Guild Wars 2

marnick.4305:

I run an i7 920@3Ghz and GTX650. I’ve got everything on high with a few tweaks to optimize performance with extremely stable 40+ fps. This PC is 3 years old except for the GPU, I do not claim it should run zerg vs zerg at 60 fps on highest … yet some people with similar setups do exactly that. Such claims are dishonest.

I’m running a similar, slightly more powerful, system (i7-920 @3,5GHz and GTX 670) and no, it isn’t. It’s not low-end hardware and even with an overclocked Haswell, you’ll end up with ~30FPS in zergs, the GPU barely matters. It’s just bad optimization, a single thread eating up too many cycles. They knew what they were programming, it should have been clear from the start that this wouldn’t work out.

marnick.4305:

However if it’s not from nVidia, this entire thread is pointless. The post hinges on the argument from authority that this is written by an nVidia employee. If it isn’t, there is no thread.

Yet there is a real problem, one acknowledged by nvidia. The post even if fake has many points based on facts. If you feel like this is not important then what are you doing here?

You make two weak premises here.
1/ you presume the engine doesn’t work just fine.
2/ you presume that, if it doesn’t, that a.net doesn’t know that.

The engine does not work fine. That is not a presumption and if you did any real research into it you would know what the main problem is and what needs to be done about it. Also i have no idea where you pulled that second presumption out of. If anything i implied that ANET knows and doesnt care enough about it to allocate enough resources to it to properly fix these issues.

I’ve seen the game become far more stable, less crashes, less graphical bugs and increased fps across the board.

I run an i7 920@3Ghz and GTX650. I’ve got everything on high with a few tweaks to optimize performance with extremely stable 40+ fps. This PC is 3 years old except for the GPU, I do not claim it should run zerg vs zerg at 60 fps on highest … yet some people with similar setups do exactly that. Such claims are dishonest.

Ever since the last few betas i have seen virtually no crashes or any artifacts but better FPS? No. In fact i can easily say the opposite when looking at places like Southsun Cove.
You are outright lying when you say you have 40 fps stable. The framerate in GW2 is anything but stable. The alleged nvidia post is right on the money with the performance variation statement. Yes MMO will vary more in performance in any case but it is very much up to ANET to keep performance on some sort of level either with proper coding or workarounds.

Post date: September 2012. A lot has changed since then.

Has it? Please provide proof for such bold statements. On the engine level besides the workaround in WvW virtually nothing of any significance has changed. The fact that GW2 is severely CPU bound and that it is only up to ANET to fix it is after 10 months still completely true.

Building an engine usually takes between 2 and 4 years of dedicated work. If you think a complete engine overhaul would take less than 10 months … you’re stupid. However a lot of incremental improvements have been made, which take far less time.

The “we’re working on it crap” isn’t crap if you have any idea about the amount of work you’re referring to. Some things simply take time. This isn’t a geocities website or ti83 game you may have built once or twice, it’s an actual videogame. And in the real world, these kinds of projects take time and are inevitably delayed. Happens all the time. I can’t imagine anyone over 20 not knowing that.

There are many other options besides making a complete overhaul of the engine. If you knew anything about game development you would know that.
ANET built a game around an old engine and while making many very good decisions they ignored one crucial thing: client side performance. The game simply does not scale well on a wide variety of PCs or rather CPUs. Even when faced with that fact they ve provided us with barely any options to alleviate this issue in all this time. Does coding a new option for reduced skill effects take 10 months? Did they redesign world boss and other events and WvW better to split up masses of people in 10 months? Did they implement other things to keep zergs under control? The list goes on and on. Sure the option to turn off other player models or using stock ones for PVE should be done soon but that is a very blunt solution.
As for the actual engine. Yes it probably requires an overhaul specifically on reducing the number of instructions in the main thread as most CPUs nowadays and in the near future do not run at 5-6GHz but rather have 4 or 8 cores. Does that take time? Yes. Does it take years? No. Unless the engine is so badly written that it was stupid to go along with it in the first place.

And as for the last statement again you completely misunderstood and went on to bashing me without even knowing my background. I cant imagine someone over 20 doing that… oh wait i can. So let me explain just for you again:
We simply want more info besides the “we are working on it” statements that we ve heard over a dozen times by now. In fact ANET hasnt even come out clean and acknowledged these problems properly or given us any info on upcoming solutions. If an engine overhaul is being worked on why are we not being told? And this awkward silence on their part isnt just on technical side of things but on general game future and development as well.

Iruwen.3164:

marnick.4305:

I run an i7 920@3Ghz and GTX650. I’ve got everything on high with a few tweaks to optimize performance with extremely stable 40+ fps. This PC is 3 years old except for the GPU, I do not claim it should run zerg vs zerg at 60 fps on highest … yet some people with similar setups do exactly that. Such claims are dishonest.

I’m running a similar, slightly more powerful, system (i7-920 @3,5GHz and GTX 670) and no, it isn’t. It’s not low-end hardware and even with an overclocked Haswell, you’ll end up with ~30FPS in zergs, the GPU barely matters. It’s just bad optimization, a single thread eating up too many cycles. They knew what they were programming, it should have been clear from the start that this wouldn’t work out.

Very true, GPU does not matter. Like I said guild member runs a onboard graphics card and gets better FPS then my GTX690.

CrazyDuck.4610:

Nvidia, who I dislike greatly as a company, is right. What that supposed employee said is true. FXAA does not even work that well in GW2 by any means. It was slapped into the game and that was it. FXAA is basically a pair of glasses that blur the games appearance, it doesn’t offer any true AA ability. ArenaNet made it worse by not even allowing the game to take advantage of some of the FXAA features — but not that it would have done much anyway.

