Guild Wars 2

Apologies for bumping but I noticed something:
The official Mac client uses the cmdline flag ‘-umbra cpu’. To clarify, this is NOT the same as -umbra gpu.

Has anyone tried testing this on Wine yet? Any performance effects? I’ll test later when I’ve got a chance but just wanted to throw that out there for the curious.

In other news, with that flag in mind I’ve had success playing the official Cider client by editing the configuration – by default it specifies 256MB VRAM – change this to the amount your Mac actually has (in my case 4096MB) and the second line which is set to 128MB by default to half of that (i.e. 2048MB).

Do you have dual monitors? I had a similar problem a while ago and the solution was to mirror displays, start the game and unmirror them.

I’ve had a similar issue but in my case it was caused by having 4 monitors. Mirroring them all made it magically work.

Moesmaker.9581:

A brand new iMac… lower the resolution… This is odd…

The Guild Wars 2 Mac client is anything but optimised unfortunately.

Nitro.4732:

Out of curiosity, has any Mac OS X user tried Parallels Desktop for Mac?

It supports 64 bit windows, allows you to boot into your mac operating system and you would be able to install 64 bit Guild Wars.

Its been a long time since I used Parallels, however just thinking, it could run Gw2 just as good as w.i.n.e. with the added bonus of accessing more memory due to 64bit support.

Unfortunately it is an additional cost so I am unwilling to purchase it just to test a theory as I do not play games on OSX. However if someone already uses parallels desktop or has access to it, I would be intrigued to find out how Gw2 performs with it.

I’ve tested using both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Basically, yes, it works, but I wouldn’t recommend blowing the money on Parallels for it.

I found that I could attain higher framerates, though granted this is on a Hackintosh where I have resources to spare. With that said however, the game did feel a lot less responsive despite the higher framerates, and had a tendency to hit pretty severe lag spikes frequently – if I had to guess because of the reduced IO performance.

If you can possibly run Windows it’s honestly the best way to enjoy Guild Wars 2 right now. I know it’s not the answer you want to hear at all – I really do love OS X myself – there’s a reason I went to the effort of getting it up and running on non-Apple hardware – but the performance difference between running the game on OS X and running it natively on Windows in night and day.

The unfortunate reality is that, for various reasons (which I’ve detailed in previous posts), the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon as it’s just broken on such a fundamental level, and short of ArenaNet suddenly deciding to invest time and energy into writing a native Mac client it’s unlikely that we’ll see any major changes any time soon.

For this reason I’m also thinking of restructuring my personal computing setup, since I do own a MacBook Pro. I just really love having a desktop wth OS X for productivity reasons (and I don’t really care about dual booting).

Inazuma.6107:

Well, even before even going the togl route, they could start by managing the memory a little better. For example I’ve read that many games always allocate big chunks of space and then fill that with textures/models/etc (this way they can defragment it).

Anyway, I will probably switch back to Linux sooner or later and enjoy the 64bit client on Wine-Staging

Oh definitely. I’d be lying if I said I was an experienced game developer – I’m not anything close to that – but I did get the impression from some anet posts on Reddit a while back that they’re not exactly doing things in the most efficient ways possible.

Unfortunately Linux isn’t really an option for me as when I’m not playing Guild Wars 2 I primarily use my computer for web development and music production. Web development is absolutely fine in Linux but music production well, it’s much better than it used to be but still not really at a level where I could comfortably switch.

I know many people would suggest I run Windows but I’m honestly not a huge fan for many, many reasons. Otherwise I’d switch now and make things a lot easier for myself.

I think it’s worth mentioning as well that my main system is actually a PC I’ve put OS X on, or a “hackintosh” as some might call it.

Moesmaker.9581:

This morning I tried to play GW2: five crashes in 30 minutes.

Don’t we think it is about time that Arenanet acknowledges that they don’t deliver sufficient support for the Apple productfamily and refunds ALL Mac-users who purchased the HoT-expansion? No offense, no harm done.

And it is NOT an incident (several times per day), it is NOT my Mac (all other games perform like a charm)

Unfortunately I can’t see them rushing to do that.

Personally though, I don’t want a refund. I really enjoy Guild Wars 2. I just want to be able to play the game on my platform of choice.

Aemon.8146:

Hang on, I thought the problem with the mac client was because the outdated wrapper wasn’t communicating well with OSX, but from what you said, this is a memory leak inherent to the base coding of the game that affects all systems.

How did that kind of error make it into a final live piece of software? I would think something like this would have been apparent during alpha/beta testing of the original release.

What triggers in the program are supposed to release RAM again? Are they failing or simply not triggering often enough to keep up with demand for RAM?

It’s actually a bit of both. Essentially the memory leak is on all systems, but the outdated wrapper makes the issue more apparent, and because it’s currently not possible to run the 64-bit client on OS X, Mac users are more affected by it.

