Guild Wars 2

It’s a matter of managing your expectations. Will it play the game, yes. On low to medium settings I’m going to guess 25 fps is easily doable since it’s a 1366×768 screen. You may be able to find a combination of settings that will give you 30fps standing still while giving you a fair amount of pretty but experimentation will be needed. Every system is different.

Dinks.2478:

Behellagh.1468:

MrRuin.9740:

Asgaeroth.6427:

People aren’t leaving MMOs, look at the top lists on Steam. People are spreading out to the various MMOs. TERA’s Steam launch came around the same time GW2 HoT preorders started. TERA is GW2’s main competition right now, and I’m sure more than a few people used the Steam launch of TERA to talk themselves out of buying HoT and switching games. MMO playership is growing, but there is ever more and more MMOs to play so each individual game has more competition.

There is much more to point to the contrary. Big-name MMO’s shutting down, MMO’s doing server merges, MMO’s dropping fees and prices in a desperate attempt to gain and keep players, big-name MMO’s like WoW having their populations drop substantially.
When people leave one MMO and go to another and yet more others only to find them generically the same, they eventually leave the genre entirely to play or do something else more engaging, since no developer in the MMO genre has the imagination to reinvent it or do anything substantial with it.

Raids were never in their vision for their game.

• They reworked Revenant based on the player feedback from that beta weekend.
• There’s changes coming based on the player feedback from this last beta weekend.
• Traits 3.0 is partially the result of the massive pushback from Traits 2.0.
• The Wardrobe, Account Bound Dyes, changing soulbound gem shop items to account bound are all based on player feedback.
• Remove WvW maps from world complete.

You’re upset because of a lack of confirmation you are being heard, the speed that change happens and the fact that sometimes, often your feedback isn’t what’s acted upon.

So, no mounts, dueling, race change, inspection tools, 3rd party plugins, UI customization, instant waypoint unlocks, buying the expansion with gems, removing timegates, banning flipping, price regulation, or other often repeated requests that conflict with their vision of their game.

And in one post this whole thread went from productive to fanboy. You’ll be the last person on the game screaming how good it is and hoping somebody hears you because anet pushed everybody else away.

While yours was nothing but ANet/GW2 bashing. You don’t like the game, don’t play it. You don’t hang around and tell everyone else how much of an idiot they are for still playing.

You don’t seem to understand that it’s their game and as players are only input is if we choose to play or not. This is true with every game from every developer out there. Now devs could choose to placate us to keep us playing but they shouldn’t change the underlying DNA of their game simply to keep the most noisy players happy. WildStar listened to those players wanting a casual free, ultra hard core play experience and now that game has 1/10th the income that GW2 has. GW2 is still cruising along as NCSOFT’s #3 MMO in income for the last 2 quarters after Lineage and Blade & Soul so they must be keeping someone happy.

MMOs are time consuming and as player get older and platforms shift to mobile devices and those games must be something that a session can be played in 5 minutes it’s only natural that MMO populations are decreasing. Older players have life that keep them from devoting as much time as they use to while younger players have been weened on Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja and don’t have the attention span to get caught up in the grind of any MMO.

With GW2, ANet tried to create an MMO experience that “filthy casuals” can play. This means no long raids, short events and “quests”, activities that someone can do if they have a half an hour to spare as well as not having aggravations that could drive them away (DUELME!!DUELME!!DUELME!DUELME!!DUELME!!…).

MrRuin.9740:

Did you mean to quote me? Because your response has nothing to do with anything I was talking about. Nor is there anything in the other persons quote inside mine where it says anything about you’re talking about here, like raids and feedback.
AFAIK the topic was aimed at the MMO genre as a whole, not attacks on Anet that need defending (though while GW2’s direction has, IMO, contributed to the stagnation of the genre, it is but a small part of the larger problems of the genre as a whole).

Sorry, grabbed the wrong quote, fixed it.