Then there’s the other issues at hand: money. Company’s that develop games either join in our join out of Nvidia support by slapping logo’s on their games and getting profit. If Nvidia can not make money off of the game at hand, then support from them is null.

GW2 will never, ever, never-ever see AntiAliasing support from Nvidia. The current FXAA within the game is all you’re going to get, and that’s that. ArenaNet wants GW2 to be the biggest MMORPG game on the planet, but time is showing that most players are getting tired of the no-bug-fix company along with its constant content tossing. I like content, but so far I personally have seen mostly meaningless content being toss at my screen. ArenaNet has a lot to work on, and not enough employees with well driven management behind it.

As for AntiAliasing, go here and get better performance and better graphics:
http://ipkonfig.com/guild-wars-2-bringing-antialiasing-to-the-game

Nvidia said a while back that GW2 is still heavily CPU bound even AFTER ArenaNet said it was no longer CPU bound. The game still heavily relies on CPU and so-so on the GPU. People who say they get better performance on old GPUs are probably running good CPUs — that’s why.

We’re quickly approaching a year on this games release. My ability on my Thief is still broken, not a single performance patch has been released and tons and TONS of botted apps are allowing players to roam WvW that do all the fighting skill selection for them. MMORPG.com was quite ignorant to list GW2 as the number 1 game of 2013.

SonicTHI.3217:

There are many other options besides making a complete overhaul of the engine. If you knew anything about game development you would know that.

Guess what kind of meetings I have on a weekly basis. Guess what kind of customers I deal with. Sure it’s not gaming, it’s industrial grades software that’s used to produce things you use every day (your monitor for example). If we have a big fix to implement, it can take up to several months before it’s released. Currently we’re working on a very big overhaul. Such things literally take years and are inevitably delayed.
Customers understand that. I’m so glad I don’t have to work with entitled gamers but rather with Ph.D.’s who have a clue.

As for the actual engine. Yes it probably requires an overhaul specifically on reducing the number of instructions in the main thread as most CPUs nowadays and in the near future do not run at 5-6GHz but rather have 4 or 8 cores. Does that take time? Yes. Does it take years? No. Unless the engine is so badly written that it was stupid to go along with it in the first place.

And as for the last statement again you completely misunderstood and went on to bashing me without even knowing my background. I cant imagine someone over 20 doing that… oh wait i can. So let me explain just for you again:
We simply want more info besides the “we are working on it” statements that we ve heard over a dozen times by now. In fact ANET hasnt even come out clean and acknowledged these problems properly or given us any info on upcoming solutions. If an engine overhaul is being worked on why are we not being told? And this awkward silence on their part isnt just on technical side of things but on general game future and development as well.

Let’s be clear here. I tell people “we’re working on it” on a daily basis. People who’s entire income depend on that statement. Companies who could lose millions of euros over such statements. They accept that because they know we are actually working on it, and who’d rather have a good fix than a rushed one.

So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

GW2 has earned Anet and NCSoft Multi Millions of Euros but, value aside if I am not happy with my BigMac is it not my right to complain or is McDonalds too big of a company to bother with and I should just let them be?

The systemic failure of the company to provide adequate performance patches in a timely basis is the nature of the discussion.

Now let’s be clear here. Anet has not said anything about performance since the vague “we’re working on it” statement about a month or so ago and to many the performance of a product they have paid for has lessened.

I understand that performance patches and fixes take time. I am in I.T. as well and things do take time. But what I DO NOT DO is keep my customers in the dark and brush them off. This forum is an ideal place to alleviate the concerns of the end user, but it seems that Anet decides to post information on Reddit and other video casts rather than their own forum.

GW2 players are not chattel, they are not numbers or a faceless corporation. They are people, and people who care about something deserve to have answers when an issue is bothering them. Not the deafening silence that see throughout it’s entirety on this “official forum”.

To reiterate, it is the lack of communication and the lack of any meaningful performance grades in almost a year is what has people upset.

PS. Your quote at the end reminds me of the Anet manifesto of it is done when it is done…kind of like the performance engineers at Anet. We will fix it when we get around to it now bugger off and keep silent.

I have mixed feelings about that myself. Truth is Right now I can’t play at all, and a few months ago, while it wasn’t perfect at least I was still playing.

So as much as I’m trying to be supportive for anet – there is a fine line of enduring an imperfect game …vs …you mean I can’t play for a few months till they fix it ? It was just working!!!

so I wish there was a way they could do open beta test servers before releasing it and finding out 1/5th of your audience can’t play anymore.

I appreciate anet, I am very happy that they survived the cut backs and have a sustainable model. But consider our side too. I can’t play anymore…period.

Stormcrow.7513:

So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

GW2 has earned Anet and NCSoft Multi Millions of Euros but, value aside if I am not happy with my BigMac is it not my right to complain or is McDonalds too big of a company to bother with and I should just let them be?

The systemic failure of the company to provide adequate performance patches in a timely basis is the nature of the discussion.

Define timely. To an autist like me, timely means “when it’s done”. To an ADD’er it probably means yesterday.

Now let’s be clear here. Anet has not said anything about performance since the vague “we’re working on it” statement about a month or so ago and to many the performance of a product they have paid for has lessened.

I understand that performance patches and fixes take time. I am in I.T. as well and things do take time. But what I DO NOT DO is keep my customers in the dark and brush them off. This forum is an ideal place to alleviate the concerns of the end user, but it seems that Anet decides to post information on Reddit and other video casts rather than their own forum.

