Well actually it scales up to 3 physical cores but no more. The game runs at over 50% cpu on a true quad core system (usually in the low 60%) so that’s more than two cores worth of work. I’m not talking overall CPU usage, just the game itself. And while some people have rigs that allow them to run all GPU exclusive features to 11 at 2560×1600, it’ll still not going to stress the video card one bit because it’s the renderer thread that gets all jammed up in a single core at that’s the limiting factor.
People may be happier by turning the frame limiter on at 30 and have a consistent frame rate 95% of the time that noticing the variation in frame rate. What’s less annoying, stop and go traffic on the highway or traveling at a nice constant but lower than highway speed on side road to go from point A to B in the morning.
Card name: AMD Radeon HD 7660D
Processor: AMD A10-5800K APU with Radeon™ HD Graphics (4 CPUs), ~3.8GHz
anyway ill link dxdiag :/
in LA i got like 20fps open world 35. on auto-detect
That’s about what I expect. I have an A8-3820 with an integrated HD 6550D, run on best appearance with DoF and Best Filtering unchecked, and get around 26 open world. If I go with auto-detect, which is nearly best performance, I get in the mid 30s. I can get LA frame rate up if I set the two culling settings to low.
It’s a personal preference trade off. I don’t mind the herky jerky nature of LA’s frame rate if that means I can see all the pretty player models rather than generic Race/Profession model. For big events I switch to best performance, like the current portal hunting events because in the midst of battle, I’m don’t care about pretty player models or the scenery, just putting the twisted clocks and pirates down.
Because the one thread that’s synchronizes all the others is likely maxing at a core’s worth of performance. Doesn’t matter how many cores you have, no thread can get any more that one core’s worth of CPU performance. You have a quad core there Canoas and I haven’t seen the game use more than 3 cores worth of performance, usually less.
If the rendering code can’t feed the GPU with enough data because it’s limited to a single core’s worth of CPU performance, then the GPU is going to be under 100%.
I think that the stuttering comes from the new culling code. I’ve seen groups of generic models in the distance, run up to them and get a stutter as the actual player models are built and swapped over to. This includes hitting the HD for costume data. I imagine a standard 5400 RPM laptop drive would make what I’m seeing on my desktop even more pronounce.
So long as the OS has a 64bit version available. Going from 32bit to 64bit is free.
Everyone should be on W7 (or 8 if they must) by now. there is 0 reason not to. Cant afford to ‘buy’ it ..well ..dont ‘buy’ it
hardware to old to use 64 bit. then well tbh, ur rig is likely not up to scratch for gaming anyway. PC’s dont lats for ever, they need upgrading / replacing every 3 to 5 years depending on the starting spec when u built/purchased it.
64-bit isn’t “free”. Sure it’s just a recompile but the gotchas come from finding all the places where someone was “ambiguous” about the width of some structure/class element. Sure it’ll help with caching more player models which may help with some of the stuttering people are seeing as the data is fetched from the drive to replace the generic model with the actual one as you move around other players, depending on your culling settings of course. Still doesn’t help the general rendering pipeline.
Adding in DX11, 64 bit memory, better multithreading etc should have been done before launch. Even WoW(shudder) added in DX11 into their client, it is not impossible. AA support is available via 3rd party injectors(which is really really sad). I am willing to not have a month or 6 of a bad LS in order to get the game up to speed to where it “should be”.I am certain that there are tons of players who would like that as well.
Do you know how Blizzard could at both Dx11 and 64-bit support? Because the game has been bringing in nearly a BILLION dollars in sales every year for the last 5 years. Do you know what that buys you? A friggin’ building full of game engine developers who can focus on nothing else other than adding this support. To get the most out of Dx11 you really have to start from scratch and step away from the old Dx3D API and embrace the “new” way of writing Dx3D graphics.
Do you know how much this game has made in the first 3 1/3 quarters? About $200 million. How much of that covers the front money for the 5 years of development cost? It’s simply a matter of resources.
The game is going to China and Korea soon. PC game cafe’s in South Korea still have 30% of their machines running XP. Similar percentage in China for PC OS in general. ANet’s owners are Korean and most of their income comes from Asia so it’s important to support XP and thus Dx9.
So assuming that you are right and we don’t have this feature. What do I do if I put a huge amount of gold to buy the precursor that I want?
This is a problem with low supply, low volume, high price items. So either save more to buy one from a seller directly or make a fair and reasonable offer and wait it out. Otherwise you aren’t having fun with the game because you’re camping on your offer.
You can’t just make a fair offer and wait it out. What is there to prevent someone who would come after you and undercut with 1 copper? Unfortunately, you have to camp your offer if tools are not available.
