The Graphics improvements are good, But you're going to lose a Lot of players.

[Witch of Steam.5138]

Especially By forcing People to upgrade or use a subscription service ( Geforce now ) To play your game. 

One of the major appeals to GW2 is that it's Free to Play, which means that people who are poor Can access and play the game. 

You wanna know what poor people don't have ? The money to go buy new graphics Cards. 

You're Kinda shooting yourselves in the Foot Here. 

Especially since there's a Lot of issues w/ Dx11 That have not been resolved or even remotely Addressed. 

My Card can run it, Thankfully, Even though It's So poorly optimized it causes Mass screen tearing with VSync turned off. Why? Nobody's answered, a few people say to go Buy a new Monitor ( Complete 4head answer btw ) , Some people say to go buy a new HDMI Cable for my monitor ( Still 4head) 

But there are a lot of people who won't be able to that you're Pointing at like 

" You, Peasant, You're too POOR for entertainment, Go Away " 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Witch of Steam.5138

[Parasite.5389]

5 minutes ago, Witch of Steam.5138 said:

Especially By forcing People to upgrade or use a subscription service ( Geforce now ) To play your game. 

One of the major appeals to GW2 is that it's Free to Play, which means that people who are poor Can access and play the game. 

You wanna know what poor people don't have ? The money to go buy new graphics Cards. 

You're Kinda shooting yourselves in the Foot Here. 

you realize GeForce now requires a DX11 compatable GPU to run... so you're points it redundant

[Xainou.1502]

8 minutes ago, Witch of Steam.5138 said:

[...] One of the major appeals to GW2 is that it's Free to Play, [...]

Except it's not. It's still buy to play with a rather extended trial.
 

I don't think it's healthy to focus on the minority of people here, (who don't even support the game, technically).
You can't expect everyone else to still game and develop like it's 2002, just because someone can't keep up. That would turn into a dead game very quickly.

[Veprovina.4876]

I'm playing GW2 on a Ryzen 5 5600g APU, yes, both CPU and GPU on a chip. 

Runs fine, but you're not gonna get "ultra" settings.

 

Point is, poor people can play this game just fine because before that, i was playing the game on a 12 year old system!

Yes it ran on low as well, but i played it.

 

Didn't lose me as a player because of GFX upgrades, in fact, switching to DX11 made it run WAY better.

[roederich.2716]

Im sure anet did statistics on how many users run dx9 still and will have the right thing decided for. Like with ending mac support.

i mean if one is running still on a dx9 system that person didnt buy new pc for ages and can possibly afford small upgrade. Is not that expensive or so. Nobody needs to buy 1k+dollar new machine or such.

a player with that old pc will not care about latest high end pc.

[FriendlyFire.6275]

Less than 3% of the Steam Hardware Survey respondents use a DirectX 10 or lower class GPU. Even the strongest DirectX 10 GPU will struggle to run this game at low settings. You have to go dig into the archaeology section on Facebook Marketplace or eBay to find DirectX 10 class GPUs.

 

This post stems from a staggering amount of ignorance regarding the state of the graphics API landscape in 2023.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

You don't need to buy a new graphics card to run DX11. It's probably the other way around. The GW2 DX11 renderer runs faster than DX9 on most systems. So turning on DX11 may give you the small performance boost needed to keep playing GW2 on a low-spec system rather than buying a new computer or graphics card.

[Khisanth.2948]

10 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

I'm playing GW2 on a Ryzen 5 5600g APU, yes, both CPU and GPU on a chip. 

Runs fine, but you're not gonna get "ultra" settings.

 

Point is, poor people can play this game just fine because before that, i was playing the game on a 12 year old system!

Yes it ran on low as well, but i played it.

 

Didn't lose me as a player because of GFX upgrades, in fact, switching to DX11 made it run WAY better.

Mine is ~5.75 years old.

The minimum systems requirements for GW2 was increased for EoD but the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 are both over 10 years old. You would probably have to have everything on low for the minimum system requirements but what would you expect from 10 year old hardware?

1 minute ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

You don't need to buy a new graphics card to run DX11. It's probably the other way around. The GW2 DX11 renderer runs faster than DX9 on most systems. So turning on DX11 may give you the small performance boost needed to keep playing GW2 on a low-spec system rather than buying a new computer or graphics card.

