GW2 DirectX 11 support?

[Leamas.5803]

Anyone know, primarily the ANet people moderating these forums, if ANet is planning to upgrade their graphics engine to support DirectX 11? I have strong suspicions that a lot of the crashing and frame rate issues we've been seeing may be related to ANet's continued reliance on DirectX 9, which came out in 2002 and has long been outdated and is horribly inefficient by today's standards. Even WoW and FFXIV, both of which came out before GW2 and started their lives on DX9, have upgraded their engines to support DX11. I realize they're both P2P games and have deeper pockets, but how long can ANet sustain GW2 on such outdated technology? I've been following these crashing problems with GW2 for 5 years and the number of people complaining about it has increased exponentially over the last couple years. Basically since HoT was released. I used to think, OK, maybe I have flaky hardware, but if that's the case, A LOT of people seem to have flaky hardware. ALL indicators point at the software being the problem, and DX9 is a prime candidate.

[MrFayth.3546]

I know the forum search is pretty useless but this has been brought up so many times that even a google search would have definitely answered this in a fraction of the time it took to type this post out.

Consensus has been, and will be for the foreseeable future; Not going to happen.

And it would not help as much as people seem to think anyway.

Further reading from a dev

[Linken.6345]

@"MrFayth.3546" said:I know the forum search is pretty useless but this has been brought up so many times that even a google search would have definitely answered this in a fraction of the time it took to type this post out.

Consensus has been, and will be for the foreseeable future; Not going to happen.

And it would not help as much as people seem to think anyway.

Further reading from a dev

Forum search work fine after they changed the whole forum awhile ago mate.

[WARIORSCHARGEING.2637]

anet will not ever use or go to DX11 or multi core cpu support ever !!! or other wise any modern tech standards in coding and so forth . and the real shame full and sad partas well as the game will never give or support new RYZEN or vega 56 VIDEO CARDS or 4K even !!

anet could have used DX11 back when they made guild wars 2 as DX11 was already out about 3 years before 2012 even !!

[mercury ranique.2170]

Short story...There are limited people complaining about crashing. Most of the recent reports are related to ArcDPS and not GW2 at all. The rest has nothing to do with DX9

[Leamas.5803]

@"MrFayth.3546" said:I know the forum search is pretty useless but this has been brought up so many times that even a google search would have definitely answered this in a fraction of the time it took to type this post out.

Consensus has been, and will be for the foreseeable future; Not going to happen.

And it would not help as much as people seem to think anyway.

Further reading from a dev

That's all well and good but the crashing and framerate drops have gotten so much more worse than when this reddit post was written, which was before the 64-bit client or HoT were released and a lot can change in 2 years. I figured a more recent statement might be in order.

It's got to be getting hard for them to ignore. Back then, going back to when I first started having crashing issues in 2012, you might see someone complain every couple weeks and a thread might get 10 or 12 replies. Easy to bury, easy to ignore. Now, it's almost a daily thing and threads grow to pages long. There are people complaining about client crashes, hard system crashes and systems spontaneously rebooting, now there the new type of crash that seemed to come up in the fall with perhaps the big Windows 10 update, where GW2 just stops responding, but the system doesn't crash and you can gracefully recover the system by logging out of via ctrl-alt-del. Using a less invasive anti-aliasing seems to have improved this for me. In ALL cases, the claim is that it ONLY happens in GW2. The random sub-10fps framerate drops, which I have also experienced and seems to affect entire instances, are more recent and seem to largely coincide with the release of PoF. Then there's the terrible latency and lag spikes that are making WvW and PvP unplayable for many that has plagued GW2 since the Comcast DDoS attacks in the fall and has seemingly followed them to the Amazon servers. GW2 has some serious issues and if some of it is not DX9 related, then so be it, but they really need to start looking at what it is.

So, the short answer is that a 2 year old explanation is not good enough since the problems have ballooned and gotten much worse. I also call BS on upgrading to DX11 not making any improvements, especially on supported hardware. If that were the case, neither Blizzard nor Square Enix would have bothered to upgrade WoW and FFXIV, respectively. That's like saying upgrading video drivers won't improve stability.