Nothing is stopping them, it’s a fact of life on the exchange that other players will undercut or overcut the current sell or buy price. If you are selling are you honestly willing to spend the 5% posting fee again simply because someone undercut you for the moment?
How would notification affect you? So you go off to play and you get notified that you’ve been overcut/undercut so you stop, tweak the price and start to play again when you get another notification. That sound less fun then accepting you aren’t going to maximizing profit or minimizing cost.
So assuming that you are right and we don’t have this feature. What do I do if I put a huge amount of gold to buy the precursor that I want?
This is a problem with low supply, low volume, high price items. So either save more to buy one from a seller directly or make a fair and reasonable offer and wait it out. Otherwise you aren’t having fun with the game because you’re camping on your offer.
So it seems that the culling settings for PVE are tied with the WvW settings. Why would you do this? Do I have to redo my graphics every time I want to go to WvW from PvE?
Myself I simply switch between performance and best presets for WvW but I do understand that maybe they should have made a 2nd set of settings for not WvW even though besides coloring they do the exactly same thing. I too would rather trade off fewer players for prettier players in PvE Vs all players as generic models in WvW.
This culling removal isn’t even a fix for performance. It makes things even worse and until there is a patch that will make the game run acceptable I can’t foresee myself playing for much longer.
Players wanted to see everyone. At no time was it implied by the devs that it was going to improve performance. Rather it makes more sense that rendering everyone present would decrease performance on the client side. But that’s what players wanted.
Anet simply passed the buck onto the gamer instead of addressing the issue itself(which is the game is the most poorly optimized and planned game ever from a technical point).
They allowed the player to adjust their settings to suit their requirements between seeing all or some other players in all their outfit glory or generic character models by profession (not even gender specific generic models by profession) and balance that against their desired frame rate. Any change the the rendering engine or client at this time such as adding Dx11 support, 64-bit memory support, better multithreaded support, AA support beyond FXAA, etc. are non trivial tasks that would take a significant amount of time and expertise to accomplish.
ANet may feel that the wide range of graphic options are enough to ensure the game is playable on a wide variety of hardware. Note I said playable, not pretty and playable.
We don’t need someone building the equivalent of a high frequency trading program for the TP. So I’m all for establishing a mirror of the TP state that’s updated only say 10 times an hour and have an API that can query that. But all transactions still must be done in game.
Who has the time to add these things in the game? Considering that TP bugs from the release day, a year ago, are still not fixed.
A more realistic approach is to make use of third party devs to add these features as external programs.
Which can be abused. Is that so hard to understand? Hey lets write one where we can enter a maximum buy amount we are willing to spend and then have it poll the TP so every time we are overcut it would cancel our previous offer and overcut the current lead until we hit the limit we set? Now imagine 1,000 of these helpful external programs hitting the TP at the same time. Or 5,000. Or 10,000. TP would come to a crawl, we’ll start having buy timers in place like we have sell timers.
We don’t need someone building the equivalent of a high frequency trading program for the TP. So I’m all for establishing a mirror of the TP state that’s updated only say 10 times an hour and have an API that can query that. But all transactions still must be done in game.
I would imagine A) not all players, like teens have credit/debit cards; enough attempts to buy gems via the gem store fail to go though due to some reason and is a PITA to get fix in time to take advantage of some short term sale of a much desired item.
As for me in the NE of the USA, I’ve seen gem cards in Walmart, Target and Best Buy. I don’t go to GameStop since their PC games selection is worse than Walmart, Target and Best Buy so why would I go there for a proxy currency card for a PC only game?
Well to know “unreleased content” you or someone else would have broken the EULA 2-f-i that “reverse engineer, translate, adapt, disassemble, decompile, or reduce to any human-perceivable form, any Software or parts thereof”. Assuming you are talking about those reddit posts that someone data dive to find strings describing future gem store offerings.
As for the forum they may have interpreted your action by this section of the forum’s rules of conduct.
“Do not breach the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement. Any post or thread in which a player admits to violating the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement, encourages others to violate the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement, or violates the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement itself will be removed and the forum account will be terminated.”
I’m someone who under/overcuts by more than 1c because I realize that the current price snapshot I’m seeing is also being looked at by other players who all are planning to under/overcut as well. It’s not just four of us competing against one another in the M.U.L.E. auction screen but against thousands of others.
And where did I say I didn’t get any achievements? I said I didn’t get the number needed for the meta reward and I did get most of those.
And up to this point the game has gone out of it’s way to not mandate teaming or jumping puzzles to achieve a meta. Simply look at dailies which don’t require WvW, jumping puzzles or fractals to achieve the daily. Or that 95% of the PvE content doesn’t require teaming. MMO means we all play in the same world, not that we have to team.
