[Optimization and performance]

@iLG.2019 said:

@Hezkore.9568 said:I've been playing Guild Wars 2 on and off since the Beta, and performance seems to always be an issues with GW2.The low FPS and stuttering gives me headache and makes me feel really sick.

Back in the beta tests, the game ran horribly bad, I was having 10-15 FPS most of the time.I bought a new computer, and when the game released I was pretty okay with its performance, with around 50 FPS.

I took a pause for a long time from GW2, and when I came back I had really bad performance once again.I eventually bought a new high-end GPU, and GW2 got a decent boost, I was mostly hovering around 40-50 FPS.

I took another pause, and once again, when I came back, my FPS was down to around 20, at the same locations I was having 40-50 FPS before.I bought a Ati HD 390x and was back up to 40-50 FPS.

I've been away from the game since and recently came back because of Path of Fire.I've already bought a new computer, much more powerful than my last one (that ran GW2 fine)And what do you know! HeheGame now runs horribly bad, around 15-20 FPS at some locations.

Why is this?It's all the same maps I played back in the release version of the game that ran really great, but my computer is now 2-3 times better but I'm having really low FPS.The Path of Fire maps are the worst when it comes to performance.And I remember someone mentioning there being a team specifically working on the optimization and performance of the game, is that team still around?

Most of these answers are plain wrong and show a complete lack of computer science or basic programming knowledge.

The problem comes from the limitations of the game engine and how the game processes instructions. GW2 uses old technology, Directx9 Technology, this technology was released in 2002. It has been 15 years since that time and many improvements have been made. Directx9 will not take advantage of the most modern hardware. That is just how the engine was coded and designed, it would be a hard task to ask the developers to modify an old 2002 engine to use hyperthreading, multiple cores, or better instruction sets. Furthermore, for those who played games or did some reading, Directx9 was an awful game engine, it was filled with bugs, inefficiencies, and was just a plain mess.

Take into account that ArenaNet was able to upgrade the graphical capabilities of GW2 using such an old engine is quite a feat. But like all things, it comes at a cost. Bigger worlds, better particle effects, shadows, all these extra settings were NOT designed for such an engine. The way the GPU and CPU processes these instructions are completely different from DirectX11 and 12. In more laymen terms, they are very inefficient. In Computer Science, there are thousands of ways to do the same task, but some are better and faster than others.

For example, shadows are rendered differently in GW2 compared to World of Warcraft. Because of the combination of old engine, increasing graphical intensively, the number of players in GW2, and calculations of combat, movement, etc at the same time. The engine just cannot keep up.

I think most people do not understand, that your computer DOES not fully utilize the hardware you buy without the proper software. In this case, GW2 is using a 2002 engine trying to run an MMO made in 2012. Anyone experiencing lag should know this is normal for a game made with such a terrible design flaw.

World of Warcraft was able to bypass this by upgrading their game from Dx9 to Dx11. But it means ArenaNet does not find it rewarding enough to upgrade. Many people believe changing the 32bit to 64bit would help, wrong.

Increasing the bit size, or instruction size from 32bit to 64bit to process information ONLY works if there was the horsepower from the game engine to use that information. It would not matter if I have a 10-inch yogurt tube or a 20-inch yogurt tube because I would not be able to consume the second one faster. All the 32bit to 64bit upgrade did, was increase the length and size of the instructions and increased the available RAM or registers to store such information. It did NOT increase the speed or improved the way those instructions were processed.

So, in the end, GW2 is a poorly designed game from the ground up. This was a design decision that has completely bitten ArenaNet and will not be fixed unless they are willing to COMPLETELY rewrite their game for newer engines.

Good luck.

To further enhance the topic, this is from an Intel Developer regarding the graphical pipeline of games. He writes, "n addition, DirectX 9 had specific memory constraints. As a result, it limited the number of textures that games could use to improve the appearance of their graphics. To get around this limitation, developers often had to apply textures in multiple passes. Loading extra textures made their games more CPU bound. Making multiple passes through the Texture Filtering stage of the pipeline caused games to be GPU bound."

