Guild Wars 2

Katsu:

The point is, if I had problems on more than one game sure I would upgrade. This rig works PERFECTLY for everything else at the low resolution I play, with everything maxed out.

If one out of the 100 TV channels you get was grainy/choppy, would you change your TV thinking it would make a difference? You wouldn’t even think about it, you just stop watching that channel until the broadcaster fixes it.\

The fact is, I DID upgrade my system, back in beta and at launch I had 2GB DDR2 666 and a HD 5850. The upgrade did NO noticable difference in GW2 (maybe 5 FPS on average), but now I can enjoy every other game at ultra settings, up from medium-high before the upgrade. GW2 stays on crappy looking low.

For the record, RAM is not a bottleneck in terms of speed. RAM becomes a bottleneck really only when you don’t have enough to hold all the textures, no matter the speed, because then the engine has to load the textures from disk and the operating system swaps a lot of data in and out. I have no texture loading issues or stuttering linked to swapping. I have a constantly low FPS issue, which is directly linked to processing power, of CPU and or GPU. The purpose of a GPU is to handle all the complicated specialized 3d transform functions and floating point calculations, that a standard general purpose CPU is not tailored to handle. A game engine is not properly optimized when some of these complicated calculations are not properly directed at the processor that can handle it best.

There is also this lengthy thread at gw2 guru:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70452-nvidia-drivers-30697/

The fact is, ANet knows what they have to do to make the game run better on pretty much every piece of hardware out there, but they refuse to do it for whatever reason, maybe thinking the game’s hype will carry them until everyone gets a new PC.

Here’s one proof, straight from NVidia:

http://i.imgur.com/M4YgV.png

Also if you have any technical background related to these things, it’s not exactly hard to see.

LameFox:

GW2: between 70%-100% CPU usage most of the time.
BL2: CPU usage rarely ever goes above 50%, and the same holds true for most other properly optimized modern games.

The problem is that every other game out there actually uses the GPU for what it’s supposed to do, and GW2 does not, probably out of upper management ignorance/lazyness. Other games spend some time optimizing the engine to use the CUDA processor on NVidia cards, or ATI’s stream technology, etc, which results in most of the rendering being properly performed by the GPU, which is much faster and efficient than the general purpose CPU your computer has.

ANet instead decided to write all these time intensive algos for the CPU, probably thinking that by the time the game came out everyone would have 8 threads i7’s, and it wouldn’t matter, so they wouldn’t have to support two different versions of the same code for NVidia and ATI.

And when NVidia comes up with their own optimizations to offload some of the load to the GPU, ANet patches the client to block these optimizations (like they did in the last beta driver; NVidia claimed 20% increase in performance on the unpatched client). Some contacts at NVidia even claim they sent suggestions and a 100 pages document about optimizing the engine months ago, that ANet decided to shelf.

Core2 Quad, 4GB DDR2 800MHz, 10KRPM HDD, GTX570 2GB (I had a HD5850 before that, essentially no difference since upgrade…).

The performance of the client is HORRID. The engine is not optimized and you seem to have no plan to optimize it, with answers like “buy a new CPU” everywhere.

My CPU plays EVERY other game on max in 1280×1024 at above 60FPS even in very crowded areas. One game, even as fun as GW2 is, will not make me shell out 300$-400$ for a new motherboard, CPU, and memory.

It’s absolutely unacceptable that a game that was in development for 8 years has no GPU-specific optimizations. It’s even worse that when nVidia releases a driver with notable optimizations for your game, you block theses optimizations.

My suggestion? Work on your game engine before your game goes to the gutter. I personally refuse to play GW2 because the low performance is insanely annoying, and destroys my playing experience. I cannot do ANY PvP because at 24FPS on average I am a sitting duck.

When the beta weekends were going on, ANet stated that the game would run well on a wide range of hardware, blah blah marketing BS. Please honor your word. I WANT to play this game, but I cannot play it and enjoy it at the moment, and I am certainly not buying new hardware for this one game. Just for the record, WoW: 110 FPS constant, BL2: 125FPS constant, Max Payne 3: well above 60FPS, that with each game running on maximum detail. GW2: cannot even break 30FPS in Lion’s Arch on low details.

The problem is your engine, stop blaming the hardware and get to work.