Is Anet ever going to adequately address the poor optimization of the game engine?

I've rolled with the 30-40fps average in LA for years now, and I've always thought it was because of my older i7 3770k (which was new when GW2 launched, game still ran awful) and now that I've upgraded to an 8th Gen i7-8700k, I'm sad to say that there is literally no difference in framerate. Getting 36fps on state of the art hardware, particularly for a CPU intensive game, is inexcusable. I really like the new direction with the new game director since PoF's launch, and I'm excited for the new LS changes, but it really takes me out of the immersion when I get constant stuttering and a terrible framerate while playing through them. Can anyone point me to a formal response from an Anet rep on this issue? it seems like it's just kept quiet.

And your GPU is...?

I've been on an I5 and GTX 670 for a number of years and I double your frame rate. You probably have something else going on if you're not pulling better than 30 fps.

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:I've been on an I5 and GTX 670 for a number of years and I double your frame rate. You probably have something else going on if you're not pulling better than 30 fps.

What resolution are you running at? I have a very hard time believing you pull more than 40fps average while in Lions Arch. I run at 2560x1440 & my GPU is a EVGA GTX 970 4GB so my hardware most certainly is not the problem.

1920X1200

Yes you should be getting better FPS. I completely agree. However, the 'something else' could be a number of things unrelated to the specs of your hardware (especially the two parts you listed). I don't know what settings in the game you have on. I don't know what other programs you're running nor what operating system or other hardware you have.

I'm sure someone else will be along to point out their superior FPS on 'inferior' hardware. You can discount us if you like, but you're more likely to see an improvement if you spend time with your machine than waiting (in vain) for Anet to make a change.

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:1920X1200

Yes you should be getting better FPS. I completely agree. However, the 'something else' could be a number of things unrelated to the specs of your hardware (especially the two parts you listed). I don't know what settings in the game you have on. I don't know what other programs you're running nor what operating system or other hardware you have.

I'm sure someone else will be along to point out their superior FPS on 'inferior' hardware. You can discount us if you like, but you're more likely to see an improvement if you spend time with your machine than waiting (in vain) for Anet to make a change.

I've been playing this game since launch and across multiple sets of hardware, the issue persists. In map chat in LA I've also had other people with newer 6th and 7th gen i7's having the same issue. If Anet could at least give us some insight on what to try to change in our settings to make the game run better, that would be great. If I turn off AA, Supersampling, it makes no difference.

Ultra settings? You're not going to see a high FPS when you have a hundred people on screen with maximum model limit/quality, ultra shadows and supersampling. If not that, check the bus speed of the GPU, using GPU-Z for example. Although it won't affect a lot of other games, if it's being limited to 1x, it'll more than half your FPS here.

For me turning off shadows and reflections helps with your FPS, and to me they don't add enough to the game immersion to be worth turning on.

@Healix.5819 said:Ultra settings? You're not going to see a high FPS when you have a hundred people on screen with maximum model limit/quality, ultra shadows and supersampling. If not that, check the bus speed of the GPU, using GPU-Z for example. Although it won't affect a lot of other games, if it's being limited to 1x, it'll more than half your FPS here.

A lot of this is just the fact that there's tons of people. I have the same pro in Heart of the Mists.

@Wander.5780 said:

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:1920X1200

Yes you should be getting better FPS. I completely agree. However, the 'something else' could be a number of things unrelated to the specs of your hardware (especially the two parts you listed). I don't know what settings in the game you have on. I don't know what other programs you're running nor what operating system or other hardware you have.

I'm sure someone else will be along to point out their superior FPS on 'inferior' hardware. You can discount us if you like, but you're more likely to see an improvement if you spend time with your machine than waiting (in vain) for Anet to make a change.

You wouldn't need to guess if you were running a performance analysis while the game is running. Do you have any such data to share with us? If you don't have this information, then you're assuming an awful lot.

My PC struggles more than it should, honestly. It seems to be more CPU heavy than it should be.

I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018, I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues. It’s shocking that there isn’t at least a DX11 client for this game yet... DX9 is 16 Years old and should not be an API to build a game on in 2012.

So did you actually want to get more frames or just regurgitate a common complaint?

@Wander.5780 said:I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018

This is irrelevant. I know, the persistent meme that bigger numbers magically mean better performance is everywhere, but the truth is, it is no more true now than when people were crying because DX9 was being replaced by DX11 clients, and people didn't want that to change.

I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues.

