Future plans for optimalization.

Hi there,

• I just want to point out that this TOPIC is a simple question No Hate or Cry out. I love the game and I have been able to play it on decent fps 20 - 140 FPS depending on the situation. (60fps - LA) *

So... to my question:Are there any plans for this game getting better optimization?We are getting amazing amounts of content (fractals, PvP, raids, World PvE, casual fun stuff like puzzles and events) but I would say that one-third of this content is not enjoyable since you are either playing a slideshow or terrible quality game (Talking about WvW / world Bosses / Gold farming Meta events)I wanted my Real life friends to get started with GW2. We were playing World of Warcraft together and I was always preaching how is GW2 great game and they should try it as well.But when they finally tried it, they found out that even when they play other MMO (WoW) where they have around 60+fps and minimum 40fps in stress situations in GW2 they had very low FPS all the time. Even if they tried all the adjustments.I continue to play GW2 but it is not as enjoyable when my friends can't join me for this reason.

So if there is something coming in future please let me know ... something like they are doing now for World of Warcraft - multi-thread (post - https://www.wowhead.com/news=287727/new-multithread-optimizations-coming-in-patch-8-1-tides-of-vengeance)

Would be nice to see this game take a step forward in this direction...Personally, I like GW2 content & combat wise more than World of Warcraft. But being able to enjoy high stress situation on better quality and with my friends is something this game cannot offer atm.

Any comments on the topic are much appreciated. :)

Yeah I bought a new gaming laptop - I know I know laptops arent really "best" for gaming, but I needed a laptop and couldn't buy pc and laptop.It has Nvidia gtx 1060 and i7-8750H (6 cores, 2.20 GH - 4.10 GHz, 9 MB cache) and I find that GW2 is reaaaaly processor heavy.

It heats up my processor to 85-90 Celsius degrees and uses like 40-50% of it, when it uses 0 of my graphic card. It's common with mmo's to use mostly processor, but come on... my computer isnt so heated up playing Witcher 3 on Ultra High settings, or Nier Automata on highest.

Also fps - while in other mmo's I can comfortably have around 60-70+ most of the time , in GW2 it's more like 50-60 usually, but in LA, raids, fractals, world bosses (so basically the situations I would need higher fps) etc it can drop even to 10 :/

I would love gw2 to get some optimisation.

@"Kas.3509" said:Yeah I bought a new gaming laptop - I know I know laptops arent really "best" for gaming, but I needed a laptop and couldn't buy pc and laptop.It has Nvidia gtx 1060 and i7-8750H (6 cores, 2.20 GH - 4.10 GHz, 9 MB cache) and I find that GW2 is reaaaaly processor heavy.

It heats up my processor to 85-90 Celsius degrees and uses like 40-50% of it, when it uses 0 of my graphic card. It's common with mmo's to use mostly processor, but come on... my computer isnt so heated up playing Witcher 3 on Ultra High settings, or Nier Automata on highest.

Also fps - while in other mmo's I can comfortably have around 60-70+ most of the time , in GW2 it's more like 50-60 usually, but in LA, raids, fractals, world bosses (so basically the situations I would need higher fps) etc it can drop even to 10 :/

I would love gw2 to get some optimisation.

My friend also has a gaming laptop even older than yours but still - WoW/witcher/overwatch he plays these games with FPS above 60 but GW2... no way.As you said GW 2 is processor Heavy as most of MMOs but.. this is a bit too much If you want a decent gaming experience IN ALL ASPECTS of the game you basically need Intel overclocked to 5,0 GHz... Not everyone can get that and it's Very far from Recommended requirements of the game.

I have Ryzen 7 1700 Clocked @ 3,7 and I am fine but still, Istan farms or WvW is like a slideshow (15-20fps - "funny thing" is that these numbers are heaven for some people in GW2 if you consider settings I play with) or I just see names and no characters if I want smoother gameplay.I saw people on forums saying things like this game has an old engine and that's why it always will be like this. I refuse to believe that developers really can not make a single meaningful optimization adjustment in 6-7 years.

In WvW turning player count down to low is a requirement.

If you're getting sub-30fps that'll fix it.

@"Arasaris.5681" said:Are there any plans for this game getting better optimization?They are constantly & consistently working on optimizing the game. Some of the improvements go into enabling new features. They don't post about the changes most of the time, because they are esoteric, "under the hood|bonnet" sorts of things and of little interest to most players. Occasionally, they will respond to this question or that about how something works (which is where I read their comments about how they are always working on optimization).

I’ve heard that if they were to upgrade to a newer version of direct x, the game would run smoother on modern computers.

