Alright, maybe it is time for an engine upgrade.

[DoggySpew.4529]

I’ve seen benchmarks with the latest hardware. I9’s 10900k + 3090RTX and STILL this game drops in the 20fps territory. I know the game is cpu intensive, but the latest hardware should be able to run an 8 year old game on full settings with no problems. There is an attempt with an DirectX12 mod, but that is just a slapped on fix, and it doesn’t work that well even. I think it is time for the developers to make the jump and make an upgrade. It will also future proof Guild Wars 2.

It would be quite a lot of work I think I am sure, but the result will satisfy everyone.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

Questionable whether Anet could pull this off and still put out at least some content. Not strictly against this but I'll not hold my breath.

[Dawdler.8521]

With that setup you can get Cyberpunk 2077 below 20 fps too.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> With that setup you can get Cyberpunk 2077 below 20 fps too.

 

Hey man, that's taking it too fair. DoggySpew doesn't deserve that.

[Blude.6812]

Search function! This has been addressed in many other threads.

 

[Veprovina.4876]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> With that setup you can get Cyberpunk 2077 below 20 fps too.

 

Haha yeah, cause that's the same thing right? :sweat_smile:

 

@"DoggySpew.4529"

 

I agree, they should optimise the engine. It's very bad right now, and an 8 year old game should not only run flawlessly on that setup, it should run flawlessly on a 5 year old graphics card and CPU. WIth the steam release, if they release the game in this condition, it will look very bad and might put people off sadly. I wouldn't count on any real changes til the expansion, though i think engine optimisation and upgrade should be a priority now over the expansion.

 

They **did** start optimising something recently though, there's a thread on it somewhere. And for a while it worked, i could play WvW with medium settings without FPS drops, it was SO good. And then something happened again, and i'm back to lowest settings subsample to make WvW work.

 

So bottom line is - it CAN work, the game isn't that demanding, but something is messing with the stability of the engine making it unstable and stuttery.

Now, whether or not they will do that before the xpac is antoher thing, but yes, the engine is in dire need of optimising and an upgrade.

 

Patience i guess. In the meantime, it is what it is, it's still fun to play.

[DeanBB.4268]

It would be nice, but I'd hate for it to happen at the expense of a content drought. There are enough complaints about content now when it is still trickling in.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"DeanBB.4268" said:

> It would be nice, but I'd hate for it to happen at the expense of a content drought.

 

Those that will make the changes to the engine are not the same people creating skins, sounds, music, voice acting, ui artists, skill balance, writers or any kind of programming work.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Changes to the game engine have the potential to break existing things in the game which would then need to be reworked. Things may also need to be reworked in order to take advantage of the new changes. Content in development may be put on hold, or release dates pushed back, in order to ensure that they'll function using the new game engine.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ayrilana.1396" said:

> Changes to the game engine have the potential to break existing things in the game which would then need to be reworked. Things may also need to be reworked in order to take advantage of the new changes. Content in development may be put on hold, or release dates pushed back, in order to ensure that they'll function using the new game engine.

 

That depends on which part of the engine we are talking about. When games switch from direct 9 to direct x 10 or 11 for example, there is minimal changes to the rest if the game's code. When you change something like for example physics, it can break things, like when they reworked that part of the engine, it broke Super Adventure Box for a while.

[Infusion.7149]

Well that's not really the fastest CPU in terms of IPC right now, the Ryzen 7nm+ 5800X / 5900X / 5950X are. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/2143-ryzen-5000-ipc-performance/ )

 

There's something called Amdahl's law so even in a perfect scenario unless _most_ of the code is parallelized (we're talking over 90%) it will be losing per core efficiency past 6 cores. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/998-cpu-performance-amdahls-law/ or the wikipedia article)

 

Even in practice there's severe diminishing returns as seen in this recent study on WoW's DX12 implementation: https://rk.edu.pl/en/analyzing-world-warcraft-multi-core-scaling/

> As you can see the game FPS decreases nearly linearly with decreasing CPU clock frequency with some gains to Dazar'alor. Those charts show that the game is still managed by the main thread working on one core and only in some edge case scenarios when there is more GPU work than other logic it can scale bit better. Single core frequency and efficiency (IPC) are the king while stronger GPU comes into play only if you want better looks after you provided the CPU power to achieve good FPS.

 

For a less MMO-type game, we have statements such as the following from Ubisoft:

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/rainbow-six/siege/news-updates/6VFn74oMO2nVQGZxvFhBb5/vulkan-api-testing-on-live-pc

> WHAT IT DOES: Dynamic Texture Indexing helps us **reduce CPU overhead** by issuing fewer draw calls (a call to the graphics API to draw an object that will appear on screen). This is accomplished by having the GPU dynamically select the texture used in the shader, instead of binding it by using the CPU. The result is less pressure on the driver, and the **freed CPU cycles can then translate into better CPU performance overall**.