This is a known problem. The developers at ANet have explicitly acknowledged it, and have been actively working on improving things. Which has happened; a few years back it would use two cores, not it pushes four, because of improvements to the engine.

Anyway, if you believe that DX9 is in any way related to this, you are directly contradicting the stated position of the developers, who agree that this is, in fact, an issue with too much work being stuck on a single thread, making the character model count one of the biggest contributors to performance limits, and single threaded CPU performance the hard blocker if you put every other bit of hardware at a level it stops slowing things down.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:My PC struggles more than it should, honestly. It seems to be more CPU heavy than it should be.

Yes. It is, specifically on a single thread. Thank the ANet developers for confirming that to us. :)

@Leablo.2651 said:

@Wander.5780 said:

@"Blockhead Magee.3092" said:1920X1200

Yes you should be getting better FPS. I completely agree. However, the 'something else' could be a number of things unrelated to the specs of your hardware (especially the two parts you listed). I don't know what settings in the game you have on. I don't know what other programs you're running nor what operating system or other hardware you have.

I'm sure someone else will be along to point out their superior FPS on 'inferior' hardware. You can discount us if you like, but you're more likely to see an improvement if you spend time with your machine than waiting (in vain) for Anet to make a change.

The answer is simple: the single biggest impact comes from turning down the player model count. A bunch of processing related to them is still stuck on that one, busy, "main" thread. Turn them down, performance increases.

Most everything else is more or less GPU specific stuff, in the sense that it depends on the entire graphics stack including the vendor-specific parts of the DirectX layer; NVIDIA is likely to still perform better than AMD there, for example, because they have that old parallel processing magic inside the stack that AMD never shipped, with DX9.

Anyways, ANet have officially confirmed that, yeah, that single "main" thread is gonna be the bottleneck if you eliminate everything else. So, that is about as formal as you are going to get.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Wander.5780 said:I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018

I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues.

Are you really going to sit here and tell me that DX9 is fine and not a problem? It’s a piece of crap API. Try playing any DX9 game full screeen, and tab out and back in, and time it. The source engine, which valve has managed to drag out for 14 years, was built on DX9, and still has issues that have to be patched from time to time. The devs deflecting blame from the API is not an indication that its without fault, its just them defending their project because they know what a monumental task it would be to move it to something more modern. Hence, why the game should’ve been built on the latest Microsoft API.

Normally the game runs great. But somehow in parts of the domain of Istan it brings my pc to stutter even. That part of the game needs some serious tweaking. Almost like the engine is pushed to the max there. But for w h at i dont see.

@Wander.5780 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Wander.5780 said:I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018

I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues.

Devs have already stated that the issue has nothing to do with DX.

Oh, and I’m also getting 70-90 FPS in LA depending on where I am. I’m getting about 70 around the MF and bank on max settings.

@Wander.5780 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Wander.5780 said:I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018

I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues.

I am going to refer you to the post by ANet on the subject and tell you that without any other changes DX9 vs DX11, or DX12, or Vulkan, is not the problem with GW2 at this time.

That is more caveats than your statement, because this is a conditional thing. However, it is also true that simply moving to DX11 offers no significant benefit to the parts of the code that are the problem, and it would require changes that can also be made while using DX9 to fix.

So, I guess the answer is "kind of" to your question, because you made it more general than my statement was.

It’s a piece of crap API.

Software isn't a cabbage: DX9 hasn't "rotted away" in the back of the fridge. It is still as good as it ever was, which is to say that it isn't the horrible burden you seem to imagine, but I wouldn't advise people to develop new software on top of that.

Try playing any DX9 game full screeen, and tab out and back in, and time it. The source engine, which valve has managed to drag out for 14 years, was built on DX9, and still has issues that have to be patched from time to time.

I'm pretty confident that one or two of the DX11 games I have here have gotten the odd patch or two...

As to the time to switch to or from full screen mode, I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to prove with that, but the low performance there isn't exactly proof of any other shortfall in terms of actual use. If you really want to be convincing, it isn't that hard:

Show proof, any proof, of your assertion that DX9 is responsible for the performance loss. Show the high cost of draw calls, or the client blocking on the thread safety lock inside DX9, or ... anything, really, that disproves what the ANet developers literally said in writing, and which also matches observed reality, which is that DX9 is not the heart of the problem at this time.

Fix that over-busy thread, and this may change. DX9 might start being the bottleneck. That'd be great, and that is the day I'll start advocating for changing the version of DirectX in use. This, however, is still not that day.

