Guild Wars 2

I hate jumping puzzles.

I love the sky crystals hunt.

I hate sPvP. I despised Dragon Ball.

I played the sprint event several times and had SO MUCH FUN.

Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it right.

This guide is epic. Guardian was my first serious class in this game. I read this around level 30 when I was flailing about and not really groking the class overall. In fact, a lot of the guide’s suggestions and tips (“Utilities are not the core of your X”, “Elites are panic buttons”) have carried over into other classes I fool with.

One minor thing: An amazing majority of the Elite skills don’t work under water. I know it isn’t a major deal, but it seems like Renewed Focus is the only Guardian Elite skill that works underwater. As a Charr Guardian, it is the only elite that works underwater.

I learned this through process of elimination. :-/

TL;DR: If you have TBD display and feel a bit let down by your performance, it may be be to your benefit to find a 1080p display to play on instead.

I’m mostly posting this here because all sorts of searching on the forums by almost all the words in the title and have turned up zero information on this sort of setup.

I have a late 2012 15" Mac Book Pro (Non-Retina) and a Thunderbolt display. I run GW2 via Boot Camp with my MBP closed in a Arc stand powering the TBD. Even thought the display is 2560×1440, I’d scale back to 1920×1080 to maintain at least a decent frame rate while not resorting to sub-sampling.

I discovered this week while over at a friends house that using a Mini-DP to HDMI adapter to power his 27" 2560×1440 display actually worked awesome. It was way better than Boot Camp + Thunderbolt Display which in turn was better than running the OSX Client. I’ve tested on my TV and found that (as expected), running Mini-DP directly at 1920×1080 gives me somewhat better than slideshow performance in WvW. So, for this particular MBP, it looks like native 1920×1080 is the upper bound for GW2 in Boot Camp.

EDIT: Quick bit of information I forgot to post. I’m using Windows 7. Due to assumptions Windows 7 makes about PCIe, Thunderbolt has certain limitations though the only documented limitation is hot-plugging devices. YMMV using Windows 8 and/or future releases of the Boot Camp drivers.

otherworld.4012:

Yeah, its completely fine with the original configuration file that came with the game, it just does it when I try this one. I just wanted to see if it was just me, or if other people were having the same problem. I have no problem using the original, I just liked the increase in fps I got with this file and hoping there was a solution. No big deal

Diff’ing against the original config file, I went through setting by setting. It appears this line is what’s causing it.

"FBOBackBuffer" = "Y"

Simply change “Y” to “N” and you should get the map back to normal.

However, this may reduce the amount of FPS gain you were seeing using this configuration before. At least when you work with the Map. However, if there are other areas of the code that render-to-textures, you’ll also see FPS drops there. It is likely this covers anything dealing with the “interface” or pieces that float on top of the actual 3D world (names, targeting circles, buttons, inventory windows, etc.)

Highly Technical Talking Out My Rear-End as to Why You’ll See an FPS Drop

Since only the map seems to have these symptoms, I’m going to talk about that. However, considering the map uses the back-buffer to render, it’s highly likely that you can substitute “inventory window”, “hud”, “hot buttons”, or any other bit of the interface here.

From what I recall from the one OpenGL class I took in college and what I can find online, this option forces GW2’s calls to render in the back-buffer to go into a Frame Buffer Object (FBO), then reinterprets any call to transfer the back-buffer to a destination object into binding the FBO to the intended destination.

All this has to do with how the map is rendered. I’m guessing that GW2 renders the map into the back-buffer, then takes the results and moves them across the bus to become a texture, then renders that texture into a surface on your screen. This is nice because you can render/scale/zoom with textures more easily while keeping your actual world rendering and updated in the background.

FBO’s are faster because you eliminate that transfer step that normally stalls the CPU. However, it appears that somehow the way the back-buffer is used by GW2 to render the map into a texture doesn’t jive well with how Cider creates the FBO. Likely, there’s some sort of call that limits what portion of the back-buffer is later transferred into your texture object while the FBO is just defaulted by Cider to be the size of your screen. That would match up with the symptoms.

Are you using custom music? Did you just set up or change any of the playlists?

I ask because if you’re playlists are wonky (they have directories instead of files), of the wrong format or point to bad files, the game will crash. I had this issue.