Of course not. It’s a LAPTOP! When will people learn that laptops aren’t viable game systems 95% of the time unless they are willing to spend $1500+ and end up with the performance of a desktop gaming system that’s 1/2 to 2/3rds that price.

It’s a dual core with HT CPU like the i3-4130 except it’s 25-33% slower. The 840m is a step up from an Intel HD 5500 (what isn’t) but it’s slower than a desktop GT 730.

You would be lucky to get 40ish on low in the middle of nowhere and there’s no system that is without some amount of system lag that’s unrelated to network/server lag.

Sorry for the rant but I’ve been seeing these questions for a decade now around this time as students go off to college for the first time and think they can sneak a laptop that could play their favorite game just as well as their home PC but Mom and Dad won’t let you take that or spend a lot of money. That may not be your situation but … August.

Sshh! Don’t tell Thomas, it’s a surprise.

Dinks.2478:

Vayne.8563:

Dinks.2478:

No, MMOs are moving away from players. Take GW2 for a perfect example.

Anet keeps ignoring feedback, won’t communicate with the player base, and time after time kittens on their loyal veteran player base in favor of grabbing new fleeting players.

I wish people would stop saying this. Anet doesn’t ignore feedback. Which doesn’t mean they take all feedback. For example, some people ask for dueling. Many say they don’t want dueling. No matter what Anet does they’re listening to feedback.

When someone says Anet isn’t listening to feedback what they’re really saying is the decisions Anet is making is moving away from MY feedback.

Which is another story entirely.

No, I wish YOU would stop saying what you’re saying because YOU are wrong.

Anet has time and time again ignored us. They won’t tell us what they are working on. They won’t give us more dungeons. They won’t give us raids. They only produce content for the gem store. This is not MY feedback, this is the feedback of anybody who isn’t an anet fanboy who refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing from their god.

Raids were never in their vision for their game.

• They reworked Revenant based on the player feedback from that beta weekend.
• There’s changes coming based on the player feedback from this last beta weekend.
• Traits 3.0 is partially the result of the massive pushback from Traits 2.0.
• The Wardrobe, Account Bound Dyes, changing soulbound gem shop items to account bound are all based on player feedback.
• Remove WvW maps from world complete.

You’re upset because of a lack of confirmation you are being heard, the speed that change happens and the fact that sometimes, often your feedback isn’t what’s acted upon.

So, no mounts, dueling, race change, inspection tools, 3rd party plugins, UI customization, instant waypoint unlocks, buying the expansion with gems, removing timegates, banning flipping, price regulation, or other often repeated requests that conflict with their vision of their game.

Edit: Fixed quote.

Khisanth.2948:

Beldin.5498:

I just have to think about all the mob camping in EQ2 .. who would do that
anymore these days ? But at that time we had a lot fun in the game even if
we often wanted to cry out loud when again only the placeholder was spawning.

Who would do that anymore these days? Most of the people doing the world bosses in GW2?

Sure there is a schedule but it’s not that much different.

That’s not mob camping as it was in EQ. Think riding a rollercoaster. Stand in this queue until it’s your party’s turn to fight the beast with 1000 eyes. Please no cutting.

Yaj.5973:

it wouldn’t let me attach 2 documents.

Hint, use preview first and you can add an additional picture. Repeat that step again and again to add even more.

Define “well”, that’s rather ambiguous. It’s like asking if a car is “fast enough”. Do you have a brand or model number?

960 is about 10% faster than the 270x according to TechPowerUP tests. NewEgg price on the 270x, 2GB version is between $175 and $220 while the 960, 2GB version is between $195 and $230. Both these price ranges are before rebates.

For Dx12 support the 960 is 2nd gen Maxwell GPU and supports more of the Dx12 exclusive features in hardware than the older GCN 1.0. Now according to this article, GCN 1.0 doesn’t have enough features supported for true Dx12 support while 2nd gen Maxwell supports Dx12.1.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207598-demystifying-directx-12-support-what-amd-intel-and-nvidia-do-and-dont-deliver

Yes but they run poorly and are rarely native applications but PC versions running under cider like our nearly 3 year old “beta” Mac client.