The devs deflecting blame from the API is not an indication that its without fault, its just them defending their project because they know what a monumental task it would be to move it to something more modern. Hence, why the game should’ve been built on the latest Microsoft API.

DX11 released a year or so before the launch of GW2, and I don't know how your memory is, but mine is clear: at the time people were mad about it. Super mad. Like, "I'll boycott your game don't use DX11 it is evil and ate my kitten" mad about people using that new API. People griped about the terrible performance. They hated it.

DX10, welp, that was just ... nothing. Nobody cared. Not people playing games, not people building them. A nothing release, that went nowhere. Games just sat on DX9 at the time, because why would you move when you gain nothing, but performance sapping bugs?

So, writing to the "latest Microsoft API" would have required ANet to build their software on either (a) a five year old release nobody liked, DX10, or (b) migrate to DX11 a year from launch which, if you are familiar with the timelines of games, is more than a little while after the core of the engine was written.

It is easy to look backwards in time and tell people what they should have done. If I was building a game on the release schedule of GW2, I'd have chosen DX9 as well, and players would have thanked me for that decision. Now, not so much, but back then? Even a year after launch, DX11 still had a bad rep, and wasn't much loved.

Anyway, ultimately, none of this is about "deflecting blame". The ANet post doesn't deflect blame. It up and up says: "hey, this thread is the bottleneck, because we made regrettable life choices in the past. it sucks." That is accepting ownership of the problem -- the main thread being the bottleneck -- is exactly the opposite of that.

In fact, the only part of the discussion here that could deflect attention from the real problem, to an imaginary one, is your push to see the DirectX version changed, when that is not the bottleneck. It is, thankfully, unlikely to have any effect, but it is a misplaced request that would not help.

Most MMO's share this same issue, the game being heavily single threaded just exacerbates the issue. It will not be fixed.

It's a shame that the majority of new maps perform worse and worse, but if you look at how the maps are populated in terms of assets, the number of models that aren't even characters have gone way up, so at this rate it will only continue to get worse imo.

OC your 8700k to 5ghz, buy a kit of fast DDR4 (3600+), and or turn off shadows and reduce model numbers to low. Those are the only solutions for the poor performance.

MMOs tend to try and cater to the widest array of systems. Not just the newest most powerful rigs. My i5 runs gw2 on max setting with decent frame rates. Arguing the wisdom of dx9 5 years later seems like wasted effort. Gw2 runs decent. Not perfect but good enough imo. Visual clutter seems like more of an issue then optimization.

One thing that might help is more dynamic quality adjustments. If I'm out doing PvE largely by myself, I can run on pretty high quality without any issues.However, I get into a big boss fight, and things slow down significantly. I can go in and adjust the settings to 'best performance' in this case, but then have to go in and say 'autodetect' when that fight is over.If there was some option like the settings you set are goals, and if framerate goes below some values, it starts turning things off temporarily, and if they go above some value again, it starts turning them on. That would remove the bother of me having to adjust them back and forth, and may be an easier solution than rewriting the engine. Or even if I could just hot-key it between 2 settings, that would also work.If I'm in some big fight with 50 other PCs, I really don't care much about seeing all the shinies at that point anyways.

I think the elephant in the room here, is that aside from being a DX9 game in 2018, I get much higher FPS in more graphically intensive games with way more going on at once like I do in ESO. That alone points to this game having optimization issues. It’s shocking that there isn’t at least a DX11 client for this game yet... DX9 is 16 Years old and should not be an API to build a game on in 2012.

It's not an elephant in the room since ANet is well aware that the game is based on DX9. They make no secret of that. But they also point out that moving it to DX11 wouldn't have the performance gain players think it would.

The OP also ignores the fact that ANet has made incremental and sometimes major improvements, so the game runs much smoother even though its graphic needs have increased.

Here are some related comments by ANet devs:

A redditor asked

GW2 stays on DX9 and 32bit client which kinda.. lags a lot, and sometimes even crashes on huge battles/worldbosses (i see you Tequatl).

I have intel i3, my friend got i7, which is waaaaaaaaaaaay better than mine. Guess who get more screen spikes? i7. Yes.

also i heard that GW2 tends to use CPU, not GPU. What the..? :xThe CPU and GPU are good at different things. There's no such thing going on as us using the CPU rather than the GPU. We use both, for the different things they're good at. In simple terms, the GPU just happens to finish its work before the CPU does, causing it to wait for the CPU to catch up.