[Shazmataz.1423]

Totally agree Leamas, with each new game update the game becomes more sluggish and non responsive...I almost exclusively wvw. Server devs really need to take a look at what is happening server side....and take data collected from players seriously. It seems atm that it is being swept under the carpet and being blamed on "other things". But the deterioration of game performance with each update is definitely reaching the unplayable.....do they want people to play or do they want people to log out and never return? Cos it's got to that point for me....(yep everything optimised my end....in before the problem is at your end people :) )

[Kalli.4506]

Im not good with techical stuff what so ever but after reading @Leamas.5803 post i just wanted to add that even i have noticed a huge change in performance since i started to play this game 1 year ago and that is not to the better. I started to notice it long before PoF launch but after PoF it has escalated much faster and more issues like crashes happens alot more often, the game freezes, insane FPS loss, longer loading times for everything etc.

What concerns me the most is the silence from Anet. Even tho there have been so many posts about these issues for a while now, they are still quiet. I wish they could be more like the devs from Warframe. They listen and communicate with their players and fans.

[WereDragon.6083]

Devs popped in and explained a while back that DirectX 11 would provide very little benefit for an incredible about of dev time. This game is built off Gw1's engine it is a mess of spaghetti code and patches to keep it running they'ed need to rebuild the engine from the ground up. Vulkan would be a better API choice then directX anyways which is garbage when it comes to making calls to the GPU.

Lamens it's the engines problem not the API's problem. Newer API's aren't a magical cure all to a games performance issues.

[Leamas.5803]

@WereDragon.6083 said:Devs popped in and explained a while back that DirectX 11 would provide very little benefit for an incredible about of dev time. This game is built off Gw1's engine it is a mess of spaghetti code and patches to keep it running they'ed need to rebuild the engine from the ground up. Vulkan would be a better API choice then directX anyways which is garbage when it comes to making calls to the GPU.

Lamens it's the engines problem not the API's problem. Newer API's aren't a magical cure all to a games performance issues.

The some time ago was over 2 years ago, a lifetime ago in software. Mr Fayth kindly posted a link to it. That was before HoT or the 64-bit client were released. They also claimed in the same statement that a 64-bit client would provide little improvement, yet here we are. Yes, the engine would obviously have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It was done for both WoW and FFXIV, which both started their lives on DX9, so it's not an impossible task.

[Ayrilana.1396]

@Leamas.5803 said:

@WereDragon.6083 said:Devs popped in and explained a while back that DirectX 11 would provide very little benefit for an incredible about of dev time. This game is built off Gw1's engine it is a mess of spaghetti code and patches to keep it running they'ed need to rebuild the engine from the ground up. Vulkan would be a better API choice then directX anyways which is garbage when it comes to making calls to the GPU.

Lamens it's the engines problem not the API's problem. Newer API's aren't a magical cure all to a games performance issues.

The some time ago was over 2 years ago, a lifetime ago in software. Mr Fayth kindly posted a link to it. That was before HoT or the 64-bit client were released. They also claimed in the same statement that a 64-bit client would provide little improvement, yet here we are. Yes, the engine would obviously have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It was done for both WoW and FFXIV, which both started their lives on DX9, so it's not an impossible task.

Whether it was 2 years ago or 10 years doesn’t matter as their statements on how the game designed don’t have expiration dates. If they stated that DX# would not provide any significant improvements, because the issues have nothing to do with DX, then there’s no reason for that to be any different today.

Just because X game developer upgraded their game and saw improvements doesn’t mean that GW2 would see the same. Games are not all created the same. Not all games have the development team size to do it either.

[Leamas.5803]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Whether it was 2 years ago or 10 years doesn’t matter as their statements on how the game designed don’t have expiration dates. If they stated that DX# would not provide any significant improvements, because the issues have nothing to do with DX, then there’s no reason for that to be any different today.

So, following your statement, if they KNOW it's not DX, then logically, they must know what it IS and in 5 years have not fixed it, OR, they have no idea what's causing the crashing and are just assuming DX is not the cause, but don't really know. Which scenario is more likely? Team size or not, they're selling a service that for various reasons is broken for many users and they need to step up.

