Guild Wars 2

Chad.9038:

We’ve been taking this performance issue very seriously and have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the various causes you guys are experiencing.

Performance is very tricky because there are so many variables as to why the game could be running poorly, especially if it used to run fine. It hasn’t been affecting everybody and some of the folks experiencing issues have found them to be due to outside forces such as poor hardware cooling. We know this is a real issue from the things you guys have posted here and have been trying to find the root of the problem. Simply put, it’s been taking time to identify what the issues could be and trying to reproduce them in-house has proven quite elusive.

We’ve identified a number of serious issues some of which were introduced into the 9/9 build and have code changes on the way to address them. We don’t expect it to fix everyone’s performance problems but we certainly hope it will help the majority of you on this thread. I will follow up when the code changes go live and hope that you guys will report back as to whether they are making a difference or not.

I want to give props to you guys for helping each other out and providing helpful insight into this problem. I know it can be really frustrating, it is for us too so please bear with us. We sincerely want to make your playing experience the best we can.

Hey guys, I would appreciate it if you read the thread before commenting.

Unfortunately, my original post(above) was through my user account and not my work account so it doesn’t have the visibility it should. Please read it if you haven’t.

We are actively looking into performance issues and I have been providing updates on this thread regularly over the past couple weeks.

There seems to be some confusion about what our “fix” was. Disabling “High-Res Character Textures” was NOT it but did come in the same patch. The “fix” is not something expected to actually fix every bodies issues but rather address what many posters have been experiencing. That said, some of you have already reported back saying that it has helped and some of you have said it hasn’t made a difference.

We’ve continued looking into this issue beyond the latest changes and in doing so have found an audio issue that can affect the global performance of the game under certain conditions. This is where I asked that you try “-nosound” to see if it makes a difference and report back if it did. This was never a suggestion to actually fix your issue. Some players did this and reported a huge performance improvement and we can now justify shipping the code changes we’ve made in response. This is GOOD! This you all helping us help you.

Dr Cynosure.1840:

Chad Taylor.3487:

arjov.8649:

ehm , button for “high” texture settings is grayed out together with high character textures… is this your magic fix? no seriously are you trying to scale the graphic this way?

Serbianwolf.1652:

“High-res character textures” is greyed out and unable to change(check or uncheck). Also, “Textures:” field is empty, making me be able select only medium and low.

What is the meaning of this anet?

This was intended…sort of. “High-res character textures” will no longer be available for low performance CPUs(most dual core) since it can be incredibly demanding on performance; on CPUs like these it will make the game unplayable. The grayed out texture quality bit was unintended and will be fixed.

This was a very minor part of the changes that went in, none of which I would qualify as “the magic fix”. As I mentioned it’s been incredibly difficult to ascertain what some of you are experiencing and thankfully our changes helped some of you, but for others it did not. We will keep working on it, chipping away at the issues we find.

Thanks all for your feedback and apologies for the hiccup. I will keep you posted if we find a smoking gun.

You say that low performance CPU’s no longer can use high-res textures, i completely understand. But what i don’t understand is why i can’t? I have a quad core CPU, it’s a Intel® Core™ i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz. I’ve been running the game fine for the last 2 years. Can you help me?

Your processor is dual core with hyper-threading. In Windows Task Manager this appears as 4 boxes but its not actually 4 cores, just 4 hardware threads. The texture quality drop down fix is on the way so you will at least be able to use “High” textures again.

Labjax.2465:

Chad Taylor.3487:

If you are still seeing performance stuttering or fluctuations please try running the client with “-nosound” and let me know if it helps.

Where do you put the “-nosound” to try it?

1. Create a new shortcut for Guild Wars 2 or make a copy the existing one with a different name.

2. Then right-click on it and select “properties”. A window should pop-up with a edit box titled “Target” that shows the Gw2.exe.

3. Add [ -nosound] after the exe without brackets. Make sure there is a space before the dash.

4. Click OK and launch the game with the shortcut.

5. Verify it worked by ensuring the game isn’t outputting audio.

If you are still seeing performance stuttering or fluctuations please try running the client with “-nosound” and let me know if it helps.

