Guild Wars 2

I’m supposed to have a powerful rig (AMD FX8320 8core), but truth be told, GW2 is not very well optimized. The frame-rate drops on zergs and the graphics don’t impress as much as they supposed to.

Many Youtubers who Stream the game suggest SweetFX as the means to enhance the graphics and improve the frame-rate, and to my understanding many people are already using it.

I was never a fan of any modding community, I don’t know much about using such tools and the last place I would normally think of using it would be on an MMO with strict modding laws.

So I would like to ask for oppinios…
How safe is this SweetFX thing?
How legal is it? (given that it only improves the graphics)

As from official posts by ANet:

“Does this program allow someone to play faster, better, longer, or more accurately than someone who doesn’t use it?”
“Does this program allow someone to ‘play’ when he/she is not at the computer?”
“Does this program allow the user to gain undeserved rewards?”

The answer to all three is no. As Sirsquishy said, it’s an API wrapper so it doesn’t alter the program giving any advantage over anyone else.

I’ve been using Sweetfx for a few months now and I don’t think I could ever go without. Not only are my graphics crisper, the colors are also more vibrant, and I even gained fps. My rig isn’t exactly a beast by today’s standards, but I rarely see lower than 45fps with everything set to max (except player model number is set lower so I can actually see something in WvW/zergs).

You’ll be fine, just don’t expect official support should you have problems.

Apparently doesn’t work with Crossfire, and possible SLI, so don’t even bother downloading if you run with more then one GPU.

As an alternative to SweetFX, especially if it doesn’t work for you or if you experience crashing with it, you should check out FXAA PPI.

I use it for enhanced anti-aliasing, color richness, bloom effect, sharpness, and other enhancements. All of my screenshots in my gallery linked in my signature are using it. I also have the split-screen comparisons between it and regular GW2 in my gallery as well.

It is quick and easy to set up and run. You can also use it to enhance pretty much any game that runs on DirectX 9. Each game can have a profile and the profiles are switchable, copyable, removable within the program so no copying files everywhere and editing config files like SweetFX has you do, or did have you do…not used SweetFX it in a very long time.

FXAA PPI also has absolutely no game crash issues that I see others having with Sweet FX, so that’s a nice bonus too. Also, FXAA PPI doesn’t need to be running for it to work on any game. Configure it for your game and it does it on its own. No need to launch games through the program like SweetFX makes you.

I find FXAA PPI to be very easy to adjust with clearly defined effects so it is easy to know what to tweak to get the results I desire. It really has a lot of options. I also have absolutely no performance loss with it unless I go real overboard on the bloom passes.

https://www.assembla.com/spaces/fxaa-pp-inject/wiki
Grab the latest FxaaToolSVN117 from the ‘Files’ tab.
Hitting the download button from the main page is the FxaaToolSVN112 as it hasn’t been updated with the latest version available.

Here was a discussion from about 10 months ago with some others on the FXAA PPI application. Some more info there as well:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/8-months-and-zero-optimization/1910878

It has some settings screenshots/file links there also for what settings I was using at the time. I switch up and tweak them frequently. If I am on my warrior I tend to adjust settings so I roam areas with almost a medieval tone to where things seem less saturated/cartoony and have a bit of a darker atmosphere or a less rich color to the environment. Sometimes I tweak it so it has that dirty western feel for one of my rangers. Sepia tone, scan line and noise adjustments are really great for this, especially to add a bit of a film grain quality as if in a western movie.

Anyway, I’ve recommended this to others in the past and have had players let me know how much the like and prefer it over SweetFX. Can give it a try, especially if SweetFX doesn’t work properly for you or if you don’t like having to launch games from within SweetFX or have it running all the time for it to be active in the game.

Any questions, let me know. Would be glad to help out.