And maybe it’s to early to be sarcastic. The question/supposition from the OP is “are MMOs dying?” Since the vast majority of MMOs aren’t on consoles but some form of personal computer and in this universe that means Windows PCs the question could be extrapolated as “is PC gaming dying”.

The dig at Apple is because they were openly hostile to game developers for over a decade. So their systems are excluded in the “PC gaming is dying” narrative that’s spun by the popular press every six months because Apple never saw their Mac line as something for “gamers”. It’s as if they excepted the popular narrative that gaming is a waste of time and they didn’t want their designer PC to be lumped in with the stereotypical uncouth, socially challenged, amoral, basement dwelling, obese slacker that popular media stereotype.

Say hi to Jenkins.

Gems have always been 80 gems for $1€. The amount of gold you can get from that is related to how much gold had already been spent to by the previous batch of gems. Since a whole lot of people bought gold with gems, because you can buy stuff from the cash shop for “free”, that exchange rate is now high.

ArenaNet, and every other MMO company realizes that there are always people outside of the game who will take money for game currency. Obviously, and especially true with MMOs that subsist primarily on the cash shop, to have said cash go into their pockets than some usually dubious 3rd party. So they provide a method to convert cash indirectly into game currency.

Sure those companies can offer a better deal, just like those guys selling TVs and appliances from the back of an unmarked white panel truck. We stole it and pass the savings onto you. Or we are laundering money and are willing to take a loss to make it “clean”.

So people who actually sell you the gold and items, get banned. People who buy said loot, gets it taken away.

PC gaming has been dying for <insert number> of years, so says the press. Of course the “press” are all Apple people and are just jealous that all the really cool games are on PCs.

Which is odd since Apple controls the hardware, has a limited number of configurations and whose hardware ecosystem has more in common with game consoles than Windows PCs. It should be easier to develop games for that platform.

Until you realize that Apple insists you should use the version of the C language with objects that isn’t the popular one (very hipster). That their desktop hardware concept is sticking a MacBook inside of a giant monitor, with all the limitations a laptop has in terms of performance including lower end GPUs with no path for upgrading. Heck they are actively hostile with the concept of upgrading since they use custom screws that use special drivers as well as glue to keep people out.

But that’s okay, gaming is what iPads and iPhones are for. SUGAR RUSH

You just have to look at the success of Steam to see that PC gaming isn’t dead. Now yes, maybe there’s some MMO fatigue. MMOs are time consuming and for some people they finally look up and realize years have past and maybe its time to take a break.

Funny, I didn’t get raptr with the 15.7 drivers.

I don’t disagree that the active population dropped due to lack of any meaningful content update. But this weekend was a tale of whether you had beta access or not in terms of how busy the core world maps were.

One of the slightly creepy features that Blade & Soul has is the ability to capture any other player which saves the entire character model so you can clone them for yours. B&S has sliders to adjust major bone lengths, there is probably 100 different settings that you can tweak in terms of body and face. And I think you can trade these models with other players. This isn’t equipment, just the underlying model.

Do people run that app to do gaming videos for YT channels? Because I never felt all that motivated to watch YT videos about GW2 other than the occasional JP hop through or Dulfy video about new gem store stuff.

Although I am getting into Guild Gab which is 3-5 talking heads with almost no game footage talking about this week’s GW2 news.

First of all, that’s old.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/29/ffxiv-swtor-and-guild-wars-2-fall-in-raptrs-june-rankings/

Second of all, who are these guys, I’ve never heard of them or their service. And if there’s a lot of people like me, that’s why GW2 isn’t a huge deal there.

From the FAQ
———————————-

How can I remove the Authenticator App from my account or change the device I use to authenticate?

