Guild Wars 2

Hyperthreading is free, programs don’t need to be “coded” to use it. It’s also NOT what most laypeople think it is. It is merely a way to improve the performance of an Intel CPU core (more so with the Core iX series than the Pentium 4) slightly, 10-20% in most cases. It does this by faking out the OS into thinking every real core is actually two.

Modern x86 CPUs (going back to the original Pentium) are superscalar, meaning they can execute more than one instruction at a time. It can do this because A) they are designed to have duplicate execution units such as adders, multipliers, address units, etc. and B) by looking at the next X instructions it’s about to execute the instruction scheduler tries to identify instructions that are unrelated to one another and assign them to maximize the use of all the execution units. Problem is it can’t always find sets of unrelated instructions so not all the execution units are running at capacity. Example: take A+B=C followed by C*D=F, you can’t multiply C and D until A is added to B and stored in C. However if it was A+B=C followed by D*E=F then A and B can be added the same time D is multiplied by E.

This is where HT comes in. By faking the OS into thinking that there is a 2nd core, it assigns another thread to the same core. This gives the instruction scheduler a greater pool of instruction it can look through and find code that can be executed at the same time. This then improves the overall performance over simply having the OS multitask the two threads on the single core (alternately letting each run for a bit of time).

One analogy I use is to think of a CPU as a bank will tellers, each teller representing a core and customers as threads to run. Customers queue up and go to the first available teller when one becomes available. HT in this case would be if each teller has two workstations and while they are waiting for the bank’s computer to finish and print the receipt for the first customer the teller can start the transaction of the next customer. They aren’t as efficient as two tellers but are more efficient then one waiting for the receipt to print.

Now HT has a downside, the two threads share the same small high speed memory cache in the core. This increases the likelihood that the memory the core is seeking to read, either instruction or data is not there so it has to be loaded or reloaded from the slower and larger cache at the next level. The core is forced to pause when this happens. This means sometimes cores with HT perform worse with some programs when HT is on than off. Most of the time it’s a net positive with it on.

As to why the OP sees what he is seeing, no idea. But it’s not because the game doesn’t recognize HT.

The Asura at the gate in Hoelbrak uses some of the technobabble from this classic video.

Noticed it last night for the first time.

Reviews of of the 212 Evo are great but Haswell heats up rapidly when overclocked and I’ve seen reviews with rather high temps on a 212 Evo.

And I agree with No One, 500 watt is pretty much minimum (eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite) with that setup at stock clock. 650 watt will be more than enough for overclocking.

And to quibble, no DVD drive for the Win 8 DVD. Yes you can use the official Win 7 USB install tool from MS as long as you have access to another PC with DVD drive and an ISO ripping utility.

Only thing I disagree over is I think the cooler is on the low end if you are planning to overclock at all.

Did you upgrade that PSU in your machine when you decided to use a HD 66xx card? It only comes with a 300 watt with not a lot of amps on the 12 volt side of things. The HD 7450 is a much lower wattage card and just maybe the card isn’t getting enough juice.

2nd I think your drivers are out of date. Current Windows approved ones are 13.4 and are almost two years newer.

Cracking Ectos for T6 dust yield about 1.7-1.8 dust (in my experience) per Ecto on average using a master salvage kit (no idea if quality of the kit matters). Right now Ectos are priced higher than what it costs for that much dust so it’s cheaper to buy dust directly than salvaging from ectos. However you also get Luck now.

/facepalm

Who knows, maybe the Holidays.

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

Geemo.6018:

I’m not going to claim to be a programmer of 30 years, but I will say this. When wow launched it’s 64bit client my fps doubled. A 64bit client in Gw2 would mitigate the pain that is WvW. Please stop trying to convince yourselves that a 32bit client is just as good as a 64bit client. Even a monkey knows it’s better to have 64 bananas over 32 bananas.

Too bad your comment will never be heard. A 64bit client would go a long way to fixing a lot of issues. So would moving from DirectX 9c only to 10 or 11. Wait a minute; we were promised GW2 would support DX 10.

No we weren’t (promised Dx10 or 11) and 64-bit isn’t the panacea you think it is. The game already can use 4GB of memory as it is, 64-bit would just let it have loads more. Performance improvement would be negligible. Performance issues like this are a design problem and while refactoring the rendering pipeline is doable it’s not a quick or easy endeavor when you are making sure you aren’t breaking anything or making it worse. It’s obvious the game has problems when loads of players are packed into a relatively small area and/or the area is visually complex. This shows the problem is algorithmic in nature.

Also it’s easy to create lots of threads, the game spins off over 40 not counting the TP, but what’s hard is to do it in a way where these threads can efficiently run in parallel to one another and not be blocked, frequently forced to sync or have vastly different run times so the performance improvement is no where near what you would think.

