Guild Wars 2

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, but… what exactly is “culling”?

In computer graphics, it’s the removal of an object before it is passed down the rendering pipeline. No need to do any rendering work on something that won’t ever be visible to you. No reason to texture a surface that’s facing away from you or is behind another object.

Here it’s generally refers to not drawing player/NPC models to reduce rendering workload, sometimes because those models aren’t loaded yet into memory or because they are simply too many of them. Rather than pausing the renderer to wait for these models to be loaded or all of them to be drawn, they are culled from the view. You run into the TP or bank in LA and you see nobody but name tags for 5-15 seconds, well their models are culled until they are loaded/created.

Think of it in the same context as culling a herd of animals.
In the case of graphics its culling a set of data. be it character models, objects, textures, effects etc etc.

The options in GW2 for culling have the choice of lowest to highest. It refers to limits, therefor Highest = the limit is set high befor culing kicks in. Lowest = the limit is low so culling starts sooner.

So would culling have an impact on FPS?

Flatley.1620:

So would culling have an impact on FPS?

Very much so, the more people/objects shown on the screen, the more the CPU has to do all sorts of calculations. Eventually, there comes a point where the CPU just can’t do enough calculations on all the people/objects fast enough. This makes is so the CPU can’t feed the GPU enough data fast enough to produce a smooth FPS.

Ah, right. So, as Bill Feist mentions at the bottom of this page:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Official-response-on-the-Lag-issues-please/page/4

There may a positive in that FPS could be increased in a future build? Perhaps some code optimisation?

Flatley.1620:

Ah, right. So, as Bill Feist mentions at the bottom of this page:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Official-response-on-the-Lag-issues-please/page/4

There may a positive in that FPS could be increased in a future build? Perhaps some code optimisation?

I don’t like to speculate but… we’ll have to wait to find out :p

I wouldnt hold your breath. GW2 has been out for long enough and still no significant performance increases have been made.
The game engine itself is at fault and changing it in any way is difficult. Their bigest mistake was to use the old Gw1 engine as a starting point. They should have gone with a completly different engine. But they didnt, they cut corners, and this is the result.

SolarNova.1052:

I wouldnt hold your breath. GW2 has been out for long enough and still no significant performance increases have been made.
The game engine itself is at fault and changing it in any way is difficult. Their bigest mistake was to use the old Gw1 engine as a starting point. They should have gone with a completly different engine. But they didnt, they cut corners, and this is the result.

Lots of speculation and guessing in there for someone that doesn’t work at ANet. Not saying it’s all BS, but you presenting it as a statement of fact is annoying when you don’t really know the details. I’m specifically looking at the “cut corners” statement made when you have no idea what the possible reasons were for using the GW1 engine as a base rather than something else. I highly doubt the reasoning was 100% a resource availability or “this will be easier” decision.