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

[DarcShriek.5829]

They'll lose players if they don't upgrade their graphics.  The reasoning is they'll lose less if they have slightly higher graphics requirements, then they would with ancient graphics.  Many people don't like old looking games.

[Bladestrom.6425]

27 minutes ago, Colin.4568 said:

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).

 

 

following says it all really.

Your Store 

 

New & Noteworthy 

Categories 

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https://store.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/public/images/blank.gif

 

<< Back to Overview

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: December 2022

Sort By: Percent Share % Change this month Item Name 

PC VIDEO CARD USAGE DETAILS

OVERALL DISTRIBUTION OF CARDS

AUG

SEP

OCT

NOV

DEC

 

DirectX 12 GPUs

91.23%

91.59%

91.79%

90.68%

90.26%

-0.42%

DirectX 11 GPUs

1.88%

1.62%

1.50%

1.61%

1.65%

+0.04%

DirectX 10 GPUs

1.08%

0.92%

0.87%

0.94%

0.96%

+0.02%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2b and 3.0 GPUs

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.00%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 GPUs

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

DirectX 8 GPUs and below

5.79%

5.85%

5.82%

6.75%

7.11%

+0.36%

 

[Malystryx.4172]

The earliest (or oldest or cheapest tier) discrete gpu to support dx11, per a 3 minute Google search , is an nvidia gtx 430. 

 

It can be bought used for roughly $28 on eBay. 

 

I did not research integrated graphics. 

 

Edit: I am fully aware that the 430 would be a massively terrible gpu to run gw2 and I do not recommend it at all. This is purely the address the issue or argument that dx11 is too expensive for players to adopt to if they are not already running it. 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Malystryx.4172
Disclaimer

[Elricht Kaltwind.8796]

1 hour ago, BurntGerbil.2861 said:

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?

I'm guessing this was months ago and you haven't tried it since (since you got it working satisfactorily some other way.) I was getting GPU crashes hourly on DX11 as well with my AMD video card. Months ago. It was in beta at that time. It's not in beta any more and has been out of beta for a while.

[Stadsport.8714]

2 hours ago, DirtyDan.4759 said:

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?

As soon as I read the announcement I knew we'd get this post. 

 

OP, players are not being required to buy a new graphics card. DX11 is literally older than this game. In fact, DirectX 9 is older than Guild Wars 1. Frankly we run a greater risk of new hardware and/or Windows versions not supporting DX9 in the not-so-distant future. It's over 20 years old. The requirement is to own a graphics card that hasn't turned to dust by now.

 

If your computer is capable of browsing the internet right now, it's practically guaranteed to support DX11. If your computer doesn't support DX11 at all, I would wager GW2 hasn't been playable for a long time anyway. 

 

Asking ANet to continue to support DX9 for the players with hardware that is literally old enough to buy beer, means holding the entire game back for the two people who want to run it on their toaster. This isn't being classist; we're talking about hardware requirements an Amish household probably exceeds.

[Smoky.5348]

I think we're all forgetting that the game wouldn't be held back in the first place if ANET would optimize their new maps. There is no reason for the EoD maps to be so poorly stitched together, and no reason DX11 is required just to make up for that. The trouble spots before EOD haven't changed, either, they just load a little faster now and hitch a little less noticeably.

[vrauns.3215]

GW2 can't keep supporting old cards forever, they need to upgrade this stuff for the future of the game, it's reality.

Edited January 7, 2023 by stuvvo.4753

[Astralporing.1957]

7 minutes ago, Smoky.5348 said:

I think we're all forgetting that the game wouldn't be held back in the first place if ANET would optimize their new maps. There is no reason for the EoD maps to be so poorly stitched together, and no reason DX11 is required just to make up for that. The trouble spots before EOD haven't changed, either, they just load a little faster now and hitch a little less noticeably.

Notice, that Anet themselves mentioned, that the dx11-based optimization will be done in a later stage. We're still in the dx11 implementation stage. They've only barely finished adding it to the game engine, but they haven't started actually taking use of it yet. That will take time.

Also, yes, there's a lot of optimization that can be done outside of the renderer. Which is irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is that anyone that doesn't have a dx11-capable computer, is also lacking a computer capable of running this game at any sensible level (so, anything above slideshow-tier at lowest settings).

Edited January 6, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[Veprovina.4876]

6 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

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?

I'm not complaining, i'm perfectly fine with the performance. 😄

In fact, Vega 7, even though it has slower ram (since it uses system ram), actually runs better because of how much is available. So more can be loaded in. On my R7 260x with 1GB, turning the camera caused major lag, i couldn't participate in large metas well, but i still played the game! 

When i got the Ryzen, i was actually blown away how well it ran Dragonfall - the meta that lagged SO much, that i never managed to catch up to everyone. Now i'm happy. Can it run better? Yes, but eh, i'm not in the market for a GPU now, GW2 is basically the only thing i play now (and some Minecraft 😛 ), so no real need for one.

And now i'm using that R7 as a GPU passthrough card on a virtual machine. 😄 

Though, i'm having trouble with it lol. 

Anyway, a topic not for here.

Gw2 runs fine, better than it has since ages, it's not DX11 fault. 🙂

[Veprovina.4876]

2 hours ago, vesica tempestas.1563 said:

 

 

following says it all really.