Forums are a very, very bad place to discuss this kind of thing. If it were up to me, I simply wouldn’t have had forums for this game. That said, the performance of the product they paid for has increased. That’s a fact you could see if you logged in once in a while. Free improvements … what are you complaining about. A.net doesn’t owe you.

GW2 players are not chattel, they are not numbers or a faceless corporation. They are people, and people who care about something deserve to have answers when an issue is bothering them. Not the deafening silence that see throughout it’s entirety on this “official forum”.

To reiterate, it is the lack of communication and the lack of any meaningful performance grades in almost a year is what has people upset.

Neither are developers chattel. There’s 8 hours in a day and 5 days in a week. Depending on the severity of issues, some things take time. Moving an entire engine from CPU-bound to CPU+GPU-optimized takes time.

Currently GW2 runs more stable and is better optimized than WoW two years in. I was there back then and I remember how horrible that game worked. And WoW got it’s act together around the 3 year mark. I sincerely hope A.net doesn’t need that long but I expected at least a year. At ten months it’s already acceptable, something WoW really wasn’t at this point. I can make do with acceptable for the time being.

PS. Your quote at the end reminds me of the Anet manifesto of it is done when it is done…kind of like the performance engineers at Anet. We will fix it when we get around to it now bugger off and keep silent.

Thanks for the compliment. I like that kind of work ethic. Rushed work is bad work. In the meanwhile, you’ll have to wait.

marnick.4305:

Customers understand that. I’m so glad I don’t have to work with entitled gamers but rather with Ph.D.’s who have a clue.

Wow, I actually wanted to reply to your post first since I’m also “in the industry”, maintaining an accounting system which processes high volume transactions, but that was so arrogant and uncalled for that I won’t even bother dealing with you. You basically just called the entire playerbase of GW2 stupid. Maybe you should work on your social skills first. Farewell.

I dont think you can really generalize this whole thing. For me the performance of the game increased drastically. I was unable to play when there were 15-20 people on screen because of FPS problems. This has steadily gotten better for me over the last months. Im using what I would consider a low-end CPU and a pretty average GPU.

Also this Email seems pretty fake to me. Prove me wrong but no hardware-manufacturer would call the publisher of a game – a (potential) customer to their software and hardware – “ignorant” or anything around those lines. If it just is a regular employee who talks about that privately he might not even have full insight into the matter. In fact I dont see a single point of proof in your post and therefore – until proof is presented – everyone should be aware that this a claim by OP and a claim only. We as regular customers dont have insight into whats going on at ANET and what their approach to this whole thing is. But Im certain that this is a matter that theyre aware of.

marnick.4305:

Guess what kind of meetings I have on a weekly basis. Guess what kind of customers I deal with. Sure it’s not gaming, it’s industrial grades software that’s used to produce things you use every day (your monitor for example). If we have a big fix to implement, it can take up to several months before it’s released. Currently we’re working on a very big overhaul. Such things literally take years and are inevitably delayed.
Customers understand that. I’m so glad I don’t have to work with entitled gamers but rather with Ph.D.’s who have a clue.

Dear Mr.Bigshot please start addressing my points and backing up yours instead of showing off how awesome and important you are on the interwebs. Also if you dont like dealing with “entitled gamers” then i ll ask you again: what are you doing here?

Let’s be clear here. I tell people “we’re working on it” on a daily basis. People who’s entire income depend on that statement. Companies who could lose millions of euros over such statements. They accept that because they know we are actually working on it, and who’d rather have a good fix than a rushed one.
So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

If you really work at such a high level i m sure the people who you say that phrase to can either sue you to oblivion if you do not deliver or at least fire you and i m sure you have meetings where your performance is assessed and graded and others where you have to explain things a lot better than with only that phrase.
However the end customer – developer or publisher relation is quite different and the phrase “we’re working on it” doesnt carry nearly as much weight in the game industry.
Game companies have no contractual obligations to their customers so please understand that the only thing we can do is bring this issue up with ANET on these forums. And no this has nothing to do with entitlement. As a consumer i expect any product i buy to work as advertised and if not for it to be fixed in a timely manner. If that is not possible i want to at least be given some proper explanation and not be kept in the dark.

rockafellah.5087:

I dont think you can really generalize this whole thing. For me the performance of the game increased drastically. I was unable to play when there were 15-20 people on screen because of FPS problems. This has steadily gotten better for me over the last months. Im using what I would consider a low-end CPU and a pretty average GPU.

Also this Email seems pretty fake to me. Prove me wrong but no hardware-manufacturer would call the publisher of a game – a (potential) customer to their software and hardware – “ignorant” or anything around those lines. If it just is a regular employee who talks about that privately he might not even have full insight into the matter. In fact I dont see a single point of proof in your post and therefore – until proof is presented – everyone should be aware that this a claim by OP and a claim only. We as regular customers dont have insight into whats going on at ANET and what their approach to this whole thing is. But Im certain that this is a matter that theyre aware of.

If the employee name isn’t published why not? And it wasn’t a formal discussion, this was just getting to the point and I respect him for that. I would rather an informal truth then a formal dance around the question. And you want proof? The proof is in playing the game, my GPU is at 99% with a GTX690 and low FPS but 9+ months ago I had no issues. Yet a guild mate of mine has an onboard graphics card and gets same if not better FPS. I’ve actually had another guild mates video card die while playing GW because of the 99% GPU issue. Anet is lucky they haven’t had class action lawsuits for frying video cards.