> WHAT IT DOES: AsyncCompute is a hardware capability that allows us to execute tasks in parallel on the GPU, thus providing more tools and opportunities for better and improved optimization. Since the launch of Siege on consoles, we have been able to utilize AsyncCompute for console players to optimize graphics techniques such as Ambient Occlusion or ScreenSpace Reflection. Graphics Cards previously supported AsyncCompute, however the DX11 API did not allow us to utilize it. With Vulkan it is now possible to do so.

> EXPECTED RESULT: With Vulkan and dynamic texture indexing, players who are CPU-bound should see better and more consistent frame rates.

 

What about a CPU bound game like from Stardock?

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20191007/351772/Living_with_Vulkan_and_DirectX_12.php

> In the most oversimplified sense, the biggest difference between the two new graphics stacks and DirectX 11 are that both Vulkan and DirectX 12 **support multiple threads to send commands to the GPU simultaneously**. GPU multitasking. Hooray. i.e. ID3D12CommandQueue::ExecuteCommandLists (send a bunch of commands and they get handled asynchronously).

> In DirectX 11, calls to the GPU are handled synchronously. You could end up with a lot of waiting after calling Present(). Don't get me wrong, DX11 is still way better than DirectX 9. **In DX9, the main thread had to call the GPU**.

 

> _The real world of game development_

> Which brings us back to the question: Why didn't Stardock's new games stick with DirectX 11? And the answer is: The performance gain you get from Vulkan or DirectX 12 comes down to the type of game it is.

>

> Case in point: Stardock has DirectX 12 and Vulkan versions of Star Control: Origins. **The performance gain is about 20% over DirectX 11**. The gain is relatively low because, well, it's Star Control. It's not a graphics intensive game (except for certain particle effects on planets which don't benefit much from the new stacks). So **we have to weigh the cost of doubling or tripling our QA compatibility budget with a fairly nominal performance gain**. And even now, we run into driver bugs on DirectX 12 and Vulkan that result in crashes or other problems that we just don't have the budget to investigate.

 

 

In the past there was the introduction of the 64 bit client which if I remember correctly is the only drastically major GW2 upgrade client-side that we know of. That update (which was not the official client , it was labeled beta for the longest time) resulted in fewer crashes due to 4GB VRAM + RAM limits. So there are changes that would benefit all, not just the people with the latest hardware.

 

Due to the fact that both D912pxy and DXVK both have FPS drops, I would hazard a guess it's down to the parallelization of the code that relies on _networking_ and also _client-side_ sequential calculations of anything from damage , conditions, range, LoS , etc (everything not visual). The "servers" are actually Amazon AWS elastic compute instances , EC2 presumably with the auto scaling functionality.

 

You can test your connection to AWS servers via sites such as https://cloudharmony.com/speedtest-for-aws and check reachability via Amazon directly https://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/

 

----

 

See also statement from the Lead Engine Programmer for GW2 5 years ago https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n/

> GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it's a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say "Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you're too busy", but sadly this is not that world.

>

> As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn't buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can't do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best.

>

> And about crashing on Tequatl: Here's one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

> > @"Ayrilana.1396" said:

> > Changes to the game engine have the potential to break existing things in the game which would then need to be reworked. Things may also need to be reworked in order to take advantage of the new changes. Content in development may be put on hold, or release dates pushed back, in order to ensure that they'll function using the new game engine.

>

> That depends on which part of the engine we are talking about. When games switch from direct 9 to direct x 10 or 11 for example, there is minimal changes to the rest if the game's code. When you change something like for example physics, it can break things, like when they reworked that part of the engine, it broke Super Adventure Box for a while.

 

Updating/re-working the game engine doesn't mean just upgrading to a higher version of DX. Besides, it's already been stated by Anet that DX wouldn't buy a whole lot of performance improvements.