If you still have access to the device with the app, you can remove the Authenticator App from the account management page by following these steps:

• Click the “Security” link at the top of the page, then “Edit” on the left side next to “2-Step Verification.”
• Click “UNLINK YOUR AUTHENTICATOR.”
• Enter the new code displayed by the app in the first box.
• When the code changes, enter the new code in the second box.
• Click “NEXT” and “FINISH.”

To keep your account secure, click “Edit” on the left side next to “2-Step Verification” again to set up a new authentication method.

If you lose your device, just contact our Support department for help changing your Authentication options.
———————————

See bold part if you still have problems.

Aetrion.8295:

So if XP is used to buy masteries in HoT, does that mean that all the old players who have a stack of 100 tomes sitting around will simply instantly be maxed out?

No because tomes at 80 only buy you Spirit Shards which has nothing to do with the mastery system.

It’s still there at the moment because we use to get skill points when we level past 80 and the mastery system hasn’t rolled out yet.

That’s why I think the warg is the easiest. There are rarely any opposing server players there simply because there are virtually no targets on that side of the river other than one vista at the shore (and now with no map complete it’s only XP) and the warg appears near the hills. You are out of visual range of that southern supply camp and the tower so it’s unlikely anyone will see you. And with the “backdoor” approach from your server area in the lower left you keep your exposure down.

Check the charts, it varies. Look at week or month charts to see if there seems to be a daily rhythm.

https://www.gw2tp.com/

Easiest way to get that daily I found is to go to the borderlands map where your server starts in the lower left. Take the right path around the hill and while sticking close to that wall is position yourself along the hill and wait for the Vet Warg to spawn. This is west of Hero’s Lodge, the southern most supply camp. The Vet Warg has a normal warg as a companion (useful to kill if down). It’s a easier than the other two choices which I think is only on Eternal Battlegrounds.

For a not level 80 sporting rare or higher gear, the fight might get … interesting but there’s usually one or two other players from your server with the same idea. And you usually don’t run into players from the other two servers.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero%27s_Lodge

Yes but games that rely on a cash shop for it’s month to month income LOVE the “whaliest”.

Nexon publishes their cash shop numbers. 1Q15 they had 10% of the player base use the cash shop. The average income from these 10% was 4,805 Yen or roughly $40. That’s mean, not median. Yes, it’s not the same 10% every month and the median is likely lower which means there are some who pay a lot more to bring up the mean.

It’s those players who really bring in the dough. Gamasutra had an article that whales consist of only 10% of the paying players but represent 64% of the income. A crude analysis would suggest they spend 16x more than the non whales. Like it or not, whales keep the lights on so why do anything that might reduce income from them?

It all boils down to how the code and data is structured. As they replaced the actual player model with a generic one they would then, key on the fact the generic model is being used, switch to a generic weapon of that class with no pretty effects. But on systems with slow graphics and popping into a crowded location (waypoint by the bank/TP in DR) I’ve seen weapons and backbacks materialize before even the generic player model. This seems to indicate that those items are processed before the player model is processed.

See I can understand why weapons are not part of a character model, weapon swap, a combat feature on most professions. Also weapons have their own effects, sounds, animations, etc. While all Warriors of the same gender/race swing a sword the same way, animation on the rig, the weapon may have it’s own animations that need to be processed separately (chain sword comes to mind).

And backpacks are probably an offshoot on the original engineer kit which can also be changed during combat which is why they aren’t quite processed the same as the rest of the player model.

But I’m just using my software archaeology skills to guess at the structure and inferring the reasons that may be behind it.

mercury ranique.2170:

Also a small note to the OP.
The board (if it would exist), has very limited influence on the main decissions. They mostly handle financial issues where they look at the revenue and profits and give tasks to lower departments to reach certain targets. They have no influence on decissions (or care bout) like “when is HoT release date”, or “a member got suspended and is angry”.

The real important decissions you are talking bout (like the HoT release date) is taken by a lower group of people. Although not all members in it are known I bet that Colin Johansen (studio lead) and Mike o’ Brien (CEO) are in it.

