released the value was 0, putting it back to 0 did seem to provide a small boost to performance with no loss of visual quality. Mine is back on 4 now, but I can’t remember if I changed it manually or if it’s been overwritten by an update? So you could always try setting that value to 0 again.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Yep, there are two. I’ve played around with the VideRam setting in both of them before, but was unable to procure a result from it.
There is one particular setting in the config file – MTD3D. By default the value is 4, but when the client was initially released the value was 0, putting it back to 0 did seem to provide a small boost to performance with no loss of visual quality. Mine is back on 4 now, but I can’t remember if I changed it manually or if it’s been overwritten by an update? So you could always try setting that value to 0 again.

MTD3D is already set to 0 in the current version. So no luck there mate, I’m actually making a custom Wine wrapper right now.. I will share the project with you guys as soon as I’ve had some success, and most importantly some performance increasement.

EDIT: Making excellent progress on porting, loading seems faster.. I’ve forced the wrapper to auto detect available videoram. Once I get everything up and running I will defiantly share it with you all for download. No hardcore installation required or anything.. Just dragging the application to your application folder.

I thought the high res disabled thing was a 32 bit limitation which includes both cider and Win32 installs. So it isn’t 100% a mac problem.

^— Yup. High res is only available on 64bit systems/client. So at the moment only 64bit windows can use it.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

^— Yup. High res is only available on 64bit systems/client. So at the moment only 64bit windows can use it.

I’m not exactly looking to enable that feature.. I’m just looking to create a better wrapper so that the game runs more smoothly

You might struggle a little bit because as far as I know there are a couple of issues that the Wine community has been unable to solve since launch. But of course I wish you the best of luck and I will be very interested to see how you go!

FlamingFoxx.1305:

You might struggle a little bit because as far as I know there are a couple of issues that the Wine community has been unable to solve since launch. But of course I wish you the best of luck and I will be very interested to see how you go!

What problems are those, it’s good to know about those.. Let’s see how far I can come.. I’m copying a lot of shaders and dx3d files from a real Windows desktop environment, which is known to run Guild Wars 2.

EDIT: I’ve got a working wrapper right now.. Same performance as the client that is currently send out to you guys.. Though it’s easier for me to edit this client, because I know how it works :P

I don’t remember exactly, I’m sure they’re listed on the WineHQ forums. I think there was a direct input problem relating to the mouse and camera rotation as well as something to do with chromium and the trading post.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I don’t remember exactly, I’m sure they’re listed on the WineHQ forums. I think there was a direct input problem relating to the mouse and camera rotation as well as something to do with chromium and the trading post.

No input problems found other than control not being mapped to command. But I will fix that very soon, I will also check out chromium trading post in a second.. Right now I’m working on multi_threaded optimisation. This should result in an 80% increase of performance.

This would be awesome thank you for even considering sharing. I know there are many that are fed up with the current port that we have.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I don’t remember exactly, I’m sure they’re listed on the WineHQ forums. I think there was a direct input problem relating to the mouse and camera rotation as well as something to do with chromium and the trading post.

I experienced the ingame trading post problem.. Trying to fix this now Good chances of fixing it.

EDIT: Fixed chromium bug, now all I need to fix is the performance itself hehe.. It now performs the same as the origional Guild Wars does… Blehhh.

I’m not recommending to anybody to buy this game and I’m not spending any more money in the gem store until we hear SOMETHING about a native client.

Dev closed the other thread because of the overwhelming negativity. Well we have a right to be upset when something we bought and put money into doesn’t work! It’s called supply and demand

For the problems with GW2 on Mavericks, try updating the client as described in the topic:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/TgUpdate-1-11-everytime-i-open-the-launcher/page/2#post3394514

Let me know if this worked for you:)

Felicja.6891:

For the problems with GW2 on Mavericks, try updating the client as described in the topic:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/TgUpdate-1-11-everytime-i-open-the-launcher/page/2#post3394645

Let me know if this worked for you:)

Thanks for sharing that, it does not increase the performance sadly.. But I might find something interesting in the updater itself! I will keep you all posted

Just some thoughts, which you maybe already checked:
- Wineskin (wine variant) has a version which boosts Direct3D

- Also wine has a 64bit version (wine64), can this help out in any way?

- And have a look at the Crossover engine, which has an open source variant
(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/faq/source/)

So far no luck at all with all the efforts on trying to speed up GW2 with Mac OSX. Most games play pretty nice with Wineskin, even games like The Witcher 2 use it as their wrapper. That game runs silky smooth on my iMac.

Yet, for some reason I can’t get the GW2 client to run smoothly. Not with Direct3D boost nothing, it all just runs at exactly the same speed as the original Mac client does.

Other than that, sadly Wine64 is not supported on Mac OSX. It will probably not be any time soon either.

I will however try and port various other games soon, like Skyrim etc. Will post a link here where you’ll find all these ports wrapped and ready to launch on another website soon.

To keep you guys posted. I’ve made some attempts in compiling different wine wrappers with different versions of wine. After extensive searching I’ve found out that there is a problem with the CPU threading in all wine en cider ports of Guild Wars 2.

The slow FPS is not always due to the GPU bottlenecking, but the GPU not getting the data in time. Why? Well… Guild Wars 2 only uses one thread of the CPU. One core, if you will.

Noone on the outside can really fix it, only NCSoft has a slight chance of fixing this issue. But I wager it takes them too much resources and risks so they might not do it, unless they see that Guild Wars 2 will have a very long lifespan.

I have however ported some other games to mac, including Skyrim. But this is not the place to discus that I guess. If you are really interested you could send me a private message.

FricoRico, I think the user who recorded this video did so on a Hackintosh, which could also use a Mac client, but have higher hardware specs than the latest iMac or currently available Mac Pro (not the unit that will be available in February 2014). I am getting between 75-110 frames during PVE fights on my Hackintosh with “Best Appearance” (hardware: Nvidia GeForce 770 GTX 4GB, 16GB RAM and Intel i7 4770K, SSD). While I don’t have a video handy, attached are some screenshots. On the iMac with GeForce 780M 4GB, I get 55-80 FPS on Low/Medium settings in WvW.

Hackintosh screenshots:
http://imgur.com/XDhOTbZ

http://imgur.com/kPwhrdf

http://imgur.com/6eF7llj

http://imgur.com/BjLn3c4

that’s weird. i do get over 60fps with high settings almost everywhere with the same imac.

hi, I wanted to share some input again, which might help you in your quest

If the GW2 port only uses 1 CPU core, maybe you can set the affinity for the core with something like this:
wine Gw2.exe -dx9single &>/dev/null &
sleep 2
taskset -p “0×1” $(pgrep Gw2.exe)

Others reported that they made a startup script, which optimizes the usages of multiple cores (under Linux)
- check the scripting via this url: http://pastebin.com/mbPdwDTv

And some say, they managed to increase their performance by assigning a core for each process.

—

Another thing I found is, that people say they received a big fps increase with Wine 1.7.1 with CSMT patch
Did you try that perhaps already