Heh ... dx11 was already 3 years old at the launch of GW2

[eutha six.5647]

running on a 10+ year old 500 dollar laptop-runs great-there are a lot of setting to make the game look great and run with low specs-some things are more intensive-but dx11 runs fine- no lag or tearing and I dont run vsync--people can run most games on older systems- just make sure you arent running everything in the background-although, I can run chrome in the background and still get no lag-my system is low spec- i-5200 (2.2GHz) 8gig ram and nvdia 940-this game is optimized great-but no, I wont attempt Ultra although I can run very high, but it makes my system too hot. 

[Khisanth.2948]

Also "Hey! You are going to lose all these people who don't have any money to spend on your product!!!" might not be the best argument to change a business decision.

I am not a writing expert but I don't think that sounds very persuasive.

[Infusion.7149]

You can play this on a sub $700 computer and now in the current market it's probably even less because every Intel Xe or Radeon IGPU can play it. I know because I've done it as a comparison against my desktop with 8 cores and a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

Sure you won't get nearly the same performance but unless you are playing largescale WvW it really doesn't matter. Openworld PVE is the only other place you have 25+ people onscreen.

[Mystere.3578]

Dear OP, don't you think ArenaNet, a professional MMO developer studio, knows the hardware of their userbase? The twenty-something people, that don't have a dx11 compatible graphics card  can get an upgrade for 20$, that's how far they would be dated back.

[Evga.2471]

I understand the frustration as the OP states. But like some said before me "not a good business model." Games do change over time and it's that time for Anet to get GW2 up to date with stuff. Sorry OP, but it has to be.

 

I have ran this game on a 2011 Samsung RC512 laptop (when out of town for vacation & etc.). It has a core i7-2630QM @ 2.00GH, 6GB ram, and a 525M GPU. The lowest settings possible with 10-20 FPS. Talk about trying to play this game. It was bad the laptop would sometimes over heat. I did my best with what I had. Played a few events as well, Wintersday & Dragon Bash. Also did a few World Bosses and that never went well about 5-8 FPS. This was with the current state of game running DX9. Laptop has Win 10. But I got myself a better laptop. I saved my money even with a very well paying job. I put very little money aside for about two years to get a better laptop.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Evga.2471

[Randulf.7614]

Let Anet and those other players worry if there’s a problem (which is unlikely). If you can play, then no issue.

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Witch of Steam.5138 said:

Especially By forcing People to upgrade or use a subscription service ( Geforce now ) To play your game.

Nah. That's only for people still playing on Win XP era hardware. Dx11 is old, there's very few computers still around that aren't capable of running it, and those few are likely already too weak for GW2 anyway for multitude of other reasons.

So, doesn;t seem to me like a real issue.

[Danikat.8537]

So far I've only seen one person saying they won't be able to play it, and that might be a joke because it was someone on Twitter saying "but I play on a potato". So this topic is currently almost entirely hypothetical - people who will be able to run the game speculating that somewhere out there are people who will be affected.

I assume Anet are able to at least estimate how many people don't have DX11 compatible computers and wouldn't be doing this if it would affect a significant number of players. So unless we start seeing people saying they won't be able to play after the update I don't think it's necessary to worry about large numbers of people have to stop playing.

[Khisanth.2948]

22 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I assume Anet are able to at least estimate how many people don't have DX11 compatible computers and wouldn't be doing this if it would affect a significant number of players. So unless we start seeing people saying they won't be able to play after the update I don't think it's necessary to worry about large numbers of people have to stop playing.

They have telemetry that tells them which areas in the game has the worst performance and what sort of of hardware was producing those results. There was something years ago with a dev talking about how they optimize maps and sometimes they would see the terrible performance and the associated hardware while occasionally wishing they could tell the person to upgrade but that was impossible because that is apparently not collected together.

They don't need to estimate since they can get an exact count.

[AgentMoore.9453]

The opening post is a bit dramatic, but I do understand that some people with dated PCs will be stuck unable to play a game they've enjoyed for a decade and unable to afford a new rig in order to keep playing. This same kind of thing happened when they cut Mac support. Undeniably, that does suck and it will be the reality for them. Those people do have my sympathy.