The only board is NCSOFT’s. NC West Holdings does have a President, I think it’s NCSOFT’s CEO’s current wife IIRC.

Yep.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2015/07/134_172359.html
http://mmoculture.com/2015/01/ncsoft-new-president-announced-for-global-and-western-ambitions/

She also inspired a Korean drama about student’s life at their premier tech university KAIST. She also has a PhD from MIT on AI. Youngest Korean woman to earn a PhD.

mercury ranique.2170:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

As ArenaNet is a wholly-owned subsidiary, the Members of the Board are probably found somewhere on NCSoft’s website(s). These members may, or may not, have anything directly to do with game content design and/or implementation. You may want to look into the Game/Design Directors, etc.

Good luck.

Do you have any proof it is wholly-owned?? it is a full subsidiary and acquired by ncsoft. This means they bought over 50% of the company (and so are the ones making the decissions cause they have the majority). afaik, nobody said they bought all of it.

I personally think that of the three founders, Mike ’o Brien still owns his part of the company. Jefft Strain and Patrick Wyatt where likely the ones being bought out with shares in NCWest. (hence why they worked there). Thats how those deals normally goes. As Mike stayed the CEO, it is good if he also owns part of the company. It means he has a strong incentive for it to do good.

bottom line is however, you dont need to buy 100% of a company to call it a subsidairy. Only more then 50%

ArenaNet’s Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/ArenaNetInc/info?tab=page_info

NCSOFT press release in the boilerplate about the company.

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/news/press-releases/ncsoft-and-aren.php

One little change in IndigoSundown’s timeline. NC West was formed in 2008 when they consolidated their US and EU NC operation branches and the Austin studio but in November 2012 NCSOFT converted NC West into NC West Holdings and moved both Carbine and ArenaNet into it. This makes NC West Holdings the basket that holds all of their NA/EU eggs operations.

Board members only makes sense if ArenaNet was a public company. It never was and even if it was, it’s now part of the NC West Holdings which is 100% owned by NCSOFT.

A feature that list the names of the skins or the name of the outfit I would support. No stats.

No it’s the same issue asked about in a number of recent threads. It’s no different than this thread except for the suggested solution.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Can-we-get-an-option-to-hide

Basically the character model doesn’t consider those items as part of the character model. Period. Therefore those settings don’t affect them. It’s that simple. Asking for a means to selectively turn off displaying minis, backpacks and weapons, via one solution or another doesn’t alter the original complaint, the belief that these items are destroying frame rate so give us a way to shut it off.

Probably frequency of the colors they have played.

Before relatively recently map complete required the WvW maps and it was much easier to secure the corner of the map you started on especially on the Eternal Battlegrounds map.

This isn’t a thing anymore but I would imagine the code they added, because long, long time ago it was rankings and I remember JQ being stuck on Green seemingly for months being an issue, to fix this is still there because variety is the spice of life.

And WinAuth and Google Authenticator still works. SMS has been added to two tier but it doesn’t replace the existing authenticator.

The reason behind it was they didn’t want players to obtain a full armor set, because they were rich, the first day the set went live. While quartz can be traded, everything else from charged quartz to celestial insignia to the celestial armor itself is account bound so not only time gated but a player needed the correct armor crafting skill leveled up to 400.

You could think of it as the dry run for ascended armor. Although you can buy the timegated refined mat and insignia from the TP the final armor still needed to be crafted by the player.

So if they learned from celestial and applied that lesson to ascended, why haven’t they gone back to “fix” celestial? Well the only fix would be to make charged quartz and celestial insignia tradable and not the timegate.

Wallets are for currency, not items.

Now I don’t have a problem if the Character Creator grayed out the faces, eye and hair color and hair styles the kits have to encourage players to buy them, the way minis, finishers and mail carriers are

Rampage.7145:

Behellagh.1468:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9

Scroll down to the section OVERALL: CPU IPC. Those 7 benchmarks, some single core/multicore, are run on Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake CPUs running at 3GHz, so all underclocked, with DDR3 memory. You can clearly see the improvement between CPU generations.