Hardcore players are your core but casual players will pay the bills. Problem is casual players are capricious creatures that will flitter from one “popular” game to the next while the hardcore will stick with you until the servers are turned off.
You cater too much to casuals, you lose your hardcore and when the casuals move on you are left with nothing. Cater only to hardcore and you don’t have enough critical mass to keep the game moving forward. Ideally you want to convert casuals into hardcore by easing them into gameplay that hardcore players prefer.
In my previous MMO the suggestions board was moved into the Fun and Games section since it was a sport for players to rip suggestions to pieces, or to simply point out that the suggestion had been already suggested X times in the last Y days/weeks/months and were ripped to pieces them and give them a link.
That said the devs in that game did use some of the better thought out ones but we’re talking Sturgeon’s Law being in full effect.
As for China, who knows. I would say no because they will be starting at 0g in the economy and it wouldn’t be fair for them to have a TP economy fully mature.
What we have is growth in money supply among active players. And while that may drive classic “inflation” on the TP, more money chasing same amount of goods", what we have at the Gem exchange is something completely different.
The rate is solely based on the ratio between two caches of items at the exchange, gold and gems. Simply the act of buying gems with gold will increase the exchange rate. It has nothing to do with the amount of gold among the active playerbase. We could have zero change in the overall gold supply and as long as players are buying gems with gold, the exchange rate will rise.
Actually it’s over 1,400% as the original exchange rate was 27.5s for 100 gems.
Others have hit upon the salient points.
1) It’s a Cash Shop, they want you to spend actual money for this stuff;
2) The Gold to Gems was something they didn’t need to add;
3) The reason they did was so gold that players paid for gems is used to pay players who sell gems for gold, whose gems went to the players who were buying gems, nice circle of life thing going on;
4) The price floats and is determined by the stockpile of gems and gold at the exchange. The rate will continue to rise until just as many gems are sold for gold as gems are bought with gold;
5) Never ever forget that ArenaNet needs players to spend real money on gems. It is their only source of continuous income. This isn’t like WoW where you have to spend $15 a month to keep playing or a F2P MMO where you have a 10 slot inventory and classes locked behind a paywall.
From experimentation Master kits will harvest about 0.9 ectos on average while BL kits which cost gems will harvest about 1.25 ectos. I don’t remember if anyone gathered data on the lesser kits.
What I would rather see is an amount of coin added vs amount of coin removed. Problem with MMO money supplies is that players could simply stop playing removing their wealth from the inflation equation. But they can still return at a later point.
I strongly disagree with A. You had to get the kite in the WvW jump puzzle to earn the meta achievement. This requires you to be good with JP and be able to survive players from other worlds killing you before reaching the end.
There were 26 achievements other than the Meta-Achievement. 24 of them counted towards the Meta-Achievement. The Meta-Achievement required 16 achievements.
Please explain why you needed to get the WvW jump puzzle kite?
List me 16 that don’t require any jumping and fine motor control and can be done solo.
Let me tell you what does require teammates, jumping and fine motor control
Best Dive Ever
Lessons from the Sky (I did get 33 of 40 thanks to Dulfy)
Kites over Caledon
Kites of Iron
Kite Bombing
Colossal Kite – In a Fractal
World vs. Kite
Learn to Kite (since 5 of the 7 are behind JPs or Fractal)
That’s 8. Then you have 6 more locked up in a mini race game. There is no way I could ever win or even place in a game like that. So that’s 2 more I can’t achieve so that’s 10 leaving 14 of 16 needed for the meta. I probably spent 50s repairing my armor from all the plummets to my death simply trying to get to the upper waypoint for the 1st time, yes my jump timing stinks that much.
I was able to do Dragon Bash and Southsun without problem but 4 Winds simply had to much locked up in content I can’t play.
I strongly disagree with A. You had to get the kite in the WvW jump puzzle to earn the meta achievement. This requires you to be good with JP and be able to survive players from other worlds killing you before reaching the end.
I’ve been doing the QP and I don’t see where people are claiming to get all this money from. The big bad simply gives me a boat load of greens that are worth nothing, some gear currency, a tube of karma and that’s it. I’m not seeing the vets around them dropping anything other than some T5/T6 mats whose prices have plummeted. Where’s all the “good” loot people are claiming that they are raking in?
QP<Cursed Shore<Frostgorge<Ember<Gauntlet
QP is the worst of the current “best” farms. In general i’ve found I get the following:
4g/hr<6g/hr<8g/hr<12g/hr<18g/hr
It depends on zerg size, no trolls, and for gauntlet sufficient skill.
But I’m not seeing anything close to 4g/hr. That’s my point, maybe 1g for couple of hours there.