[Ayrilana.1396]

@Leamas.5803 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Whether it was 2 years ago or 10 years doesn’t matter as their statements on how the game designed don’t have expiration dates. If they stated that DX# would not provide any significant improvements, because the issues have nothing to do with DX, then there’s no reason for that to be any different today.

So, following your statement, if they KNOW it's not DX, then logically, they must know what it IS and in 5 years have not fixed it, OR, they have no idea what's causing the crashing and are just assuming DX is not the cause, but don't really know. Which scenario is more likely? Team size or not, they're selling a service that for various reasons is broken for many users and they need to step up.

Maybe because the changes would involve re-writing a large part of the game and it's not worth it at the expense of future content. It seems people are far more likely to place the blame on Anet than their computers or something between the two of them.

[Leamas.5803]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Maybe because the changes would involve re-writing a large part of the game and it's not worth it at the expense of future content. It seems people are far more likely to place the blame on Anet than their computers or something between the two of them.

I was a software developer for years, so I'm not disputing the scope of the changes or how difficult tracking down something random like this can be, but I am saying that the scope of the problems is far worse than it used to be and of course it is easy to blame ANet, but I don't place that blame lightly or without reason. In the first 3 years I had my previous machine as my main gaming rig, this was one with which GW2 had serious crashing issues (i7-3930K, eVGA nVidia 670gtx, 16GB RAM), I brought it in to the techs 3 times where I bought the machine (I don't have the bench tools for testing hardware like the MB or PSU), that was at ~$150 a shot, I got both nVidia and eVGA tech support involved, I replaced all my RAM and my system drive, I reinstalled Windows clean at least 3 times and tried playing GW2 as the solely installed app on said clean installs. The unanimous conclusion from Memory Express, nVidia and eVGA was that it was an application issue since it cannot be reproduced outside of GW2 and all hardware tested clean. That machine is now over 5 years old and my kids now use it daily since I replaced it in March and to this day GW2 is still the only thing that has ever had issues.

In the old days, crashing complaints on the forum were relatively rare and you might see someone post on the forum every few weeks, so it was easy to blame the hardware, even when everything pointed towards the software being the issue. These days, complaints are pretty much a daily thing, far too many on a wide variety of different setups to easily blame hardware. They may likely choose to ignore it but between the crashing issues, lag issues and frame rate issues, that's a lot of people getting angry. For every person who posts, there are probably 1000s more who don't bother. I've seen many already come out and say they're leaving GW2 because PvP and WvW are unplayable due to the latency and lag spikes. How long before people with crashing issues start walking away? When you crash every few minutes, it really limits what you can do in this game. PvP, WvW, Dungeons, Raids, meta events, long story instances, the large world bosses like Teq and TT, all become incredibly frustrating. I don't know how many times I've tried dungeons, only to crash half way through. I only stuck around so long because I'm a stubborn techie and can't walk away from an issue without finding some semblance of a solution. It's just not in my nature.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Then what makes you think DX is the issue when you had issues when you first started playing and DX hasn’t really changed since then? If complaints have increased recently, with DX remaining the same, wouldn’t that suggest something else being at fault?

[Healix.5819]

@Leamas.5803 said:They also claimed in the same statement that a 64-bit client would provide little improvement, yet here we are.

They were forced to make the 64-bit client due to hitting the 32-bit memory limitation in HoT. Other than that, it's not an improvement. It uses more memory and performs worse for some.

Rewriting the engine with more recent technology would certainly improve it, but it's highly unlikely that they would do that. The native Mac client was really the only hope of seeing an upgrade, but it turned out they were only refactoring old code. They'll likely continue to support GW2 for a few more expansions, then move on to GW3 with a new engine. GW3 itself would be a big risk however, for the same reason Blizzard abandoned Titan (whereas GW1 wasn't an MMO), but it's also the only way to fix the mistakes and truly bring people in. Their biggest challenge will be deciding how to move forward, as they would potentially be starting over from scratch and having to retrain.

