Guild Wars 2

Any guesses as to how much benefit the new Metal API will have on Guild Wars 2 (or how much it will break? I’m slightly worried that Metal will actually break the Mac Beta and prevent support for the latest operating system for a bit until the wrapper can be updated…

Brother Grimm.5176:

My numbers were made up to make a point. NOBODY is going to allow anyone to invest significant resources without 2 things:

1) An insurmountable problem that MUST be fixed.
2) A significant return in potential revenue.

Neither of those apply here. The game as it is is NOT suffering for lack of DX11 support (it is NOT a MUST for the game to continue).

The other side of this is supporting multiple versions since they certainly CAN NOT discontinue support for the DX9 version. Despite what most player seem to think, that would actually INCREASE their recurring costs as well (having to test any change at least twice….having to do EVERYTHING twice).

Not gonna happen.

True in one sense. It comes down to quality of game play, with Guild Wars 2 having both client-side and server-side limitations. Frankly, they are about at the limit of what they can get performance-wise from the client, and PvE, WvW (and possibly some content in HoT) show this. I realize that some of the issues with WvW are server-side, but some are not. When your only option is to overclock the snot out of your CPU to get the truly best experience, it gets to be problematic. So yes, cost benefit analysis says that DX12 isn’t necessary at the moment, but they may find that their desire to add specific features to drive growth of the player base is sufficient to prompt the effort.

There are lots of issues with an MMO. Some of them are due to rendering (GPU), tasks/threading (CPU), and networking/bandwidth. There are ways to address each, within bounds. I have a theory that the older DX9/DX10 cards do better with GW2 (DX9) due to changes in the architecture in favor of DX11, though it may not be that simple. I don’t think that Arena Net is under the impression that most people are running ancient systems, though they have to determine where the inflection point is on the hardware graph, and it’s probably lower than we like. Reality is, MMOs are hard. They are doing remarkably well under an engine using DX9, but would need to transition to a newer DX version if they want to do any further optimization. Basically, it’s not going to get that much better apart from an engine re-write. Which isn’t going to happen any time soon I would wager.

EDIT: By the way, if the game is updated to use a newer DX, they couldn’t use the wrapper in use for the Mac client. So, there would need to be some significant changes there.

The Mac client is 32 bit, which I think would be too limiting for 4k. I could be wrong, but I’m gonna say that 4k is out of the question with the current client.

Gazareth.7230:

Doesn’t that just give you extra ram? Is that needed? What we want is better low-level use of our components. Guild wars 2 is a good looking game… aesthetically but not graphically (technologically). So it makes no sense that it runs like tosh. It seems like (given the early performance reports by Microsoft) if it was running on DX12, this problem would be almost completely absolved.

Targeting DX12 doesn’t magically fix things. It opens up the ability to more efficiently use the cores available on the processor, and appears to have more low-level adjustments available. This means that a lot of time spent and optimizing would be necessary. Yes, it would in theory be nice, but the upcoming content looks good and should be enjoyable regardless.

An engine upgrade is a fair bit of work, and it would behoove them to target DX12, which is still in development (since Windows 10 is a free upgrade for most). It offers the most benefits, and would allow them the most performance gains. While I expect there will be some tweaks to the engine, a major overhaul could be a few years out unfortunately.

This isn’t really a Mac issue though. It happens for my guild/EB as well. The [physical] servers can’t handle the clustered groups and by the time it sends the position data to your computer it’s after the fact. Only way this will improve is updated code. They already limit the number of players in EB at once for this reason, so it’s not that they don’t know about the issue. It’s going to take them a bit to figure out how to fix it.

Since this game uses a wrapper, the optimizations and work will go into the Window’s build first, with the Mac version getting that version to optimize from. Anet isn’t likely wanting to have two builds of the game (barring some minor differences I imagine), so they’ll have to go with Window’s first. They have fixed plenty of bugs on the Window’s client, and I’m sure that they are working on getting those on OS X fixed. In some ways, bug fixing with a port is harder than with a native client.

EDIT: For what it’s worth, I feel the pain of those still having issues. I’ve switched over entirely to Apple Computers (necessary for work), and my iMac struggles to get reasonable frame rates. It is playable for the most part luckily.

It seems as though Macs with ATI graphics are getting good (even better) frame rates, while the Nvidia users are getting subpar results. Small sample size thus far, but it’s a similar trend to what is seen in the Windows side…