The wrapper that Guild Wars 2 is using is based on an old version of Wine from back before they switched to the GPL license which prevents outside companies from releasing closed source forks. Some people have had varying success by playing the game with software such as PlayOnMac which allows you to use the latest version of Wine.

With the original (non Heart of Thorns zones) the issue wasn’t as apparent as the game simply didn’t use as much RAM back then, in part simply because the zones in the base game aren’t as detailed and don’t feature the multiple layers present in HoT zones.

From my understanding, there’s two problems:
1. It isn’t unloading assets from memory quickly enough (made worse by Wine simply being slower at doing this)
2. When memory is free, it is left fragmented. What this means is that the space released by old assets being unloaded may not be large enough to load new assets into, so assets are loaded onto the end of the game’s allocated memory, increasing its RAM usage until it reaches the 3.5GB limit and crashes.

In this case you’ve got memory being un-used in many places within the RAM that the game is allocated, and as far as I can tell the game doesn’t really do anything to try and defragment the RAM its given, which is surprising seeing as how on systems with multiple cores the game really only utilises the first core.

As far as I know, the game only really runs any proper garbage collection when the map is changed, but even then I’m not convinced it properly deals with memory fragmentation.

Inazuma.6107:

Actually it would be possible to have a native client that uses only a togl layer like Valve’s Vogl, or eON (which I believe offers consulting to companies that want their games ported).

It would be still quite costly (especially to maintain and QA), but nowhere near as rewriting the engine. This is supposing the main loop, network code and audio code are well factored so that the windows specifics are well isolated.

I’m actually surprised that more developers haven’t used Valve’s offering simply because it’s freely available on Github and works well.

If I had to guess, the reason Anet haven’t opted for a native client (for example, by using eON’s technology) is because they don’t want the expense and workload of maintaining two distinct clients. Assuming their code is fairly platform agnostic it wouldn’t be too difficult but to be honest it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it wasn’t.

What they could do is build an updated game client which could be more easily ported and release it alongside a future expansion (maybe even have DirectX 11 support on Windows!) but now we’re just dreaming.

I’d like to think that a decent part of their market are Mac users but unfortunately I do get the impression that that’s not really the case.

Technical explanation incoming…

Right so the issue with the crashing is actually present on the Windows version as well, it’s just less pronounced. Essentially the Guild Wars 2 client is quite bad at freeing up memory after loading and unloading textures as you play the game. Sooner or later you’ll hit the 3.5GB RAM limit as it fails to unload textures properly and it’ll crash. On Windows they’ve resolved this issue by ignoring it entirely and just releasing a x64 client raising that 3.5GB limit to however much memory you have in your system, and realistically you probably won’t hit the 8GB or 16GB or however much memory you have in your system playing Guild Wars 2.

On the Mac side of things however, due to incompatibilities with how OS X deals with CPU registers (which by the way, it really shouldn’t do but it does but that’s a discussion for another time), it’s currently not possible to run x64 Wine on OS X. What this means is that you’re limited to using the x86 client.

Now, due to limitations with how Wine works, the 4GB limit is actually split between both your system memory and your video memory, meaning that effectively you’ve got 1.75GB to 2GB of VRAM and system RAM that the game can utilise. I believe newer versions of Wine don’t necessarily have this issue (or rather, divide it differently) but I cannot confirm.

What this means is that it takes much less effort to crash the Mac client, simply because you’ll run out of memory a lot sooner.

But wait! There’s more bad news!

Due to the fact that Wine is having to translate DirectX calls to OpenGL ones in real time to allow the game to run on OS X, there’s a performance penalty, meaning that it takes longer than it does on Windows for the game to load and unload textures. This means that the amount of memory Guild Wars 2 requires is even higher than normal, because it simply takes longer to unload textures that are no longer required from memory.

In real world usage, this means that the game ends up needing almost twice the memory that it would require on Windows, running the game on the same settings.

There are plans to make Wine unload textures more aggressively in future but this is likely to lead to increased CPU usage, further reducing framerates (and let’s be honest, they’re already far from excellent on OS X).

Tl;dr:
Don’t expect a working Mac client any time soon unless ArenaNet decide to rewrite the game engine, something I can’t see them finding money in the budget to do.

If you are an OS X user I suggest the following two options:
1. Quit playing Guild Wars 2 or
2. Install Windows

Moesmaker.9581:

Yesterday the State of the Game Update was posted on the website. A lot of things to get excited about.

It makes me sad that there wasn’t one single word about the problems with the Mac client.

What is the use of all these great new features when the game crashes unexpectedly and often?

I feel you, I scanned through that article really hoping for an update. I really don’t want to run Windows so it’s frustrating that there’s this one game that I love.

