Guild Wars 2

What exactly do you mean by retina support? The client works on the retina MBP, only performance is much lower than under Windows.

DJRuful: the retina MBP is essentially a gaming laptop equipped with a GTX 660M analogue. It is pretty decent for gaming. I play GW2 under Bootcamp at 1920×1200 at high settings.

Normal.1823:

Karew.2169:

Have you tried using the “Renderer: Supersample” mode at either native resolution or half resolution?

I hadn’t but just tried it now, actually native resolution with supersample crushes the game. Half resolution with supersample is ok but still blurry. Native resolution with subsampling is pretty good, had to turn down shadows and shaders but not bad, averaging about 30fps, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Didn’t try it in WvWvW.

Using both subsampling and supersampling is really pointless on the rMBP. The scaled resolutions provide a better way to do the same thing. Rather than running native with subsampling you should try 1680×1050or 1920×1200.

I am playing 1920×1200 in Bootcamp, looks very clean to me. The 1400×900 will usually look blurry only because you have seen it in higher res before In fact, its not anymore blurry than a native 1440×900 screen.

Jpac, try starting the game, wait for the download to begin and then quit it. I guess that should create the folder structure if it wasn’t already there.

The retina MBP gets around 70-100% performance hit compared to the Windows version

Under Windows I am able to run with 35+ fps on 1920×1200 on everything set to high.

To get similar levels of performance, I must switch to 1680×1050 almost everything low under the OS X port. Anything higher yields very inconsistent and choppy behaviour.

If you already have the game installed on Windows, you can just copy the game data over to your Mac installation in order to avoid the huge download. Just install the Mac package from the website, then right-click on the app icon, select show package contents, then go Resources -> Transgaming -> c_drive -> GW2. Copy your GW2.DAT there. Launch the app – it will quickly patch and voila!

…unfortunately, I will be sticking to Bootcamp for now.

On my retina MBP I get lower performance running all low than under Windows running all high. Currently, I’d rather take the inconvenience of having to reboot compared to taking such a huge quality and performance hit.

Prophet of Atlantis.7169:

Technically the Mac environment is less stringent on the hardware and more “powerful” than Windows

Technically, this is not correct

The answer to your question is that the GW2 Mac client is a Cider-based Windows port, which means it relies on windows/directx emulation. So there will be performance loss here. Besides, Apple graphics drivers are less optimised than their Windows counterparts, so you need faster hardware to offset this.

I am happy to have a Mac version but I think I will still use the Windows one. Until a native Mac version comes out.