[Veprovina.4876]

> @"Infusion.7149" said:

> Well that's not really the fastest CPU in terms of IPC right now, the Ryzen 7nm+ 5800X / 5900X / 5950X are. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/2143-ryzen-5000-ipc-performance/ )

>

 

Are you implying we need a 1500€ processor that was released less than a year ago to run an 8 year old game properly? :tongue:

That's not in the system requirements. Not even in recommended ones. :wink:

[Infusion.7149]

> @"Veprovina.4876" said:

> > @"Infusion.7149" said:

> > Well that's not really the fastest CPU in terms of IPC right now, the Ryzen 7nm+ 5800X / 5900X / 5950X are. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/2143-ryzen-5000-ipc-performance/ )

> >

>

> Are you implying we need a 1500€ processor that was released less than a year ago to run an 8 year old game properly? :tongue:

> That's not in the system requirements. Not even in recommended ones. :wink:

 

Define "properly". If you have some sort of adaptive sync anything within range of the monitor refresh rate is fine by definition. 30FPS is "console quality". The recommended and minimum specs don't expect you to turn everything to maximum and get super FPS in a highly populated zone, they are likely based off living story and single player or sparse player zones.

 

The entire 5000 series Ryzens (zen3 / 7nm+ or whatever you want to call it) have the same IPC. If you want the best performance then that is what you should be getting regardless of it is a $300 or less 6 core or a $800 16 core.

 

Turning _all the settings up_ just means your CPU works harder. The shadows and reflections are CPU bound because they were developed before path tracing / ray tracing on GPUs. That won't change even if it is ported to DX12/Vulkan because everything shadows/reflections related would need to be made calculated on GPU which means a complete overhaul and a massive undertaking.

[Blocki.4931]

Literally just don't try to run it at max settings.

That's all that is required. It's perfectly playable, it works.

 

[Astralporing.1957]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

> > @"DeanBB.4268" said:

> > It would be nice, but I'd hate for it to happen at the expense of a content drought.

>

> Those that will make the changes to the engine are not the same people creating skins, sounds, music, voice acting, ui artists, skill balance, writers or any kind of programming work.

True, but they still be doing that for the same _money_. I don't think they have enough devs with required experience to do such a rework now (the ones they have probably are already doing what they can, but the rate of imporvements is slow)- like you said, an assets dev is not going to help there. So, they would need to hire them. Then they'd need to train them (because this is a proprietary engine, so the new hires would not know it) All this would take money. Money that would need to be taken from somewhere.

 

[Lucio.4190]

Age of Conan had two different versions of DX at the same time and let the player choose at startup.

GW2 could do the same thing during a beta period.

 

I think an upgrade with the latest DX version would be a great way to keep the engine updated and future proof. That would make it possible to give us lots of new features and another dimension to future expansions.

It would also allow the developers to be more creative and give us a better experience from the game.

I like this idea.

 

Still, I'm pretty curious of how an i9 gen 10 and an rtx3090 would give you 20fps? Have you installed the drivers for your chipset?

I'm running a gt730 on i5 gen 9. It works great on PvE when I play the Meta on Dragons Stand, also participated in a farm train outside Tarir. Saying we were at least 80 players there on each is not an exaggaration.

[Veprovina.4876]

> @"Infusion.7149" said:

> > @"Veprovina.4876" said:

> > > @"Infusion.7149" said:

> > > Well that's not really the fastest CPU in terms of IPC right now, the Ryzen 7nm+ 5800X / 5900X / 5950X are. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/2143-ryzen-5000-ipc-performance/ )

> > >

> >

> > Are you implying we need a 1500€ processor that was released less than a year ago to run an 8 year old game properly? :tongue:

> > That's not in the system requirements. Not even in recommended ones. :wink:

>

> Define "properly". If you have some sort of adaptive sync anything within range of the monitor refresh rate is fine by definition. 30FPS is "console quality". The recommended and minimum specs don't expect you to turn everything to maximum and get super FPS in a highly populated zone, they are likely based off living story and single player or sparse player zones.

>

> The entire 5000 series Ryzens (zen3 / 7nm+ or whatever you want to call it) have the same IPC. If you want the best performance then that is what you should be getting regardless of it is a $300 or less 6 core or a $800 16 core.

>

> Turning _all the settings up_ just means your CPU works harder. The shadows and reflections are CPU bound because they were developed before path tracing / ray tracing on GPUs. That won't change even if it is ported to DX12/Vulkan because everything shadows/reflections related would need to be made calculated on GPU which means a complete overhaul and a massive undertaking.

 

I mean, "properly" for an 8 year old game means, having 4-5 year old hardware and running it 30+ FPS. Which guild wars doesn't manage to do on any settings, and you can't really defend such poor performance by arguing that you should get $800 worth of hardware to get best performance. Especially not when people with even more powerful hardware than that have issues and drops below 20 fps. It's not about the hardware, and people shouldn't assume that's the issue when it clearly isn't. Guild Wars 2 didn't recieve a major engine upgrade that would justify a minimum/recommended spec switch to more recent hardware, and it clearly *can* run perfectly fine on lower specs when they optimise it.