I really hope one day Guild Wars 2 can switch to eON as opposed to Cider, seeing as how development has now stopped.

eON is a huge improvement – games such as Saints Row IV are using it on Linux and running wonderfully. I may consider switching to Linux at some point but music production prevents me right now.

Mitha.7039:

More Mac Client Problems: Running client normally produces an empty invisible window that cannot be interacted with and the game never runs. If I run repair on it, it’ll finally load up and work properly, but I have to run repair just to run the kitten game.
Rig: iMac 14,2 running OS 10.11.2, with the NVIDIA GeForce GT755M 1024 mb VRAM

Out of curiosity, do you have dual monitors? I’ve had the same problem with my own setup but I have three monitors + a projector. If I mirror all displays and then start the game it works. I can then disable mirroring again.

My setup is a hackintosh (system definition is iMac 14,2) with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB VRAM.

Also have you tried with PlayOnMac or WineSkin?

Can we make this a bit more constructive? Anet clearly have no intention (at least not publicly) of improving the situation, so why don’t we instead talk about ways we can improve the situation for ourselves, the players?

For example, does anyone know which Wine versions work best? Which configuration options? Is it worth running the game in a virtual machine? AMD vs Nvidia on OS X performance?

Regarding an anet response, they’ve already responded on the first page. The response wasn’t helpful but at least they didn’t lie – quite simply said they know the Cider port isn’t the best but they’ll try to make it run a bit better if they can. Unfortunately Cider isn’t being actively developed anymore so it’s unlikely the Mac port will get any updates in the future unless Anet can get someone else to develop something similar.

Honestly that PC will last you a very long time.

Whilst it’s true that the CPU you’ve got now is the latest CPU that motherboard will take (to the best of my knowledge anyway), it’s still one of the fastest CPUs on the market and with overclocking I’m told it’ll even overtake Intel’s latest offerings due to a better TIM.

Simply put, yes that system will last you a very long time.

Not a clue if it’s possible but yeah, the Xbox One is a really underpowered console.

In all honesty you could build a PC for the same price with considerably better specifications and just plug an Xbox controller into it.

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

SpookyElectric.1507:

Clever clever…

On-Topic: Game still crashes. OOM errors each time.

I’ve been tweaking my Wine-staging GW2 build for a while now, but I cannot seem to get rid of the graphics glitches. They seem to occur in tandem with glowing and lighting effects, of which GW2 has a TON, so there is a constant garble of flashing, distorted environmental models, and other graphical messes that makes the game nearly unplayable. These glitches do not seem to affect the UI, Inventory Box, or options windows.

Furthermore, wine-staging apparently cannot not use the 64-bit windows client, so I am not sure that, even if I somehow fix the graphics problem, it will last any longer than the Mac client as it is now.

All of which is very unfortunate, because it seems to otherwise be the most stable. Looking online, I can find nothing about this particular problem.

Native Wine stopped working as of yesterday’s patch. So it was the best option until then.

I have to say, It’s kinda crummy that I’m looking into these sorts of options for a game advertised to me with a mac client. But until Cider comes in 64-bit, or until ANet comes out with a native client, I’m not sure what we can do.

Really sucks to hear

I was hoping that Wine-Staging would have the same performance / effect on Mac as it does on Linux.

Just to be clear, did you compile the Wine-Staging build from source or downloaded the pre built one? On the official website I could only find builds for 32bit so that may be the reason why the 64bit client can’t run.

Additionally if your Wine configuration has the 2 folders named “Program Files (x86)” and “Program Files” that means you have a 64bit Wine profile (which also supports 32bit). But if there’s only “Program Files” that means it’s 32bit only.

As a Linux user I wasn’t far behind Macs with the 32bit build of the game, I could do events and play the game but was forced to restart every 45mins or so because the Virtual Memory would fill up and crash the game. The 64bit client now uses even up to 5GB VM and doesn’t crash.

If ANet could at least fix up the graphics issues from Wine-Staging and build a 64bit version, that might restore a big chunk of playability for Macs

Regarding 64-bit, it’s very unlikely that it’ll ever work on OS X due to the way in which the OS X ABI handles CPU registers. In a nutshell, OS X uses a CPU register that Windows applications expect to be able to use.

What this means is it is not currently possible to build Wine x64 on OS X and unfortunately it probably won’t ever be, short of virtualising a CPU in QEMU or having Wine intercept requests to this register (which would murder performance).

There is currently a project where they are testing Wine with the CPU register outright disabled and it works well with some software, not so well with others.

We’ll see.

BDave.9386:

HippieJoel.9537:

Regarding an x64 client for OS X:
As much as you don’t want to hear this, it’s most likely never going to happen. Short of ArenaNet writing a native Mac client anyway.