Having to overclock an i7 3770k just to get 20+fps in meta events is pretty bad. I have never seen a game the basically requires you to overclock your CPU.

Now you have

Microsoft is also suspect here ya know….I’m on a completely unrelated 3D software forum that’s just as resource heavy, and one of my friends computer just got boinked by microsoft updates …… Including another friend that had to send her new computer back to replace the board last week because it was overheating the cpu….. It makes me wonder if these recent microsoft updates are affecting our systems, adobe / nvidia and gw2 – microsoft is no angel and they have the ability to throw all these softwares out of whack with a bad update!! they’ve done it to me before.

Iruwen.3164:

marnick.4305:

Customers understand that. I’m so glad I don’t have to work with entitled gamers but rather with Ph.D.’s who have a clue.

Wow, I actually wanted to reply to your post first since I’m also “in the industry”, maintaining an accounting system which processes high volume transactions, but that was so arrogant and uncalled for that I won’t even bother dealing with you. You basically just called the entire playerbase of GW2 stupid. Maybe you should work on your social skills first. Farewell.

I have good hopes that not the entire playerbase of GW2 consists of entitled gamers. There’s more intelligent people in here, the rotten apples are exceptions. Unfortunately, the exceptions are far more vocal on forums, and on forums don’t tend to take no for an answer.
I didn’t want to insult the entire playerbase and I’m sorry if that was to be misinterpreted, I’m sure you understand what I wanted to say if you read it a second time.

That said, I usually call people when I’m not sure my emails can’t be misinterpreted, again a reason why having forums is a very bad idea. Text is too prone for unintended insults.

BTW: I don’t like to be quote mined. Answer the post instead of one out-of-context sentence.

SonicTHI.3217:

marnick.4305:

Let’s be clear here. I tell people “we’re working on it” on a daily basis. People who’s entire income depend on that statement. Companies who could lose millions of euros over such statements. They accept that because they know we are actually working on it, and who’d rather have a good fix than a rushed one.
So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

If you really work at such a high level i m sure the people who you say that phrase to can either sue you to oblivion if you do not deliver or at least fire you and i m sure you have meetings where your performance is assessed and graded and others where you have to explain things a lot better than with only that phrase.

Sometimes that’s the only possible explanation. They can’t and won’t sue me. Why would they? And why would my boss fire someone who delivers good customer support? I love my job and try to do it to the best of my ability. It pains me to say that line but again, sometimes it’s the only possible answer.

However the end customer – developer or publisher relation is quite different and the phrase “we’re working on it” doesnt carry nearly as much weight in the game industry.
Game companies have no contractual obligations to their customers so please understand that the only thing we can do is bring this issue up with ANET on these forums. And no this has nothing to do with entitlement. As a consumer i expect any product i buy to work as advertised and if not for it to be fixed in a timely manner. If that is not possible i want to at least be given some proper explanation and not be kept in the dark.

As an end customer you bought the boxed product. All obligations from A.net’s side ended there. Indeed they have absolutely no contractual obligations to add one more update to the game. They do because they want to earn money through gems, so the only argument of value you have, is your wallet. No forum post you make can have more influence than the amount of real money you spend to buy gems.

In the MMO industry, “we’re working on it” means several months on average. Eventually A.net will deliver. If not, people will stop buying gems for $$, so A.net has a good reason to deliver ASAP, which in this genre means, hopefully by the end of summer. Hopefully being the key word.

In GW1, people demanded 7 heroes, claiming gloom and doom for the game. A.net delivered, but it literally took years.

So again, what does “timely” mean to you? Months? Days? Years?

marnick.4305:

BTW: I don’t like to be quote mined. Answer the post instead of one out-of-context sentence.

And I don’t like people making excuses because something was allegedly “out of context”. Context often doesn’t change the intention of statement.

marnick.4305:

Sometimes that’s the only possible explanation. They can’t and won’t sue me. Why would they? And why would my boss fire someone who delivers good customer support? I love my job and try to do it to the best of my ability. It pains me to say that line but again, sometimes it’s the only possible answer.

And what if you wouldnt deliver a few times? Do you think that phrase would still hold as much merit with your superiors? Also as i said there is a big difference in who says it and to whom. Yes when talking about a very specific thing that can be the only answer but not in the case that we are talking about here.

As an end customer you bought the boxed product. All obligations from A.net’s side ended there. Indeed they have absolutely no contractual obligations to add one more update to the game. They do because they want to earn money through gems, so the only argument of value you have, is your wallet. No forum post you make can have more influence than the amount of real money you spend to buy gems.

In the MMO industry, “we’re working on it” means several months on average. Eventually A.net will deliver. If not, people will stop buying gems for $$, so A.net has a good reason to deliver ASAP, which in this genre means, hopefully by the end of summer. Hopefully being the key word.

In GW1, people demanded 7 heroes, claiming gloom and doom for the game. A.net delivered, but it literally took years.

So again, what does “timely” mean to you? Months? Days? Years?

If ANET is only looking at gems bought they have a serious case of bad management. MMOs are a service and those sales are the last indicator of its success. When they go bad it is already too late. That s why you also need feedback and that s what these forums are for among other things.

In the MMO industry, “we’re working on it” can mean anywhere from now to never. It is as vague of a phrase as “when its done” or soon™.
Having 7 heroes or dealing with technical difficulties are two completely different things. One is a feature request, the other is a problem affecting the majority of the playerbase.