Serbianwolf.1652:

Well, at least we got our response; which I deeply respect. Just to confirm this Chad, blank tab under “Textures:” is part of “intended development fix” or bug?

Thanks in advance!

bug

arjov.8649:

ehm , button for “high” texture settings is grayed out together with high character textures… is this your magic fix? no seriously are you trying to scale the graphic this way?

Serbianwolf.1652:

“High-res character textures” is greyed out and unable to change(check or uncheck). Also, “Textures:” field is empty, making me be able select only medium and low.

What is the meaning of this anet?

This was intended…sort of. “High-res character textures” will no longer be available for low performance CPUs(most dual core) since it can be incredibly demanding on performance; on CPUs like these it will make the game unplayable. The grayed out texture quality bit was unintended and will be fixed.

This was a very minor part of the changes that went in, none of which I would qualify as “the magic fix”. As I mentioned it’s been incredibly difficult to ascertain what some of you are experiencing and thankfully our changes helped some of you, but for others it did not. We will keep working on it, chipping away at the issues we find.

Thanks all for your feedback and apologies for the hiccup. I will keep you posted if we find a smoking gun.

Chad.9038:

We’ve identified a number of serious issues some of which were introduced into the 9/9 build and have code changes on the way to address them. We don’t expect it to fix everyone’s performance problems but we certainly hope it will help the majority of you on this thread. I will follow up when the code changes go live and hope that you guys will report back as to whether they are making a difference or not.

Fixes have gone live. Please report back if it affects any of the issues you guys are experiencing.

daimasei.4091:

Labjax.2465:

P. S. No Red tag! :P You need to get one…

Agreed. I just realized he was Chad because his post wasn’t a bunch of whining :P

100% legit now

DougTheSlug.3920:

These world boss crashes are getting real tiring. How many times do I need to submit these similar callstacks?
I crash almost daily at Karka Queen, or Shatterer. Today, I crashed at both.

I don’t crash anywhere else. I think in the years I’ve been playing, I’ve had one (1) crash that wasn’t at a world boss.

I have been sending in callstacks for over a year now for crashes at world bosses, and while I’ve not been looking that closely at them, they almost always look the same. These crashes showed up around the time the culling feature was removed (when was that, a year and a half ago?)

And no, I’m not interested in playing at “low quality” settings. That is a BS solution, and by doing that stupid workaround, Anet won’t get the volume of callstacks they should be getting over this ridiculous issue.

Further, I play 99% of my gameplay with everything maxed, and there is no preset for that. High only sets about half the settings to max. I still have to go in and manually set half the settings higher after I choose the high preset. I’m not interested in fiddling with a dozen settings multiple times a day just to workaround some crashes that should have been fixed a long time ago.

Please, for the love of {deity} put some priority on fixing these crashes. I have sent you countless callstacks now. The issue is easily reproducible:
1) Go to a world boss where a zerg collects
2) Auto attack boss and wait
3) Crash

Thanks for submitting your log files. I’ve found your corresponding crash reports and we will look into the issue immediately.

The skinny is that it looks like we’ve allowed you to shoot yourselves in the foot with maxed out graphics settings combined with crazy boss zergs. The GW2 client is a 32bit process which has access to just 4gb of RAM, even less in practice due to fragmentation in high churn environments like a zerg fest. I can see from your log files that you are hitting an upper limit of about 3.5 gb of allocated memory before crashing on a failed allocation(i.e. running out of memory).

In the meantime here are some things you can turn down that will free up some memory in zergs without compromising graphics too much:

-Disable “High-Res character textures”
-Ease back on “Character Model Limit” and “Character Model Quality”
-Ease back on “Lod Distance”

The memory use for characters can roughly be described as = character count * character quality * 4 (if high-res is enabled).

Report back if those changes don’t help and I will do the same when we have a fix in-bound.