[Leamas.5803]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Then what makes you think DX is the issue when you had issues when you first started playing and DX hasn’t really changed since then? If complaints have increased recently, with DX remaining the same, wouldn’t that suggest something else being at fault?

Blaming DX is just a guess based on the fact that the majority of the hard crashes seem to be graphics related, specifically nVidia chipset related. I guess I should more correctly point fingers at the GW2 graphics engine rather than DX9 since many things run DX9 just fine. Perhaps newer hardware and/or drivers are expecting something the GW2 is not doing, or GW2 is not catching some error it should be, but it is definitely graphic engine related. For a LONG time, perhaps even still, GW2 tended to be more consistently stable on older hardware/drivers (Pre-2012), it does not like overclocking and does not like SLi (At least the last time I tried). The first is a bug in the engine I think, since that should be transparent and the second I think is a limitation of DX9 where SLi tends to be flaky at the best of times. I would receive 2-3 fps with SLi and 25ish with one card pulled. I used nVidia driver version 306.97 (GW2 was completely unstable on 310.xx) for years beyond when it was released simply because GW2 crashed less on it. Then I got in to the ESO beta and had to update to 36x.xx, or whatever was current at the time because ESO was totally and completely unstable on the old driver. For a while, I swapped drivers back and forth between 306.97 and whatever was current, but that became tedious, so on was the hunt for a better solution. Down clocking my video card, which was basically a last resort for me, ultimately resolved the crashing problems with GW2, but to be clear, this is a work around, not a fix, and doesn't work for everyone who has the issue. If this had not have worked, I was at a point where I going to walk away from the game since I was already in the mode of trying other MMOs like ESO and FFXIV, which both worked flawlessly. I played FFXIV on a free trial quite a lot for a full month without a single crash...it was refreshing to not have to worry about it, TBH.

[glass.3245]

With the emergence of some of the new Korean MMOs gaining popularity based on their sparkly graphics I'm sure that ANET are looking at their options.

A game engine update would be a big job, but might be worth it for the health of the game.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

The average player is not willing to pay expansion pricing for a new game engine, and a new game engine requires at least as much time and expenses as an expansion so there is your problem. Of course, a DX11 renderer can probably be easily added, but then you just have the same game with the same effects and CPU bound limitations on a DX11 driver. That will not fix very much. (Maybe still worth a try tho, but I've also seen games become slower by switching from a highly optimized DX9 renderer to a new and less optimized DX10/11 renderer.

[Ayrilana.1396]

I already get sparkly graphics and any issues that I do haven’t wouldn’t be resolved by upgrading to a higher version of DX.

[elrin.4750]

Problem is not DX9 or and old engine. Just look at core Tyria, it is still quite performant. I get good FPS on those maps.

Now in HOT/POF, they have upped the complexity of those maps. It has very complex maps, hires-textures, animations, models with high poly count, etc. Here's the thing, did they update their engine to handle those new complex assets? I DON'T THINK SO! Maybe they tweaked it a lot, but the fact is that we get poor performance on those maps.

Solution: STOP MAKING STUFF THAT YOUR OLD UNOPTIMIZED ENGINE CAN'T HANDLE!!

[Praffy.4091]

i have one good reason now for dx11 support.DXVK and wine.of course a linux version will be awesome

[Linken.6345]

@Praffy.4091 said:i have one good reason now for dx11 support.DXVK and wine.of course a linux version will be awesome

I thought the game ran already on linux so thats not a good reason.

[Praffy.4091]

@Linken.6345 said:

@Praffy.4091 said:i have one good reason now for dx11 support.DXVK and wine.of course a linux version will be awesome

I thought the game ran already on linux so thats not a good reason.

yes but not as good as on windows

[Deepcuts.9740]

I am all for better tech implemented in GW2, such as newer DX, but crashing is not one of the problems DX9 has.I am using ArcDPS and gw2hook for better graphics and I do not have any crashes whatsoever.Then again, I lost a lot of time testing my system to make sure it is as stable as it can be. I see many people getting new rigs and overclocking the kittycat out of them. The more Ghz, the better. But unfortunately, without making sure their systems are stable.