 

It's like saying, you need a Ryzen 7 or Intel I9 to run Dragon's Dogma, Borderlands 2, Spec Ops: The Line or any other game using 2012 technology. No you don't, and to suggest it is kinda ridiculous.

 

But we'll probably have to wait til xpac for anything significant to happen. Best we can hope in the meantime is that they continue the tweaks that they said they're doing. Cause it's working, since they started, i've noticed significant improvements in FPS and stability. It's just that, sometimes they tweak further and "undo" some of it, so it's back and forth now.

 

It's ok though, just let them tweak, they'll sort it out, i believe in them. :smile:

[Astralporing.1957]

> @"Veprovina.4876" said:

> I mean, "properly" for an 8 year old game means, having 4-5 year old hardware and running it 30+ FPS.

I have 5 years old hardware and overall _am_ running it at 30+ fps at max details. Easily.

 

> Which guild wars doesn't manage to do on any settings

You sure about that? Because that strongly contradicts my personal experiences with this game.

 

Not saying GW2 is well-optimized (because it definitely isn't), but still let's please not overreact and overrepresent the situation, okay?

 

[Veprovina.4876]

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> > @"Veprovina.4876" said:

> > I mean, "properly" for an 8 year old game means, having 4-5 year old hardware and running it 30+ FPS.

> I have 5 years old hardware and overall _am_ running it at 30+ fps at max details. Easily.

>

> > Which guild wars doesn't manage to do on any settings

> You sure about that? Because that strongly contradicts my personal experiences with this game.

>

> Not saying GW2 is well-optimized (because it definitely isn't), but still let's please not overreact and overrepresent the situation, okay?

>

 

The thing about PC games as most know is that not everyone with exact or simmilar specs have the same experience. I'm glad you have a good experience with the game, but a lot of others do not.

 

People with OP's specs also can either run it great, or have horrible FPS and dips.

 

It's all about the engine, and how well it's optimised across the board.

 

Also, what are you arguing here exactly? That they *shouldn't* optimise the engine to run better because what, "it's ok for you"? You do 30+ FPS easily. Wouldn't you want to do 60+ FPS easily? What's the argument here? Should Anet manage the engine on your personal experience? Even by that logic, your personal experience can be improved so idk what your logic or argument here is honestly.

 

Why not make something the best it can be? Why the need to argue against engine optimisation?

[Infusion.7149]

For core maps (2012),

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-4.html

> The Radeon HD 7750 and GeForce GTX 550 Ti had no trouble through 1920x1080 at the _Balanced_ preset. However, they're both knocked down to about 30 FPS minimums using the _Best Appearance_ setting.

> At 1920x1080, you need at least a Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 560 to use the best-looking graphics preset offered in Guild Wars 2. It's preferable to get smoother performance using the Balanced setting when it comes to slower cards.

> None of the boards we're testing can keep above 40 FPS, including the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670. At its highest detail setting, Guild Wars 2 clearly demands a potent graphics subsystem.

...

> Four physical cores appear ideal, based on our results from the Sandy Bridge design. Sandy Bridge-E doesn't seem to introduce any benefit at all. Intel's dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and dual-core Pentium are notably slower, though they still embarrass the eight-core AMD FX at 3 GHz.

> Guild Wars 2 looks good, even at its lowest detail settings. **And it runs smoothly at 1920x1080 on a $40 Radeon HD 6450 using that entry-level preset.**

> A **Sandy Bridge-based** Core i5 is all you need for the best possible experience.

 

P.S. Nobody is arguing that the engine should not be improved. A complete engine overhaul on the other hand is not in the cards.

 

Testing with d912pxy and dxvk on average has ~15-20% improvement for min FPS in line with what Stardock's developer stated over DX11 (this game is DX9). There needs to be additional multithreading at the actual main thread and not the render threads.

[Lucio.4190]

To make it possible to run the game as it is now, it wouldn't require much... or maybe we'd be satisfied as it is.

But if we want the game to survive for another 10 years, some changes are needed. I'm thinking a big patch that will give the developers a bigger toolbox and larger playroom. Otherwise, the material and experience will be "same thing as before, nothing different... still bored".

 

What if, three (or five) years from now, you would be able to play some underwater missions or air battles, in VR?

"This expansion will cost $350, but you will receive a complete VR set with matching gauntlets delivered to your door."

This engine will not support it and maybe there are no such plans for the future, but without an upgrade we will never know how that would feel.

 

I love GW2 as it is now. I don't want a GW3.

