Guild Wars 2

I should clarify about the drivers…. What I meant is that once there is an issue it generally takes Ati long time to release a fix… Let’s take Skyrim black texture issues… It took 3 driver revisions before the issue was resolved.. In the meantime people had to use an old driver to be able to play it.

This isn’t always the case, and they have gotten better, but that’s just kind of their history.

And yeah you are right about beta drivers for new games, in the grand scheme of things though those are far and few in between.

With consoles, I don’t think it matters who gets it, since unlike pc developers will be developing for that specific hardware.. Not a MHz higher not a MHz lower… So I’m sure everything will run perfectly.

Nope Nvidia nor ATI get access to games before they come out. I don’t know where you got that idea from.

The program logos during game boot up are placed there when Nvidia or ATI pays them money for advertising.. There are some benefits to it (they will offer optimization) but that involves a meeti g or two a few hours long and only at developer!a request.. Total time Nvidia or ATI spend on game development is less than 10 hours.

Yes there are some inherit guarantees as to the game running well on that particular vendors hardware, but it hardly means much more than that. It’s mostly just a paid ad.

ATI has historically been much slower on driver releases than Nvidia.

Most games run well within a few months because either the developer optimizes the game or Nvidia or ATI will release optimized driver or combination of both.

Both of which are usually a direct result of the community going on and on about problems and demanding them to get fixed.

The fact is though that most of the games run well on both its because the cards themselves are much more powerful than what the game needs.

I have no idea where you get your information but most of it is wrong. You either haven’t been using ATI cards for more than 5 years or don’t know anything about game development.

Nvidia acquisition of AGEIA among other smart moves (CUDA) allowed than to stay ahead for the last few years. AMD acknowledged that themselves by talks of shifting strategy from high end gaming cards…

Yes, they test on both… but if the entire development team is on Nvidia cards then they create code/assets based on their experience with the game they are coding.. which is based on Nvidia drivers… or ATI for some developers..

So basically it still ends up that the game runs better on one or the other platform. Its 2 years worth of art assets and coding plus QA time on 1 platformat… versus a few months of testing on another platform (if that).

The truth of the matter is that development teams are very short on time, on every game project… deadlines are everywhere… noone sits there and analyzes performance across a wide range of systems…. they basically run through the game a few times to ensure its playable.

You wouldnt believe how many games ship with “acceptable” bugs… some of which can easily be a worse performance on a certain card… the developer isnt going to lose sleep over a 10FPS loss on ATI architecture or Nvidia architecture… if the game runs 60 on one and 15 on the other then yes… thats a problem.. but if its 60 vs 45… not a big deal.

Could be a heat issue… check your heatsinks (video card and CPU) to make sure there is no dust…. if there is blow it out.

Yeah, I guess I should have stated that the video card giveaways is based on my personal experience.

Back on topic though….

So does everyone agree that GW2 runs as expected on ATI cards then?

Rabbiddog.7690:

It may very well be a ‘placebo’ effect but I have stuck to this method for years and have never had issues with games. I may have minor issues here and there that a little tweaking doesn’t fix, but nothing that doesn’t prevent me from playing games and playing them without having to sacrifice performance.

shrugs If it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it.

I also disagree with you that Nvidia are superior cards. IMHO it is all marketing. And game developers chose to favor one card over another based on what their own game engines will be most easily developed on. This doesn’t make it a superior card, just an easier developmental process. Also, AMD is getting better with their driver release schedules. Anyway, just my opinion.

I really don’t want to get into NVidia Vs ATI argument, but its not marketing, just look at anandtech or tomshardware benchmarks, Nvidia has been ahead for a few years across the board. Which is also the reason AMD is shifting their strategy from high end gaming cards. They aren’t able to compete.

As far as developers developing for Nvidia there are actually a few reasons… I work in the tech industry and get to deal with this all the time. The 2 main reasons are:

1- Nvidia tends to give out developers more cards than ATI does. Nvidia tends to give out top end cards while ATI gives out last gen cards. This naturally leads to devs using Nvidia more
2- whoever is in charge of ordering parts will look at benchmarks and will get the winners.. Since Nvidia has been winning for the last several years they tend to get Nvidia cards.

Personally I believe sticking with amd/ATI and Nvidia/intel is a placebo effect, Nvidia cards are currently better than AtI(amd) which means that developers will tend to develop on Nvidia cards. So less testing is done on ATI cards. Coupled with AMDs slow driver release schedule I think ATI cards suffer.

I agree that my tests aren’t scientific, however under no circumstances should 4850, 5850 and 6850 have about the same FPS in the same areas. Something isn’t right.

So I’m hoping either ATI releases better drivers or Arena net comes out with some optimizations.. I don’t know what the issue is.. I hope one of them does… If they don’t then that’s unfortunate

The fix could be as easy as giving us more granular graphics settings.. For example the ability to adjust particle effects, give us granularity with anti aliasing, giving more rendering options, allowing us to adjust the draw distance etc…

Or perhaps it could be as simple as Arena net releasing an application profile tailored for GW2 that works best for the game.

I’ve ran tests on a range of cards and motherboards, and Nvidia tends to get better FPS. High end Nvidia cards stick to 60fps while most ati cards are in the 40s and 50s. Tests were done on pcie3 and 2 boards and i5 3.4ghz quad core and i7 3.2ghz processors with 6,8 and 12 gb of DDR 3 with latest drivers from both manufacturers.

My biggest discovery is that 4850, 5850, 6850 tend to get about the same FPS in the same areas. And around 30 in Lions Arch. While respective generations of Nvidia cards tend to have a decent difference 9800gtx, GTX560, GTX460 having at least 10 FPS increase every generation.

So it seems like the ATI cards aren’t being used to their full potential.

Or perhaps there is something that GW2 does graphically that ATI cards aren’t good at? And therefore it bogs down the whole thing

It seems like a wide range of ATI cards have about the same (average performance) while Nvidia cards of the same generation seem to run the game better. Most importantly it seems like ATI cards run it at about the same FPS +-5 FPS across generations.. Wich should not ba happening. There is a huge increase between generations of Nvidia cards.

I also noticed that on most ATI cards setting everything to low tends to give about the same FPS as everything set to high. This definitely should not be happening.

Has anyone else noticed sub par performance with ATI cards? Even top end ones? Is it the ATI drivers? Has there been a word about perhaps better optimizing GW2 for ATI cards?

Thanks for any feedback on this.