On the other hand, 11 has been industry standard for a while and 12 is on its way to becoming the same. It benefits ArenaNet a lot more to upgrade (even if some people are lost along the way) because most players are going to be using more modern machines.

One example of why this matters: I own some extremely old games made for ancient versions of Windows and some of them are unable to run correctly on shiny new versions of the OS. For ancient one-off games like that, that's just a part of life. For live service, continuous-play games like MMOs? Software has to stay current/compatible or it will create widescale problems on the user end and that is when a company will lose players en masse.

To the point of 11 being buggy or unstable, that's a bridge that will be crossed when we get to it (hopefully). If they push it through and it runs like garbage with GW2 for a lot of people, I can only imagine you'll hear the player outcry from low orbit and they'll peel it back until major issues are resolved.

[Juan.6124]

Ah. There is the post.

 

DX11 is from 2009. Why not wait for someone to post this kind of post who is actually affected by it?

Edited January 5, 2023 by DirtyDan.4759

[Rogue.8235]

So I'm in the game now, while running screen reading software (which is stupidly graphics intensive) and other access tools to grab text imagery (OCR), all while on a computer that is over 10 years old.  There are no problems here.  I'm really not sure what the complaints are, because I'm not experiencing any change to performance at all.

Now, Autodesk Maya definitely has some performance issues when I'm running physics heavy simulations, so I'm familiar with what horrible performance is.

 

[Elricht Kaltwind.8796]

The notion that any players will be lost over this is absolutely laughable. DX11 has been around since 2009. If your hardware is older than that then it would already have been outdated by the time of the game's launch, let alone more than ten years later. Even if you could play at launch on that hardware, there's no way you'd even come close to the specs that are already required for any of the expansions. It really is a non-issue.

[Elricht Kaltwind.8796]

1 hour ago, AgentMoore.9453 said:

The opening post is a bit dramatic, but I do understand that some people with dated PCs will be stuck unable to play a game they've enjoyed for a decade and unable to afford a new rig in order to keep playing.

Well you don't even need a new rig per se, DX compatibility is dependent only on video card. You can get a video card from ten years ago for like $40.

[ArchonWing.9480]

Graphics card? You don't even need that. Any remotely modern processor (like in the last 10 years) does fine. My laptop can run gw2 when it accidentally runs integrated when I don't plug it in.  You can literally buy any old clunker from Amazon for less than 150 total  with an i5-6500 (that's my processor!) and a 512 SSD.

I mean, DX12 came out 8 years ago lol.

If your potato is that old, chances are it's also not running a modern OS. Can you even watch Youtube with that not lagging? And speaking of that, Windows 10 will stop being supported in late 2025, meaning security issues, assuming it hasn't croaked by then. Just do yourself a favor and spend a few hundred dollars now, instead of having to face an unknown cost of data loss or security breaches. Or maybe something just catching on fire.

And before anyone says anything, i used my old monitor until smoke came out. I've also had a computer explode right next to my leg because it was some garbage power supply. A few more bad rolls and I wouldn't even be here.

 

Don't do this. You're lying to yourself if you think you're saving money. You're paying a very invisible, but very real cost.

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[BurntGerbil.2861]

I know that there’s a subset of players who experience some pretty severe crashes when using DX11 with this game. I was one of them prior to installing a Linux partition and running GW2 on there.

When running DX11, I would get frequent (nearly hourly) GPU crashes (Radeon 6700). Sometimes the whole system would shut off,  but usually the display would just go out until a hard reset. Switching to DX9 completely eliminated the issue. 
 

I found a few threads of people with the same DX11 issues when I was troubleshooting. So, if any of those people find their way here when ANet flips this switch… maybe consider Linux?

[Colin.4568]

Thanks for the tip but I personally won't install a new operating system in the hope that it fixes a bug introduced by a game.

If they did not fix the recurring crashes with DX11 before it goes mandatory, well, it's their loss. (and mine, given that I will lose everything I accomplished ingame, and every friend that I brought to the game and plays with me).

But they sure know what they are doing and it is certainly an acceptable loss on their end (not the best move imho but who am I to judge).