GW2 is a case of bad game design where the devs either didnt judge their engine performance correctly or they didnt consider the hardware used by most people. So a proper solution for this should have been implemented before the game was even released.
But as far as specifics go… something like particle effect reduction shouldnt take more than a month or two even with a very small team. Some things in games can be very easily implemented. I requested the option to turn off depth blur somewhere in the last few betas and got that option by release. Of course other things take much more time but as i said they should at least be more specific and tell us what they are working on even if they cant give us the info when it will be done. And that also goes for other things like features and general game direction.

This is my first time posting or even reading forums as I’ve not had any trouble with the game (based off of the last MMO I played) yet.

marnick.4305:

Let’s be clear here. I tell people “we’re working on it” on a daily basis. People who’s entire income depend on that statement. Companies who could lose millions of euros over such statements. They accept that because they know we are actually working on it, and who’d rather have a good fix than a rushed one.

Let’s be clear here first, you may do this and that is fine for the customer if you actually deliver consecutively on that statement. So far what I’m reading is Anet has utterly failed at this.

I want to give you two scenarios, as with most people you seem to be unable to see alternate perspectives.

The first is a hypothetical, which is what we wish to avoid by asking for more specific information regarding updates and patches instead of getting rubber stamped.

Customer: Hey, I’ve found a major bug.
Company: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will look into this and begin working on solutions.
Few days later-
Customer: Hey I’m still having this major issue.
Company: We are aware of the problem and are doing our best to work out a solution.
Few weeks later-
Customer: What is going on? It’s been weeks and I still can’t play your game properly.
Company: We are working on it.
A year later-
The bug still exists.
The Companies response: We are aware of this issue and are working on it.

The phrase “We are working on it” means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the real world. It is solely a band-aid to keep the masses at bay.

My second example is my personal experience with an MMO company:

Me: Hi, I’ve noticed that with the new GUI there is an issue with the pet and party windows. First, with my pet out and the status window active, every time I join a party, the party window opens over the pet window. This wouldn’t be so bad if the party window opened in the last place you positioned it like in the old GUI. It also seems like the new pet window is locked in position and cannot be moved anymore. Simple solutions would obviously be to unlock the pet window so it can be moved again, or have the party window “remember” its last position like it used to. Other than this the new GUI looks great.

Company Response: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will forward this on to our design team.

1.5 years later and nothing, the windows continued to open over each other, and the pet window was locked (unmovable). I even gave them two possible solutions that were already part of the old GUI.

I actually quit playing and moved here because they had persistent bugs (example being 4 years of dc issues when entering 1 specific instance) and in the last two months the only things worked on were fashion items (non functional appearance, similar to town clothes in gw2) and 6 new kinds of random item gambling packs in their Real Money shop. That’s it.

So now that you’ve seen what “We are working on it” means to a customer, who might I add in this game don’t generally have millions of euros to be tossing around, would you like to rethink your response to that?

I completely understand that most bug fixes and overhauls take time. Compared to that typing a few lines to your customers about whats going on about an issue takes almost no time at all. Yet, it seems more and more companies don’t care one bit about their customers. These things are what keeps their dedicated customers coming back. These things differentiate between serious customers and people who only come onto a game to pass time.

Some of us may be entitled gamers, but honestly we are their customers. WE are the reason the exist. WE are the reason they make money. Why is it so hard for you to understand why we want to know a little more than “We are working on it”.

Now as to the OP, I doubt that it is a real employee that made those comments. But, i can only speak from how my game runs. I run an i7 – 2600k OC’ed at 4.4Ghz, 16GB of ram OC’ed to 1833Mhz, dual GTX 560 Ti in SLI configuration (Always running the newest beta drivers), dual 1920×1080 res monitors. As of writing this my cpu is at 40-55% and both gpu running at 50-60% with 88% vram usage. In Lions Arch right now i have all settings except LOD Distance and reflections on high, with supersample on native. Im sitting at 48-60 fps at the bank depending on the number of toons needing loaded.

GW2 is clearly offloading alot onto my gpu’s. One tip though, you could try shutting hyperthreading off in your BIOS. This is supposed to give my core bandwidth and raw processing power. I’m not sure if this would help with gw2 being multi-core compatible (all 8 of my logical cores are being used) but it is something you can try.

LA is probably one the worst examples in this case since it’s actually one of the few places in the game that really stresses the GPU, probably because of the amount of detail all around the city and the reflections that appear in the water flowing through it. Also people are hardly doing anything, most aren’t visible anyway because of culling and those who are just stand around. And even if the FPS are low in a city, it doesn’t really matter.
FPS are always low where it matters, i.e. at all crowded events where you actually have to react and use skills, and that’s always because of high CPU usage, you can see that GPU usage drops to really low levels then (<30% for my GTX 670@1280MHz). And unfortunately, there’s nothing you can really do about that CPU usage, except more overclocking.

Honestly Iruwen it doesn’t matter where I am my GPU gets way too hot, fans spin at insane speeds and GPU % is way too high I can run games 10X more intense than this and not hit 99% GPU. But the proof is in the updates, 9 months ago I never had FPS issues.

Someone brought this up-
"If GW2 is passing off non-serial functions to the GPU, that would explain the increase, as it would be removing some of the CPU’s current overburden Again, I’ll have to verify this (if possible) through extensive virtual machine testing. "

So they basically probably tried to take the burden off the CPU and make the GPU do some of the work/all the work. Well this can cause the exact issues we are having. My CPU is only at 8-11% usage TOTAL while game is running? Why offload so much CPU work when my CPU isn’t even being used. Also a CPU can handle higher load consistently alot better then a GPU can.