That will almost certainly never happen though.

@Exalted Quality.8534 said:I’ve heard that if they were to upgrade to a newer version of direct x, the game would run smoother on modern computers.

That will almost certainly never happen though.

Kinda strange since the devs said the exact opposite mate.

At least you can have more than eight people on the screen and still do things unlike swtor.

The problem is they use an ancient engine and ancient DX version (10+ years old) and they don't have the resources to improve it.

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:The problem is they use an ancient engine and ancient DX version (10+ years old) and they don't have the resources to improve it.

When it comes to the DX they said that it wouldnt do much if they upgraded, so im conflicted on that count, but the engine absolutely,

I wonder if some of Anets hope was that improvements in CPU/graphics would make for the poor engine (though in fairness, when the engine was first written, multi core cpus tended to only have 2 cores, not the 4/8/16/more that they have now). Unfortunately, making a game use more cores (threads) is not a simple matter.I recently updated my system from an i7-3770, which had a lot of performance issues (though if I turned graphics way day, zergs were playable, but then I have poor looking graphics for the general pve wandering) to an i7-9700 (kept the nvidia 1070 graphic card). Not surprisingly, performance is way better - even playing with near max settings @ 4K resolution, big zergs (like palwadan or great hall) still keep a playable 30 FPS.Since an engine rewrite seems unlikely, what one almost wants is 2 settings - one for low player counts, which most of PvE is, and one for zerg player counts (pve metas, wvw). In that way, people can still have good looking and good performing graphics when doing pve, and game adjusts to poor quality automatially when getting into a zerg.I sort of got tired of doing that when I was still on the old computer.

@Dante.1763 said:

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:The problem is they use an ancient engine and ancient DX version (10+ years old) and they don't have the resources to improve it.

Yes, actually I have no idea how this works, but in the end the problem is that they don't know how they can improve their engine with new tech. Other companies did it. WoW was DX9, too and they implemented DX10 with cataclysm (which is now btw 8 years old). So it is possible. But Anet surely don't have the resources Blizzard has.

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:The problem is they use an ancient engine and ancient DX version (10+ years old) and they don't have the resources to improve it.

The question remains I guess if the transition to dx10 improved the performance?

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:

@Dante.1763 said:

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:The problem is they use an ancient engine and ancient DX version (10+ years old) and they don't have the resources to improve it.

Even LotRO uses DX11 (and still supports their 9 and 10 client as well). LotRO staff count is way less than ANets. It's not a matter of if they have the resources, more like where they would need to pull from in order to get the job done.

Personally I think they should skip all the DX's and start developing a Vulkan client instead. It is shaping up to be better in every way, universal across all platforms, performance increases, etc...

@"yann.1946" said:The question remains I guess if the transition to dx10 improved the performance?

It was DX11, and they saw a 20~30% boost in FPS using it over DX9. DX11 is the first DX to support multi-threaded rendering, which WoW has just recently implemented for DX12 and has shown another ~25% boost in FPS.

Keep in mind that these improvements are not from DX alone. There would have been a lot of changes to the engine, especially to support multi-threading. If ArenaNet were to poorly patch in DX11+, it would only worsen performance and introduce problems. It would really only be an improvement in cases where ArenaNet has been using their own code to implement something that newer versions natively support. If ArenaNet were to do what WoW did, then you could expect a similar boost, but they're more likely to start a new game with a different engine instead.

@LetoII.3782 said:In WvW turning player count down to low is a requirement.

If you're getting sub-30fps that'll fix it.

Is it? I have 30+ fps in WvW even with medium character model limit. Just turn on standard character models for enemies.

@Healix.5819 said:

@"yann.1946" said:The question remains I guess if the transition to dx10 improved the performance?

So dx didn't do a lot then. The background optimalisation probably did?

@Solvar.7953 said:I wonder if some of Anets hope was that improvements in CPU/graphics would make for the poor engine (though in fairness, when the engine was first written, multi core cpus tended to only have 2 cores, not the 4/8/16/more that they have now). Unfortunately, making a game use more cores (threads) is not a simple matter.

The first dual core CPU was released in May 2005 by AMD and July 2006 by Intel, while the first Guild Wars was released in April 2005, about a month before the first dual core CPU was available. The engine was obviously designed and developed even earlier, so when they developed it, dual core CPUs for the consumer (excluding extreme editions) were still a fantasy.

The developers have been making the game run on multiple cores, if you disable core affinity for your multiple cores, then you'll notice a massive performance drop, meaning that he game DOES use multiple cores. The problem is that what is left for the main thread to do is still a significant amount of work which causes the bottleneck.