There is a 20% improvement between Sandy Bridge and Skylake in CineBench. Same with PovRay, another CPU intensive benchmark. No “new instructions” or advantage from DDR4 here. No better thermals so Turbo kicks up the speed, no faster default clock speed. Skylake IS a faster CPU at the same speed against existing software.

You are right, this doesn’t necessarily translates into an equal performance gain in games. But if you already OCing, getting another 20% above what you already have is a virtual impossibility unless you are barely OCing.

Ok if you think Cinebench is equal to real world performance, ehm…. There is nothing else to say. I do invite you to check out the GAMING benches on that very same review and see what real worl gaming performance means. And as i said, at best it is 10% faster in 1 game GTA 5. That is about it, some other CPU intensive games like atila perform exactly equal. Gaming is not equal to sytnthetic CPU benches cuz every game is different they basically move massive ammounts of data from CPU to memory to GPU, during this process there are many things that affect the performance, not only raw CPU performance.

All these ¨review¨ websites are paid by intel and such to speak marvels about their new releases but lets face it. Intel has not released a decent CPU since the sandy days, people should just kittening boycot every single of these garbage releases. How is it kittening possible that a 2011 CPU made in 32nm is virtually as good as a 2015 CPU made in 14nm, they even comsume about the same kittening power. They should at least be giving you 8 cores at this point at the same price to barelly justify their inneptitude. This is completelly unacceptable and people should just not buy these producs cuz they are garbage, plain and simple it is like we had 560ti videocards still. Hell no any 100$ videocard in 2015 will destroy a 300$ 2011 videocard, that is how CPU market should kittening work. Compare a kittening iphone 3 to an iphone 5 for god sake, the x64 CPU industry is a technology embarasment.

Rerards like you who read these biased reviews and believe what they say without stopping for a second and actually thinking for yourself are the reasson why the industry is not moving forward, cuz nobody has the balls to tell intel they are a piece of kitten.

Yay! You get a tin foil hat for your Intel pays them all conspiracy theory.

I was countering your allegations that any CPU performance gain was due only to newer instructions and DDR4 memory.

Cinebench and PovRay are perfectly good pure CPU benchmarks. Even 3DPM shows some improvement generation to generation but it’s obvious that it’s very data cache dependent as Broadwell with it’s additional e-DRAM L4 cache helps in that case.

I wouldn’t recommend upgrading from Haswell Devil’s Canyon CPU but an ancient Sandy Bridge? I think it’s a little too soon, give it 3 months or so for issues to be resolved but if you want a the “new” platform, then why not?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9

Scroll down to the section OVERALL: CPU IPC. Those 7 benchmarks, some single core/multicore, are run on Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake CPUs running at 3GHz, so all underclocked, with DDR3 memory. You can clearly see the improvement between CPU generations.

There is a 20% improvement between Sandy Bridge and Skylake in CineBench. Same with PovRay, another CPU intensive benchmark. No “new instructions” or advantage from DDR4 here. No better thermals so Turbo kicks up the speed, no faster default clock speed. Skylake IS a faster CPU at the same speed against existing software.

You are right, this doesn’t necessarily translates into an equal performance gain in games. But if you already OCing, getting another 20% above what you already have is a virtual impossibility unless you are barely OCing.

You didn’t exploit anything, as they pointed out it got awarded to you, and lots of other players in error and they simply fixed the error.

sirsquishy.8531:

Behellagh.1468:

The current Skylake CPUs do NOT contain eDRAM+Iris. It’s the Intel HD 530. So no HUGE L4 cache.

You are thinking of the Broadwell Socket 1150 i7-5775C.

The current no, but they are going to release Skylake CPUs with eDRAM + Iris at some point. And I honestly can’t wait until they do.

I want to see a dual core (G or i3) with Iris + eDRAM, cause when that happens that shuts down AMD’s APU’s until they are forced to release their new Zen technology. AMD needs that push.