Source: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/high-performance-games-addressing-performance-bottlenecks-with-directx-gpus-and-cpus

Now, do you understand why the game uses more CPU than GPU? The single core bounded GW2 wants to pretend to be a multi-core processor. It tries to render the game using one core multiple times to display the large environments you see. It is almost like rendering a jig-saw puzzle with 1 person and expect it to be smooth.

Compound this problem with the memory limitations, and you have yourself a disaster.

This is even more complicated with different CPUs, as all CPUs are different have different pipelines of processing information/data. Some CPUs might not be work as well as others using directx9. This is why GW2 has a hard time appealing to the hard-core fan-base. If your game cannot run smoothly compared to the competition do not expect players to stay and play your game, no matter how many good features you have.

[Optimization and performance]

@Hezkore.9568 said:I've been playing Guild Wars 2 on and off since the Beta, and performance seems to always be an issues with GW2.The low FPS and stuttering gives me headache and makes me feel really sick.

Back in the beta tests, the game ran horribly bad, I was having 10-15 FPS most of the time.I bought a new computer, and when the game released I was pretty okay with its performance, with around 50 FPS.

I took a pause for a long time from GW2, and when I came back I had really bad performance once again.I eventually bought a new high-end GPU, and GW2 got a decent boost, I was mostly hovering around 40-50 FPS.

I took another pause, and once again, when I came back, my FPS was down to around 20, at the same locations I was having 40-50 FPS before.I bought a Ati HD 390x and was back up to 40-50 FPS.

I've been away from the game since and recently came back because of Path of Fire.I've already bought a new computer, much more powerful than my last one (that ran GW2 fine)And what do you know! HeheGame now runs horribly bad, around 15-20 FPS at some locations.

Why is this?It's all the same maps I played back in the release version of the game that ran really great, but my computer is now 2-3 times better but I'm having really low FPS.The Path of Fire maps are the worst when it comes to performance.And I remember someone mentioning there being a team specifically working on the optimization and performance of the game, is that team still around?

Most of these answers are plain wrong and show a complete lack of computer science or basic programming knowledge.

The problem comes from the limitations of the game engine and how the game processes instructions. GW2 uses old technology, Directx9 Technology, this technology was released in 2002. It has been 15 years since that time and many improvements have been made. Directx9 will not take advantage of the most modern hardware. That is just how the engine was coded and designed, it would be a hard task to ask the developers to modify an old 2002 engine to use hyperthreading, multiple cores, or better instruction sets. Furthermore, for those who played games or did some reading, Directx9 was an awful game engine, it was filled with bugs, inefficiencies, and was just a plain mess.

Take into account that ArenaNet was able to upgrade the graphical capabilities of GW2 using such an old engine is quite a feat. But like all things, it comes at a cost. Bigger worlds, better particle effects, shadows, all these extra settings were NOT designed for such an engine. The way the GPU and CPU processes these instructions are completely different from DirectX11 and 12. In more laymen terms, they are very inefficient. In Computer Science, there are thousands of ways to do the same task, but some are better and faster than others.

For example, shadows are rendered differently in GW2 compared to World of Warcraft. Because of the combination of old engine, increasing graphical intensively, the number of players in GW2, and calculations of combat, movement, etc at the same time. The engine just cannot keep up.

I think most people do not understand, that your computer DOES not fully utilize the hardware you buy without the proper software. In this case, GW2 is using a 2002 engine trying to run an MMO made in 2012. Anyone experiencing lag should know this is normal for a game made with such a terrible design flaw.

World of Warcraft was able to bypass this by upgrading their game from Dx9 to Dx11. But it means ArenaNet does not find it rewarding enough to upgrade. Many people believe changing the 32bit to 64bit would help, wrong.

Increasing the bit size, or instruction size from 32bit to 64bit to process information ONLY works if there was the horsepower from the game engine to use that information. It would not matter if I have a 10-inch yogurt tube or a 20-inch yogurt tube because I would not be able to consume the second one faster. All the 32bit to 64bit upgrade did, was increase the length and size of the instructions and increased the available RAM or registers to store such information. It did NOT increase the speed or improved the way those instructions were processed.

So, in the end, GW2 is a poorly designed game from the ground up. This was a design decision that has completely bitten ArenaNet and will not be fixed unless they are willing to COMPLETELY rewrite their game for newer engines.

Good luck.