Over the last month during the last LW event a lot of players hung out at the QP the first two weeks farming chests or doing the arena, doing the invasion every hour the next two weeks hunting champs or running around in the open world in zergs farming champs. What they weren’t doing is gathering low level mats.

Then there was the announcement about the crafting changes the Friday before the patch which caused a run on all basic mats. There was over one million copper ore a month ago, 200K before the crafting announcement, as low as 120K during the US labor day holiday and now the previous LW content is over the supply has recovered to still less than half of the amount before the Queen’s Jubilee.

We only see snapshots of what is being offered at the TP, we don’t see the actual number passing through the TP. It’s possible that the price of those 2 are very unattractive and as soon as one becomes available it’s snapped up or sold directly to the highest bidder.

GW2Spidy updates irregularly (19, 27, 22, 25, etc minutes apart) and GuildWarsTrade every 10-11 minutes. We don’t see what happens in that in between time. If one is added and sold within that time period, or an old one is sold and a new one is added, it will appear as if nothing happened.

Yes it’s easier to simply have hair and flags as animation rather than physics engine. Gravity and siege engines I can see it being used.

Treeline.3865:

I’d have to agree with OP for the most part. While the Gold -> Gem price is entirely player driven, the pure cost of a Gemstore Item is.. Well.. Pretty high!

As any example, one of the infinite tools = 800 gems. That’s almost 15 dollars in a pure buy. Optional sure, convenience, sure. But wow. That is a lot for never having to buy a pickaxe again in a computer game.

800 gems is $10 US.

With video cards peaking at 250-300 watts and CPUs using fewer and fewer watts, unless you’re AMD ( :p ), 800 watts is only for those looking to double up their video cards.

You know what, SLi and CrossfireX aren’t as prevalent among games as the nVidia, AMD or gaming sites portray.

GW2 spawns over 40, most are utility and have very specific, run infrequently or get synced with another thread.

Not a lot of exploding or destroyable objects in GW2 so none of the obvious particle physics of debris. Maybe cloth. Do ponytails move up when falling?

An entire thread and not one …

First one has the weakest GPU. Half as powerful as the 750m in the other two.

The second one has the best CPU of the remaining two. About 5-10% faster than the third one.

So on the surface I would say the second one.

Intelliraptor.5328:

Oh, how stupid of me. Well thanks for the advice, I didn’t realise that. What an awful “fix” :P I’m mostly new to the game so I never saw these placeholder models before.

Well before you didn’t see people at all based on some server criteria. Now it’s at least player settable. Problem now is after you zone into a player populated area it may take a few minutes to change the placeholder generic with the actual character. Lion’s Arch around the Mystic Forge is a prime example of genericville.

The notion is a placeholder is quicker to render, uses less memory to represent more players and in crowded conditions can improve the frame rate which suffers in crowds of players. Downside is you might as well color them white and put bar codes on them. They could have at least have gender specific models and in crowds even a mesmer’s illusions turn generic.

Well the art assets are likely salvageable. Geometry/mesh, textures, sound and possibly animations. It’s just all that “glue” which ties it all together will need to be reworked. Every mission, the UI, the cut scenes, etc. It’s no small effort and anything unique will need to be bolted on to UE4.

Side note: I love how the naughty word filter screens out white space and punctuation to insert “kitten” in the most interesting places.

If you consider 28g and up cheap.

Ah, where in the patch notes, I’ve looked.

Search for salvag and the only mention is EoL and Dark Matter

Search for inscript and the only mention is ascended inscription recipe for purchase, settler’s inscription drop from Karka Queen and sentinel inscription for purchase.

Search for exotic and the only mention is the crafting reset to level up to 500 and the previously mentioned dark matter.

Search for chance only produces the previously mentioned settler’s inscription drop.

I just don’t see it.

Well then, I guess you are your name. :p

If they picked something, players would be upset because it wouldn’t be what “they” (the individual player) would have picked.

I am surprised that the script they ran to return the items off the TP didn’t also refund the bid. That was bad.

GT 630 is a very, very low end video card. Probably because of the PSU. According to Thermaltake it’s 500 watts peak/400 watts continuous.

http://www.thermaltake.com.au/products-model_Specification.aspx?id=C_00001786

Edit: Oh yes, due to the video card is won’t be either a high setting or high frame rate experience.

Open world should be better than LA or any city. I’m dumbfounded as to why you aren’t getting better FRs.

slayer.1083:

is there enough blood and gore in the game???

I don’t ever remember seeing blood. And no gibs if that’s what you are asking. No dismembered limbs. You hit things, they fall down, they disappear.