In a perfect world, game developers will write their engines to the DirectX or OpenGL API standards and GPU manufactures will write drivers to translate those functions into commands that will use the GPU as efficiently as possible for the hardware features that GPU has.

Sadly this isn’t what happens. What happens is GPU manufactures write fairly basic drivers that aren’t terribly efficient and shake down game developers, offering them help for a fee. What they end up doing is, and this is mainly with shader code, provide them a “hand assembled” version of the shader they want to use or will unilaterally replace the shader unilaterally in the driver code if the game is popular enough to use as a major benchmark. This is because the shader compiler provided in the driver from either manufacturer works but doesn’t produced very optimized output. How else do you think a beta driver can suddenly give a 20% boost to performance in a new game without changes to the game code?

On one hand writing an optimized compiler for anything isn’t an easy task, a lot of deep magic is involved and clever developers who can do that are both rare and expensive to employ. On the other by not putting in much effort into getting better results from the compiler keeps the “partnership” program and revenue stream going.

When games favor one manufacture over the other, it’s often due to the game developer being told how to code their shaders in a way that happens to be much better in that manufacturer’s shader compiler but not necessarily in the other’s.

So to perform well in both it’s now on the game developer’s shoulders to provide two or three sets of shader code depending on whose driver is being used (N or A or generic). An application provider shouldn’t have to care about whose device is being used to do function X, that’s the whole purpose of the driver code, you abstract that stuff away. And it’s true everywhere but video drivers and games.

So ANet refused to pay to play. Congrats. But this does mean that the game will never perform as well as one from a company that was willing to pay “performance” money to the big two for their “expert” guidance.

somehow I’m really starting to suspect that recent windows 7 patches are a big source of the problem. Just google “windows 7, Lag” then filter it down to the last 24 hours.. it’s not just guildwars and not just nvidia, and not just games for that matter.

Ricky.4706:

somehow I’m really starting to suspect that recent windows 7 patches are a big source of the problem. Just google “windows 7, Lag” then filter it down to the last 24 hours.. it’s not just guildwars and not just nvidia, and not just games for that matter.

Lol… Yet every other game runs perfectly for me? Hmm

it’s no secret that the game needs more optimization, but there’s been a wave of failure on the net recently not limited to guildwars, last adobe update has been running like crap, nvidia’s forums is blowing up with problems and complaints, my graphic software unrelated to gw2 have been running slower had 2 people i know computers crap out after the last 2 updates, one of which was right after she updated her machine ….whether other games run perfectly for you is irrelevant if the error thats affecting my computer and gw2, is coming from microsoft. Your computer may simply have more tolerance for it, but you still feel it more in gw2 = we all do…..so imagine how bad my and everyone elses game is running if your’s is running so poorly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

CrazyDuck.4610:

Honestly Iruwen it doesn’t matter where I am my GPU gets way too hot, fans spin at insane speeds and GPU % is way too high I can run games 10X more intense than this and not hit 99% GPU. But the proof is in the updates, 9 months ago I never had FPS issues.

Someone brought this up-
"If GW2 is passing off non-serial functions to the GPU, that would explain the increase, as it would be removing some of the CPU’s current overburden Again, I’ll have to verify this (if possible) through extensive virtual machine testing. "

So they basically probably tried to take the burden off the CPU and make the GPU do some of the work/all the work. Well this can cause the exact issues we are having. My CPU is only at 8-11% usage TOTAL while game is running? Why offload so much CPU work when my CPU isn’t even being used. Also a CPU can handle higher load consistently alot better then a GPU can.

Sorry but that’s plain bs and if your card is showing such behaviour when it’s loaded it’s simply broken.

It’s not BS, and it’s not just me look around at other threads. And I have used multiple computers to test and the issue still arises. Any other game out there works perfectly fine. CPU % at 8-11% is very low and under used for a “CPU heavy game” as the developers have said.

I’d love to hear an official statement about this, because GW2 is the worst optimized game ever and I’m getting tired of it.

^ Agreed surprised they haven’t yet.

I’m running an e450 1.68 ghz dual core laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 (even has its own pool of 2 gig ram). The game works poorly no matter what I do, but it doesn’t overheat my machine either… yet its been worse at loading things and my character since Halloween event. I can run all high on the GPU end of things, but the CPU bottlenecks so badly (and loads even slower) its not worth it. If Anet makes the game more 50/50 on terms of reliance of GPU and CPU, I think dual cores can run this very well.

I even run PSO 2 and GW 1 better than this on this machine! GW 1 topped 60 fps in spots!

I remember ANET saying GW 2 runs off of a modified GW 1 engine and if so, we shouldn’t have these problems.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I’m running an e450 1.68 ghz dual core laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 (even has its own pool of 2 gig ram). The game works poorly no matter what I do, but it doesn’t overheat my machine either… yet its been worse at loading things and my character since Halloween event. I can run all high on the GPU end of things, but the CPU bottlenecks so badly (and loads even slower) its not worth it. If Anet makes the game more 50/50 on terms of reliance of GPU and CPU, I think dual cores can run this very well.

I even run PSO 2 and GW 1 better than this on this machine! GW 1 topped 60 fps in spots!

I remember ANET saying GW 2 runs off of a modified GW 1 engine and if so, we shouldn’t have these problems.

That is some really bad reasoning you got there since GW2 has models with 10-100 times the polygon count of GW1, not to mention other graphical additions. There are reasonable expectations and improvements and then there is this.