Intel needs AMD otherwise the price will jump at least 50%. APUs are fine for low price solution.

It will eventually expand the range of addresses so it doesn’t bother you.

It’s suppose to be about designing for the future.

They merged some traits.

We now get 18 points instead of 14.

3 out of 5 lines yields 10 combinations. 2 out of 5 lines plus one specialization also yields 10 combinations. If they add additional specializations, each will yield 10 more per profession.

I was a four line thief too and now forced to choose. Oh well, MMO skills and abilities are always changing.

It’s good on all nodes, takes no inventory space as spare tools do, it never runs out.

It’s the same with all the other infinite convenience items at the Gem Store. You get one and you pass it around. That’s much better than the 800 gem soul bound ones we had initially.

If you pick up one, and this should be obvious, buy the Watchwork Pick as it drops sprockets you can sell. Next would be the Consortium Sickle which allows drive by foraging, it’s noticeably faster.

They did tweet that it most definitely being released this year.

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/629069828054192128

The current Skylake CPUs do NOT contain eDRAM+Iris. It’s the Intel HD 530. So no HUGE L4 cache.

You are thinking of the Broadwell Socket 1150 i7-5775C.

Rampage.7145:

Ansau.7326:

- The 6700k OC to 4.6 or 4.7 (which seems to be easy) will be around 30% more powerful than your overclocked 2600k.
- Z170 has pcie 3.0 while yours has 2.0. This will add around 5fps more.
- Your ddr3 ram will probably be 1333 or 1600 at most. ddr4 will start at 2133, but I suggest to get 2666, 2800 or 3000. This will add another 5fps more.

For gw2 it is a good upgrade.

Ok no this is not true most of those becnhmarks use newer instruction sets, which makes new processors better, faster and efficient (due having new instruction sets compared to old ones), When games start taking advantage of this then yes u will see better performnce. Old games (like gw2) will hardly use these so basically they will perform the same on an old i7 2600k than on a new i7 6700k. Notice these benches are also made at stock clock speeds and the new i7 has a base clock of 4.2ghz compared to 3.8ghz from the old one. When u overclock both the new will get to 4.7 or close to that as maximum Oc while the old one will get 4.8-4.9.

U can see all the gaming benches and even on CPU starved games like atila total war u will see indentical performance on both CPUs. The reasson for this is Intel hvn’t improved IPC since sandy days, they only added tricks and gimmicks to their new procesors but they hvn’t done anything groundbreaking yet to make em really faster. Sure the new i7 will feel a bit faster during general usage, but for gaming, hell no untill the games start taking advantage of newer technologies.

I would advice you to just keep your i7 2600k untill it dies or they release faster processors (for real). If you use you PC for video editing, rendering or other professional stuff where u can take advantage of new instruction sets to do things faster, then definitelly go get the new i7 6700k right away cuz DDR4 PCIe 4.0 M.2 USB 3.0 are worthly platform upgrades u wanna have to be more productive. If you only game then u will notice no difference whatsoever between the old i7 2600k and newer processors (at least on current games it may change for future games).

Running conventional benchmarks that run both on Sandy Bridge and Skylake shows that Skylake is anywhere between 5.5% and 69.3% faster than Sandy Bridge. Cinebench is 22.3% faster. These percentages are all at the same non-turbo clock speed. This has nothing to do with “new instructions”, just older ones that are faster.

Biggest problem with that idea, assuming I found the right original machine, is that case is a slim line case and not a mini tower which parts like most video cards and power supplies expect. So you better also think about a standard mini tower case as well.

A lot of differences between Dx9 and later are do to the advances in GPU design and how hardware features feed back into the changes of the API. More memory, texture compression, significantly more complex shaders and the movement from a very generic API that evolved to catch up to the features and structure of OpenGL to one with Dx12 that attempted to streamline it so the abstraction of features and internal data formats are all but non-existent. You can thank the console hardware development wars and the Mantle API for some of this.