Tachenon.5270:

Thorgrim Havasnikkers

Nice.

Having an undefined item, which is what they did with items with MF, is simply to powerful of an item to be tradeable so they soulbound them. Sadly they didn’t have the ability to only do it until you chose a type at which time free them up for trade. At least you can still salvage them for something.

First off, every time you zone, you are on a different server.

I gave you the IP address of one I was on one time in a previous post. You don’t want to ping/ping plotter it, fine. It’s true you will not actually get a response off it since they filter pings but you will get close to it hop wise for a reasonable estimate.

Better with 8GB. Lots of ceiling, allows the OS to run with large file cache, you have memory to allow a browser to idle in the background without impacting the game, etc. At home my rig “idles” close to 2GB with only an AV and Firewall and a couple of small utilities running that track CPU temp, system usage and Internet usage. I’ve seen the game used a bit over 2GB by itself. Plus that MB only has 2 ram slots. The only way to expand in the future is tossing the 4GB out for 8GB later.

Think of it as getting a bit larger U-haul to move yourself cross country. The smaller one probably could pack everything in there but better safe than a last minute tag sale.

It looks really good as it is.

Masters were 0.9 and BL kits were 1.25. And yes it can vary. Sometimes for me in the 70s. It also depends on the number you do at one time. Runs of bad (or good) luck tend to be glossed over on big salvage runs. But if you are only cracking 10 items, you could end up with like 4 ectos.

For me on 100+ runs, 0.8 to 0.95 ectos on average with master kits, cracking 15 to 20 at a time or however many until I exhaust a kit and then run over for a refill, finish this round and wait for another 15-20 to roll in (I put in bids and camp at the TP for them to come in and to counter overcutters for an hour or so every few days).

Sounds good.

That’s the problem, prices always in flux. At some point you just have to pull the trigger, or as the saying goes “in the life of a project there comes a time to shoot the engineers and put it into production”. Same difference.

Oxe.6142:

Galtrix.7369:

Oxe.6142:

You’re complaining about an optional service you can even pay for by earning gold in game so no real money is required in an MMO that has no subscription.

Read that twice. Then apologize.

Yes, farm your 10,000 hours to get those 1,800 gems. Do you not know how much the price for gems go for nowadays? It’s like 6 gold per 100 gems!

That’s obviously not an option here, so Anet wants you to pay real money for that.

Read your post twice, because obviously you didn’t do the math, and in all honesty, I don’t even know if you’re playing this game because you know so little about it.

Read your post twice, then apologize.

Gems have actually dropped in price recently, they’re below 5g per 100. So either you aren’t playing the game, or you like hyperbole to spin your arguments. If you can’t earn 70-100 gold in a week, you’re doing it wrong. Learn to play.

Really? L2P? I get gold when I want gold but most of the time I simply play ignoring the whole loot aspect.

Mahaedros.7085:

I think Fort Aspenwood is now in Tier 1 for WvWvW (?) so if you like to be competitive in WvWvW you may want to to stay on your current server.

Fort Aspenwood is T2 who are playing against a couple of T1s this week. Highest they’ve gotten in the rankings is 5th, where they are now.

http://mos.millenium.org/na

I use crude on whites and blues, basic on greens, master on yellows, Black Lion Kits on exotic.

But it depends on what you are after.

- Luck, no difference.
- Runes and Sigils from items with runes and sigils, kit level matters but 90% of minor runes and sigils (green items) are worth around vendor price (16c) which is why I only use the basic kit. Major ones (yellow items) are worth 3-4 silver each and are worth the 61.44c per use of a Master Kit. Superior ones (orange items), some go for over a gold usually. I use the Black Lion kits I got from drops, I think I got most from either free keys or directly from zone exploration completion.
- Ectos, master kits, level 68 and up armor/weapon/trinkets
- Materials, better kit, better chance but personally haven’t see the listed percentages pay out.

I’m not rich enough to farm dark matter from salvage.

Note: Superior Runes and Sigils use to be worth on average a lot more but because you get them from salvaging exotics and exotics are being salvage for dark matter the supply has gone way up without and equal rise in demand so prices have plummeted.

Well ask them why your new e-mail address can’t be used. Anyways this should be under Account and not Players Helping Players.

I came from a game where altitus ran rampant with players having hundreds of characters. But that game had lots of combinations as well as the best outfit creator in MMO history. But it’s gone now.

Just saying, some people like to try out everything and delete nothing, so they have a lot of character slots.

No, I just cracked 164 rares and got over 90% return (150+) ectos with a master kit.

@MaideN

Something is NOT kosher there, I have a weaker rig and get better frame rates.