People with quad cores cant run this game well yet you expect to run it on something that is 5-10x slower than a proper gaming PC: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

I am directly requesting, as per my right as a customer and patron of ArenaNet, that we be given some official comment from ArenaNet regarding this issue.
It has already been established that this is a wide-spread problem for many users, and if there is any news on a fix, please address it here so that we all might resume enjoying the game we paid $60+ for.
Thank you in advance for your compliance, ArenaNet.
We look forward to continued adventures in Tyria!

Nowadays, same GPU (GTX 690), same problems. Fps really dreadfull. Other games running absolutely smooth on max settings.
Guild Wars 2 fps falling to, I believe, 5-10 sometimes (even on min settings). Really often, to be honest.
And after Queen’s Jubilee mega events I’m done.
I’m playing since GW and it was one of the best MMO’s for me.
So, now I’m leaving GW 2, at least until ArenaNet will fix their mistakes.

Yeah, I’m just talking from a personal point of view, it used to run kinda good, I loved and love this game and spent over 100 euros on it and gladly supported Anet, but this situation is just making me sick of it, from 20 fps in Lion’s Arch with everything on max it has now dropped to 5-10 fps with everything turned off to the minumum and subsample in dungeons, it is just horrible to look and to play and I am sincerily sad for this ’cause I would have gladly invested both more time and money in this game if only Anet would have gave a sign of working on this problem.

I will also buy a new computer ONLY for this game, if even that doesn’t solve it then i will be out.

That business model sounds like my workplace

The game engine is poor at start ever since I load GW2 into my system. LA low 40 FPS… WvW down 25 FPS lowest.

A system pushing at 4.7 to 4.8Ghz 6 cores 3930k (12 virtual cores) $600 CPU and GTX TITAN to run this poorly.

p.s. no i didn’t build this system for GW2 but to run other high end games at 1440p without issues. Going back to old MMO like World of Warcraft, that game dump out 300FPS in DX9 and DX11 mode at max.

Engine is known to be very poor since Beta Week launch.

I had a feeling the game isn’t fully utilizing the GPU VRAM leads to constant loading from HDD to CPU which drags down the FPS.

Culling engine is terrible. GW2 base on Umbra Culling http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/

I believe it is poorly use or something.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I’m running an e450 1.68 ghz dual core laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 (even has its own pool of 2 gig ram). The game works poorly no matter what I do, but it doesn’t overheat my machine either… yet its been worse at loading things and my character since Halloween event. I can run all high on the GPU end of things, but the CPU bottlenecks so badly (and loads even slower) its not worth it. If Anet makes the game more 50/50 on terms of reliance of GPU and CPU, I think dual cores can run this very well.

I even run PSO 2 and GW 1 better than this on this machine! GW 1 topped 60 fps in spots!

I remember ANET saying GW 2 runs off of a modified GW 1 engine and if so, we shouldn’t have these problems.

Got to say that CPU, the E-450, was meant to compete with Intel’s Atom in netbooks and then some genius decided to put them in inexpensive laptop and occasional desktop. It’s fine for browsing and lightweight gaming (Angry Birds, Plants Vs Zombies) but if you thought a “modern” high poly count MMO will be able to play well is somewhat optimistic. You aren’t even at the minimum system requirements for CPU or GPU.

And no, the integrated HD 6320 doesn’t have it’s own pool of memory, the E-450 isn’t designed to support what AMD called once “sideport” memory. You were fed a bunch of marketing hooey and assumed it actually has dedicated memory.

i am reading daily the nvidia forums and i never saw any “response”

can open poster or someone else link us the the whole text in nvidia forums ?

DJRiful.3749:

The game engine is poor at start ever since I load GW2 into my system. LA low 40 FPS… WvW down 25 FPS lowest.

A system pushing at 4.7 to 4.8Ghz 6 cores 3930k (12 virtual cores) $600 CPU and GTX TITAN to run this poorly.

p.s. no i didn’t build this system for GW2 but to run other high end games at 1440p without issues. Going back to old MMO like World of Warcraft, that game dump out 300FPS in DX9 and DX11 mode at max.

Engine is known to be very poor since Beta Week launch.

I had a feeling the game isn’t fully utilizing the GPU VRAM leads to constant loading from HDD to CPU which drags down the FPS.

Culling engine is terrible. GW2 base on Umbra Culling http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/

I believe it is poorly use or something.

+1 for truth.

DJRiful.3749:

The game engine is poor at start ever since I load GW2 into my system. LA low 40 FPS… WvW down 25 FPS lowest.

A system pushing at 4.7 to 4.8Ghz 6 cores 3930k (12 virtual cores) $600 CPU and GTX TITAN to run this poorly.

p.s. no i didn’t build this system for GW2 but to run other high end games at 1440p without issues. Going back to old MMO like World of Warcraft, that game dump out 300FPS in DX9 and DX11 mode at max.

Engine is known to be very poor since Beta Week launch.

I had a feeling the game isn’t fully utilizing the GPU VRAM leads to constant loading from HDD to CPU which drags down the FPS.

Culling engine is terrible. GW2 base on Umbra Culling http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/

I believe it is poorly use or something.

With GPU-Z you can see how much video memory is being used on the sensors tab.

Umbra is for occlusion culling of large fixed objects, buildings, landscape, etc. Smaller, moving, destroyable, animated objects don’t use it. That’s very obvious when you pop into the LA portal hub as the center circular event monument, railings, banners, flags aren’t drawn at the same time as the larger features. Without Umbra they would either have to write one themselves and/or use fewer objects.