I had a really tough time Gaile when I changed my password because I had problems logging into the forum after the 6 hour maintenance. I had to get exceedingly creative, and long before it would accept one. Even though this was only my 2nd password for this game it constantly said that the password I was entering, which wasn’t my original in any variation, had been used before/wasn’t unique/long enough. It’s as if everyone needs to have a password that nobody else is currently using.
Believe me I understand Turkledon’s friend’s frustration.
The game engine is poor at start ever since I load GW2 into my system. LA low 40 FPS… WvW down 25 FPS lowest.
A system pushing at 4.7 to 4.8Ghz 6 cores 3930k (12 virtual cores) $600 CPU and GTX TITAN to run this poorly.
p.s. no i didn’t build this system for GW2 but to run other high end games at 1440p without issues. Going back to old MMO like World of Warcraft, that game dump out 300FPS in DX9 and DX11 mode at max.
Engine is known to be very poor since Beta Week launch.
I had a feeling the game isn’t fully utilizing the GPU VRAM leads to constant loading from HDD to CPU which drags down the FPS.
With GPU-Z you can see how much video memory is being used on the sensors tab.
Umbra is for occlusion culling of large fixed objects, buildings, landscape, etc. Smaller, moving, destroyable, animated objects don’t use it. That’s very obvious when you pop into the LA portal hub as the center circular event monument, railings, banners, flags aren’t drawn at the same time as the larger features. Without Umbra they would either have to write one themselves and/or use fewer objects.
Multi GPU setups, either with multiple cards or cards like the GTX 690 or HD 7990, added performance isn’t guaranteed. There are “gotchas” you have to avoid doing in your rendering code while talking to the drivers that if you don’t avoid, will kill any performance gain. And maybe that’s where nVidia guy is coming from because AMD and nVidia want games to show off SLi and CrossfireX because those companies sell hardware. Which is also why they love over the top game engines that almost requires either $500+ single cards or pairs of $300+ cards to run with settings past medium or pushing double or triple monitor setups.
I’m running an e450 1.68 ghz dual core laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 (even has its own pool of 2 gig ram). The game works poorly no matter what I do, but it doesn’t overheat my machine either… yet its been worse at loading things and my character since Halloween event. I can run all high on the GPU end of things, but the CPU bottlenecks so badly (and loads even slower) its not worth it. If Anet makes the game more 50/50 on terms of reliance of GPU and CPU, I think dual cores can run this very well.
I even run PSO 2 and GW 1 better than this on this machine! GW 1 topped 60 fps in spots!
I remember ANET saying GW 2 runs off of a modified GW 1 engine and if so, we shouldn’t have these problems.
Got to say that CPU, the E-450, was meant to compete with Intel’s Atom in netbooks and then some genius decided to put them in inexpensive laptop and occasional desktop. It’s fine for browsing and lightweight gaming (Angry Birds, Plants Vs Zombies) but if you thought a “modern” high poly count MMO will be able to play well is somewhat optimistic. You aren’t even at the minimum system requirements for CPU or GPU.
And no, the integrated HD 6320 doesn’t have it’s own pool of memory, the E-450 isn’t designed to support what AMD called once “sideport” memory. You were fed a bunch of marketing hooey and assumed it actually has dedicated memory.
I’ve been doing the QP and I don’t see where people are claiming to get all this money from. The big bad simply gives me a boat load of greens that are worth nothing, some gear currency, a tube of karma and that’s it. I’m not seeing the vets around them dropping anything other than some T5/T6 mats whose prices have plummeted. Where’s all the “good” loot people are claiming that they are raking in?
Except it’s a weak x86 platform. 8 low power laptop/tablet cores with 8GB of unified memory. Not saying an MMO can’t be designed to play in this fix platform, just that to do it right you really need to do it from scratch to take advantage of ALL hardware resources.
I’m hoping to get some feedback from our friendly, neighborhood economist. Currently, a lot of us are enjoying the opportunity to make Gold via certain events related to the Queen’s Jubilee update. Everything from mass Champion farming, to the Queen’s Gauntlet challenge.
While I, personally, love the fact that I can make easy money really quickly, my long term concerns are that the value of our in game currency is going to be decimated. Well, perhaps not that bad, but I can see bad signs day to day. As an example, my Guildies are making an average of 150 Gold per day with dedicated farming. This isn’t the use of an exploit, but rather akin to CoF on steroids.
Is there any plans in place that might help slow the snowball that’s currently rolling downhill?
You’re lucky they disclose figures at all. Few game companies provide even a breakdown of sales by game. I don’t know of any that breaks it down into license/cash shop for a B2P game.
enough attempts to buy gems via the gem store fail to go though due to some reason and is a PITA to get fix in time to take advantage of some short term sale of a much desired item.