What version of the graphics driver you are running? Are you using stock settings in the CCC? I know you are water cooled but have you checked the temps lately? Are you using SweetFX at all?

Assuming you have a conventional hard drive, have you defragged it lately? GW2 puts the entire set of game assets into one huge file. I just finished playing and noticed the game read 17GB while playing for 2 1/2 hours. Extra head seeks can disrupt frame rate.

Anything else running in the background while you are playing? Is anything auto updating?

Throwing out ideas.

Galtrix.7369:

Oxe.6142:

You’re complaining about an optional service you can even pay for by earning gold in game so no real money is required in an MMO that has no subscription.

Read that twice. Then apologize.

Yes, farm your 10,000 hours to get those 1,800 gems. Do you not know how much the price for gems go for nowadays? It’s like 6 gold per 100 gems!

That’s obviously not an option here, so Anet wants you to pay real money for that.

Read your post twice, because obviously you didn’t do the math, and in all honesty, I don’t even know if you’re playing this game because you know so little about it.

Read your post twice, then apologize.

Hmm. Right now 3pEDT Sep 9th 1800 gems will cost around 82 gold. There was a time I thought that was impossible to ever get but it is doable farming Champs or taking advantage of the current flux in the TP caused by the new crafting levels.

Have you tried asking support?

That’s the culling “fix”. What was once your WvW character settings for other players are now game wide. I suspect you are on Lowest and Lowest (or is it just low?). Bump those up and these “placeholder” characters are replaced with the player’s actual model.

1800 gems to a server with a very high population. Only 1000 gems to a high and 500 gems to a medium population server.

First, it’s a way to discourage players to transfer to servers with very high populations over less filled ones. Partially due to WvW.

Second, with the advent of guesting most reasons for transfer are moot.

Please provide evidence it’s an anti-bot measure.

Sounds more like you had a muck up DirectX install and that simply made sure everything was up to date.

Geemo.6018:

Behellagh.1468:

You didn’t say if you used it or not (FarCry 3 64-bit client).

But my point still stands. Unless the game being tested + 64-bit OS is actively needing more than 4GB then you won’t see a performance shift from 4GB to 8GB.

All that more system memory buys you is the ability to run more 32-bit apps at the same time without the apps fighting over who gets system memory.

This is just lol. A 64bit client will utilize a 64bit cpu which in turn will have twice the computing power. If a program is not utilizing the hardware that’s available then its a poorly designed program. The gw2 game engine is a poorly designed engine. It’s not the worst engine I’ve seen, but it’s still subpar none the less.

A no, as a programmer for nearly 30 years from assembler to C++ that’s bunk. Well not 100% bunk but unless you are doing some very specific kinds of intensely math oriented algorithms and most of those are now faster in SSE4/AVX where 32/64bit doesn’t matter anymore. The primary advantage with a 64-bit app is virtually unlimited memory, or as much Microsoft allows us access to (they cap different versions).

With modern superscalar (more than 1 instruction at a time) CPU architecture the internal difference between 32 and 64 is virtually nonexistent. Instructions, 32 or 64 bit, are broken up into “microOps”, analyzed, rearranged, fused into “macroOps” and then those are executed to attempt to utilize the redundant processing elements within a core as efficiently as possible. In the guts of a core, there is no difference.

To be clear Fermi means a DVD drive and not the hard drive. You would still need one if you get Windows on DVD to do the initial install.

When you log in it normally says how much longer the time out is. He should have also gotten an email. He could always submit a ticket as to why.

The forum is cranky today.

Raijinn.9065:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh699156.aspx

I wouldn’t have said it, if it wasn’t true. 3 month trial

I don’t suggest cheaping out on the gpu if you don’t have to

“The Windows 8 Enterprise 90-day evaluation is intended for evaluation purposes only and cannot be used for productive business or personal purposes. In order to use this evaluation, the product must be activated online with Microsoft-hosted activation and validation services. Microsoft does not provide technical support for this software.”

“This is evaluation software designed for IT professionals interested in trying Windows 8 Enterprise on behalf of their organization. We do not recommend that you install this evaluation if you are not an IT professional or not professionally managing corporate networks.”

EQuake would still have to pay $100 90 days from now and likely need to reformat his drive.

@Fermi, yes the cooler isn’t necessary but there is little harm and no cost saving right now between the CX430 and the CX500. It’s not like he’s getting an 850 watt PSU that’s $50 more. So unless you are part of the shaft Microsoft totally or postpone getting Windows by misrepresenting yourself to Microsoft crowd then you still will have to pull $25-30 out of thin air for that GPU upgrade after getting rid of the cooler.

All of us technocrati could suggest better options with another $50-100 in the budget.