But with an upgrade we could avoid a new game, instead this game will have a new life and we would be able to keep all our achievements. And playing a Tengu in VR? ;)

[Daishi.6027]

GW2 should do what PSO2 is doing with New Genesis. Practically a new game, new engine, same launcher; and you get to carry over all your premium currency and hard earned or purchased skins.

 

A-net could fix long standing bugs, re-balance the game from the ground up with much better data, make the game run more efficiently on GPU and hopefully be less CPU intensive.

[Veprovina.4876]

> @"Infusion.7149" said:

> For core maps (2012),

> https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-4.html

> > The Radeon HD 7750 and GeForce GTX 550 Ti had no trouble through 1920x1080 at the _Balanced_ preset. However, they're both knocked down to about 30 FPS minimums using the _Best Appearance_ setting.

> > At 1920x1080, you need at least a Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 560 to use the best-looking graphics preset offered in Guild Wars 2. It's preferable to get smoother performance using the Balanced setting when it comes to slower cards.

> > None of the boards we're testing can keep above 40 FPS, including the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670. At its highest detail setting, Guild Wars 2 clearly demands a potent graphics subsystem.

> ...

> > Four physical cores appear ideal, based on our results from the Sandy Bridge design. Sandy Bridge-E doesn't seem to introduce any benefit at all. Intel's dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and dual-core Pentium are notably slower, though they still embarrass the eight-core AMD FX at 3 GHz.

> > Guild Wars 2 looks good, even at its lowest detail settings. **And it runs smoothly at 1920x1080 on a $40 Radeon HD 6450 using that entry-level preset.**

> > A **Sandy Bridge-based** Core i5 is all you need for the best possible experience.

>

> P.S. Nobody is arguing that the engine should not be improved. A complete engine overhaul on the other hand is not in the cards.

>

> Testing with d912pxy and dxvk on average has ~15-20% improvement for min FPS in line with what Stardock's developer stated over DX11 (this game is DX9). There needs to be additional multithreading at the actual main thread and not the render threads.

 

Why wouldn't it be in the cards? I'm not saying *do it now*, all i'm saying, and i think several other people as well as OP, is that this game won't survive on this poor performance really. If Anet wants to future proof the game, multi threading, DX11 or 12, and other "fancy" stuff should really be implemented, no matter how difficult.

 

I mean, it's it sad that people with RTX3090 can't get a stable 60 FPS in the game? And i know - this game is CPU intensive, yes i agree, but even CPUs have gone a LONG way in 8 years, and i'm pretty sure they didn't program the game 8 years ago so that it requires a Ryzen or whatever to run. The fact that it doesn't even run on a Ryzen perfectly is a whole set of different problems in itself. One of which you mentioned, heavy single core usage.

 

Established players are probably "fine" with how things are, the time they invested in the game trumps any annoyances that poor optimisation brings. But getting some new blood in the game and **keeping** it requires the game to run super smooth.

 

Imagine, the game gets released on Steam finally, people swarm in, try it out on their new or new-ish rigs and they can't play an 8 year old game on medium settings in 60 FPS. Or someone getting a new fancy 16795K capable graphics card and the game just runs badly for what that card is capable of. People are used to much more than the game can provide, and the general public doesn't think about engines, multithreads, why something is. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work by the standards some people set for a game (and standards for an 8 year old game are stable 60 FPS+ without dips), then it's not gonna be a great experience for them and they might leave. Especially since GW2 is essentially very action oriented. FPS dips while you're in the middle of a fight, or poor performance in fights equal bad fights and potentially not dodging that big AOE wipe and losing.

 

Which would then be a shame, they'd be missing out on a great game, and current players would be missing out on new people to play with.

 

It's not a be all end all thing for sure, but it needs to happen inevitably.

 

Anyway, i've said all i think, i'm repeating myself now, so whether it happens or not, we'll see, none of us can really speculate what Anet is doing or thinks needs to be done. I'm hoping for performance improvements. If or when they happen is anyone's guess. My opinion is just that they should happen to ensure the game has a long life.

 

Cheers!

 

> @"Daishi.6027" said:

> GW2 should do what PSO2 is doing with New Genesis. Practically a new game, new engine, same launcher; and you get to carry over all your premium currency and hard earned or purchased skins.

>

> A-net could fix long standing bugs, re-balance the game from the ground up with much better data, make the game run more efficiently on GPU and hopefully be less CPU intensive.

 

Yes, as extensive and difficult as making an essentialy "new game" is - i think it needs to be done one day.

[Rankomonaut.4708]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> With that setup you can get Cyberpunk 2077 below 20 fps too.

 

Got a stable 60fps in CP2077, all settings maxed.

 

In GW2... fps is dying but 60 fps is a rare thing to behold for me.