I wonder if there’s a compiler flag for not using the register(s) in question? Hmm… That’d solve the one issue, but I’m not sure how many others there might be.

Whilst I’m by no means an expert on the subject, my understanding is that it’s not so much that Wine needs that register, but rather that applications written for Windows in general do. It’s not really a problem on Linux since Linux doesn’t touch the register in question anyway, but OS X does. Apple could in theory release an update to the OS X kernel which changes this but it’d then risk breaking compatibility with OS X applications that expect things to be the way they are now.

Regarding an x64 client for OS X:
As much as you don’t want to hear this, it’s most likely never going to happen. Short of ArenaNet writing a native Mac client anyway.

In a nutshell, the issue lies with the way in which OS X handles CPU registers on x64. Unfortunately this conflicts with the way Windows does and the way in which Windows applications are programmed to expect. What this means is that OS X will change the value of a CPU register to something that the application doesn’t expect which will cause a crash.

It is possible to wrap calls from the Windows software in Wine to prevent this problem but we’re talking a 15 to 20x performance hit, which is just unacceptable.

The only way you’re going to see an x64 GW2 client on OS X is if someone set up a way to run Wine via a CPU emulator like QEMU, but that’s fairly far fetched.

Your best options at this point are:
1. Run the x86 version (32 bit) of Guild Wars 2 using PlayOnMac
or:
2. Run the x64 version of Guild Wars 2 either via BootCamp or using a virtual machine with software like Parallels or VMware.

Whilst I’ve found VMware is, on the whole, a lot more stable and does benchmark higher, Parallels seems to give better graphical performance.

Someone mentioned WineSkin working with the x64 client – I’m pretty sure this couldn’t work even if it wanted to but will test and report back.

Genuine advice:
If you use a Mac with OS X – don’t use the official Anet client. It’s a Cider wrapper developed by TransGaming and as we all know, it doesn’t work very well.

What I recommend:
Download PlayOnMac. It’s a lovely front-end for Wine, the wrapper that Cider is based on. Install Guild Wars 2 through it.

Once you’ve done this, go to the settings and switch to the latest staging version of Wine. Add the flag -dx9single.

Then, go to the Wine settings, go to the ‘Staging’ tab and enable CSMT.

This worked wonders for me – I can now play the game in a resizable windowed mode, full screen windowed mode and the low quality sound glitch is gone. I also genuinely get better framerates.

Whilst ANet seem to have better things to worry about than Mac support, if you are on a Mac I’d recommend you try running the game with PlayOnMac plus the Windows version. I’m doing that now and whilst the experience certainly isn’t perfect it’s much better than what I’m getting with the official Mac client.

I know it’s not particularly helpful but from what I’ve seen ArenaNet don’t really like to comment either way.

The general view however is: Does it give you an unfair advantage? If it does then it probably won’t be allowed.

I will admit that I too would love to see the game feature an FOV slider. I also wish the camera was centred a bit higher but I suspect we won’t be seeing that any time soon.

Assuming it’s an AMD FX-6350 or something along those lines I wouldn’t rush to upgrade the CPU too quickly – true, it doesn’t do nearly as well as a haswell chip in single threaded tasks but I think the GPU is going to be your primary bottleneck.

I would definitely second the thought that you should go with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 ti – it’s a fantastic card for the money.

If your primary use for your computer is going to be gaming, you’d be much better off simply building a desktop computer. Generally speaking you’ll get a much better price:performance ratio on desktop components than you will on a laptop, plus cooling isn’t as much of an issue. If you want an idea of where to start with components have a look at http://logicalincrements.com – it gives good components for each budget.

With that said, if you want a gaming laptop, honestly it’s not something I’m particularly experienced in (my primary laptop is a MacBook Pro) but I’ve heard good things about Lenovo laptops in general. That and where I work we have 100 or so HP laptops which have proven to be fairly reliable.

I apologize if this has been answered before somewhere, but I suspect I win some kind of prize for having an issue that probably affects me and no other players on the planet.

Essentially I play Guild Wars 2 on both my PC and my MacBook, and on top of that to complicate matters (because I apparently enjoy complicating things) I use the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout, which I suspect may be related to the issues I’m having.

(For clarification, I have attached an image showing this keyboard layout).

What I’m finding is that if I set my keybindings on my PC, they don’t seem to correlate properly with what they should be on my Mac. For example, if I set my movement keys to .OEU (or ESDF as it’d be on QWERTY) on my Mac, my PC seems to pick them up as RVO. or something along those lines. I get the same in reverse.

I’d like to think that I’m not the only person affected by this (other people with non-QWERTY layouts perhaps?) but would appreciate some help with this.

Assuming nobody knows how to fix this, is it possible to store the keybindings client-side rather than syncing with the server?