Remember Dx9 runs on old GPUs with fixed, pixel and vector shader pipelines as part of it’s design rather than the massive array of simple FPUs that Dx10 and beyond GPUs are built around. There is a reason that supercomputers are being built with high end graphics cards nowadays.

But there is a downside to this raw power. It means that a significant portion of the driver is in reality a compiler to convert shaders into the code needed to run on these massive arrays of FPUs and well, they aren’t as good as they could be. Which is why many drivers and now game optimizers from GPU manufacturing essential provide hand optimized versions of those shaders and bypass the less efficient shader compilers for specific games. Games that are frequently used as benchmarks get special attention. Benchmarks sell cards. And even if a game doesn’t get personal attention one manufacturer may suggest a series of rendering steps that is less efficient on their competitors product.

This means the two major manufacturers don’t really need to make the best driver to support the published API but tweak their perception to consumers by playing favorites with benchmark products than a consistent best experience for all games. But that’s my soapbox. I think one or both teams have commented that ArenaNet wouldn’t play ball with them to get $pecial attention.

So what Dx10/11/12 could provide are shaders that could improve lighting, shadows, improved textures and other effects that are difficult and or slow using the limitations of Dx9.

I nice read into a modern rendering path, explained for the layperson, sort of is a piece on the Dx11 render path in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s a fascinating read and highlights all the steps that are done to generate all those effects.

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-revolution-graphics-study/

Blizzard had annual income of a billion a year for a few years. This game is around 80 million a year. There is a lot of resources you can devote if you are earning 10x as much as this game is annually.

Turbine did their upgrade, on an engine used in multiple titles, while those titles were still subscription based.

People aren’t saying that. People are saying that the game targeted 32-bit XP as the minimum OS requirements. Since 32-bit apps run on 64-bit OS and Dx9 is supported on all newer versions of Windows, that’s why.

Also China was still over 68% XP in 2012. Worldwide in 2012 XP was 2nd at 30% while Win 7 was at 50% and in 2011, XP was still number 1.

When you develop code you make technological decisions based on what your minimum configuration were at the time you started. Dx9 was also a very mature API while Dx10 was new and different and most early Dx10 added pretty but sacrificed the all mighty FPS so that wasn’t encouraging a forward looking design. In 2007 where quad cores were still premium hardware they built their client on the classic duel thread design that was the common approach at the time and an upgrade over what they had in GW.

This was a product of it’s time. And decisions made then made sense. Nobody wanted a Duke Nuken continuous restart everytime a better engine came out. So you build it, plant a stake in the ground and then have all the assets developed and tested on that client rather than feature creep hell.

Okay I stand corrected.

Carighan.6758:

laokoko.7403:

You can aim for 6 spirits shard a day which take just daily and farming 18 champ bag. And you can get a legendary in 60 days.

Exactly.

And if not, 120 days in you’ll have the same amount. It’s really not all that slow to acquire. -.-

sirsquishy.8531:

Behellagh.1468:

As you pointed out it does future proof it. The only drawback, other than cost, is the whole Z170 chipset and motherboard hasn’t really been tested with the inevitable tweaks and BIOS upgrades that a more mature Z97 motherboard has. You will be on the bleeding edge and everything that means.

I think if you could hold off for a few months that the i7-6700K (or i5-6600K) and the Z170 is the way to go. There will be a few bios patches out and supply of Skylake should bring the price closer to suggested retail. Also DDR4 prices may start to go down as well.

But that’s my opinion.

Intel is going to run 2-3 cycles on the 1151 socket. By the time its upgrade a 6700K Intel will be rolling a new socket. Thats not future proofed. There is no such thing as future proofing Technology. Best you can hope for is a 5-6 year cycle before upgrading.

It’s more future proof than Socket 1150 which is at it’s end. Desktop Broadwell have lower base clock performance. DDR3 goes bye-bye with the end of Socket 1150 as Socket 1151 and Socket 2011-3 are DDR4. That’s future proofing, at least for a few years.