Multi GPU setups, either with multiple cards or cards like the GTX 690 or HD 7990, added performance isn’t guaranteed. There are “gotchas” you have to avoid doing in your rendering code while talking to the drivers that if you don’t avoid, will kill any performance gain. And maybe that’s where nVidia guy is coming from because AMD and nVidia want games to show off SLi and CrossfireX because those companies sell hardware. Which is also why they love over the top game engines that almost requires either $500+ single cards or pairs of $300+ cards to run with settings past medium or pushing double or triple monitor setups.

What I don’t get though, is that something changed over the past month or two that caused my FPS to fall through the floor. And I have an AMD GPU. AFAIK, nothing changed on my end except the game patched (or had a new build or whatever you want to call it).

@DjRiful

You can see my specs in my sig.
In LA i get 55-60 FPS and thats running at a resolution of 3200×1800 downsampled with setitngs maxed and Supersampling. The ONLY setting that is not maxed is reflections, becouse they a still borked, so i set them to Terrain and Sky.

WvW FPS well thats understandble really, i get simular FPS. 20-35 in those massive EB zergs and 30+ in most other zergs. 45+ in small 50 mans. etc. Though i might add that the WvW setitngs are set to Highest on character limit, and ‘Medium’ on texture limit(‘low’ when in those insane EB zergs).

I don’t care who wrote it a nvidia employee or my grandma all of those statements are correct. There was almost no patch that covers any techincal issues. The engine flaws are most visible on low end computers. When I look into sun I get like 10 fps when I look the other way I get 45 with all high except reflections! Really? I mean this sun isn’t so awesome…. In southsun cove my fps drop is extreme, from around 30 with 30 limiter and vsync to about 15.

There is also nice notice nobody from Anet ever responded to any thread about techincal polish, they made a funny guide to improve fps that does really nothing and this guide feels like written for people who don’t know what vsync is for.

Even if they would respond they would just say that they never heard about it I guess.

Really making all those story patches is not enaugh to make mmo a great game, actually it’s second after a nice polished graphics engine.

I really loved the GW1 series and also had respect for them making the game, it’s system requirements were absurd for such amazing graphics, but this time it looks like they made system requirements like gta 4 which was one of most poorly ported games in history.

I got a new PC with an i5 3570k and a gtx760 2GB vram and I can honestly say I only have about 30 FPS on Lion’s Arch but there’s absolutely no bottle neck on my system. The Vram doesn’t pass 1GB, the load on the graphics card doesn’t go over 70% and the CPU stays at 80%. I don’t have any problems with overclocking if it was bottlenecking my system, but nothing is pushed to the max and my fps are still crap! wtf is happening?
I’m really disappointed, I didn’t gain any increase in FPS from my old pc.

Canoas.8423:

I got a new PC with an i5 3570k and a gtx760 2GB vram and I can honestly say I only have about 30 FPS on Lion’s Arch but there’s absolutely no bottle neck on my system. The Vram doesn’t pass 1GB, the load on the graphics card doesn’t go over 70% and the CPU stays at 80%. I don’t have any problems with overclocking if it was bottlenecking my system, but nothing is pushed to the max and my fps are still crap! wtf is happening?
I’m really disappointed, I didn’t gain any increase in FPS from my old pc.

The graphics engine used for GW2 is a modified version of the one they used for GW1. It’s old, and it appears to suffer from code bloat. Anet refuses to admit it. IMHO, this legacy engine demands a higher end system just to run, not because of the use of better specs but because it’s so antiquated it cannot run on low end systems. It uses DX9, not Dx11 like most new mmo’s., etc..

I have always had low FPS in GW2, and its not much different now than it was at launch.

I’m 100% sure as with most people here thakittens over reliant on the CPU and the GPU is hardly used.

I use a 3770k @ 4.4 and 780 GTX SLi – and it likes to lag quite a bit.

I live in hope that they will optimize it some day….

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

The graphics engine used for GW2 is a modified version of the one they used for GW1. It’s old, and it appears to suffer from code bloat. Anet refuses to admit it. IMHO, this legacy engine demands a higher end system just to run, not because of the use of better specs but because it’s so antiquated it cannot run on low end systems. It uses DX9, not Dx11 like most new mmo’s., etc..

My problem is that there’s absolutely no bottleneck on my system. It’s not using too much CPU and too little GPU like others are saying, it’s simply not maxing anything! My CPU is at 80% at most and my GPU is only at 70%. I still have 1GB of free Vram and 4 GB of free RAM and nothing is being bottlenecked. Why is nothing at 100% like it should be? At least one thing must be always maxed out for the frame rate to be low. If the game is dependent on the CPU then the CPU would be at 100%, if it’s on the GPU then the GPU would be at 100%, but mine aren’t. They’re just not being used.

Because the one thread that’s synchronizes all the others is likely maxing at a core’s worth of performance. Doesn’t matter how many cores you have, no thread can get any more that one core’s worth of CPU performance. You have a quad core there Canoas and I haven’t seen the game use more than 3 cores worth of performance, usually less.

If the rendering code can’t feed the GPU with enough data because it’s limited to a single core’s worth of CPU performance, then the GPU is going to be under 100%.

i don’t have the best rig but i can other mmo’s just fine . wht i have notice is when u turn some stuff to low almost nothing change just +4 or 5 fps up , strange cause in other mmo’s the shadow alone give 10 fps or 15 boost , then u start teawking stuff till u have a good looking game with good fps . i hop they will start working on this problem soon .