Your Store 

 

New & Noteworthy 

Categories 

Points ShopNewsLabs

 

https://store.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/public/images/blank.gif

 

<< Back to Overview

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: December 2022

Sort By: Percent Share % Change this month Item Name 

PC VIDEO CARD USAGE DETAILS

OVERALL DISTRIBUTION OF CARDS

AUG

SEP

OCT

NOV

DEC

 

DirectX 12 GPUs

91.23%

91.59%

91.79%

90.68%

90.26%

-0.42%

DirectX 11 GPUs

1.88%

1.62%

1.50%

1.61%

1.65%

+0.04%

DirectX 10 GPUs

1.08%

0.92%

0.87%

0.94%

0.96%

+0.02%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2b and 3.0 GPUs

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.00%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 GPUs

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

DirectX 8 GPUs and below

5.79%

5.85%

5.82%

6.75%

7.11%

+0.36%

 

First of all - images work now???????? 😮

 

Second - There's more DX8 GPUs than DX9, 10, AND 11 GPUs!!! 🤣

Maybe Anet should switch to DX8! 🤣

[Relco.2708]

9 hours 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. 

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 " 

The nVidia GeForce Now Is paid but you can also use it for free, only things is you have to restart game after 1h of playing.  It notify you how much time you have left before you have to restart the game (If you pay sub, after 6h or 8h dep on sub) No paywall. I read the post and wanted to try it so I registered and Played gw2 on it for couple hours. It runs smooth on medium settings up to 1080p Res. Definitely viable for ppl that their pc can't handle dx11. Of course you need some network brandwidth but I think 15mb/s is pretty standard nowadays, essentially if you able to stream 720p vid on YouTube you have enough speed.

Tbh the free GeForce Now  Handles full maps of ppl better than my PC 😅 also it allow you play gw2 on phone, android TV, SHIELD. Ofcourse keyboard and mouse is needed for that. And the price is not that bad you could stream games for 2-3years and not gonna be even close to price of midrange GPU, not talking about rest in of PC, laptop. The only real downside except the 1h relog interval is that you can't load any addons on there.  

Update: Tested it also on phone with mouse and it's totally playable. Kinda smart to use it for daily login if you can't make it to PC. From now I'm gonna do sell orders on my phone in bed.

 

 

Edited January 6, 2023 by Relco.2708
Post though

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Second - There's more DX8 GPUs than DX9, 10, AND 11 GPUs!!! 🤣

It's a known issue. A guess (guess, because valve is not exactly forthcoming, and there's no GPU breakdown for this category) is that it's Steam Deck and some Macs that fall in there. Possibly also some VMs. Not actual dx8 GPUs.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

be glad we don't have to buy the game again.

[LSD.4673]

It's hilarious they're gonna go all-in on DX11 now, despite it being farted out the door last year for the Steam release in an unfinished state.

Crashes. Worse performance. Graphical bugs. Yeah, force this one on everyone and kick the DX9s to the wind. That'll be great for an MMO, which are renowned for being able to haemorrhage players with no ill effects.

[Solvar.7953]

I somehow think that if a player is running on a card that does not do DX11 and does not have the money to buy a new card, they probably are not giving Anet much money either.  So even if this does force some players to quite playing, it probably doesn't change Anets bottom line.

And removing a big chunk of code saves Anet considerable amount of money in that they no longer need to maintain it, test it, etc.

 

[b k.1648]

At this point, continuing to support DX9 is probably going to be more expensive than it's worth. Not only is the number of players who are still relying on it tiny, that cohort is also going to be spending way less than average.

[Lydia.3842]

Time to upgrade your potatoes 

[Rukia.4802]

11 hours 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. 

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 " 

There was always screen tearing without vsync, in fact I don't think I've played a game without it enabled since I can remember. What's wrong with using vsync? It matches frames to your screens refresh rate.

 

I have a $2000 rig and have issues with GW2 since dx11/eod that's just how games are sometimes they are terribly optimized and the players have to be beta testers. I've noticed the most difference in eod zones.  

 

Gw2 and MMOs in general are usually more cpu bound than gpu, most modern gpu can run pretty much anything.

 

In WoW I have massive stutters in the new zones while dragon riding and there's no realistic setup that can fix unoptimized content. 

 

ESO at least has always been extremely well optimized , though server performance is another story . 

 

Sometimes I do like playing my PS5 and knowing a game is most likely to just WORK.

 

6950xt with a i7 12700f 

 

Maybe I should have bought a $800 CPU as well 🤣 PC gaming is just a pita.  I know players with worse rigs than me that have less issues not everyone is gonna have the same performance that's just the way it goes unfortunately.

 

 

 

[Sindust.7059]

I don't think you'll find more than 5 people playing on cards this old. Most of those cards will result in a horrendous gaming experience nowadays, even with a game this old. Good luck rendering EoD zones on an AMD HD4890. And that's the top of the line, people playing on cards this old will probably have some mid range cards of the era, so realistically they are playing at 10 fps on minimum settings and never leave core Tyria or ever participate in meta events.

 

ANet can afford to lose those customers as obviously they are not spending any money on gaming anyway, and will hardly be the kind of people enthusiastic enough to bring in new customers. If they were, they'd buy something much better used for ~50€. Like a GTX 1050ti or an RX 570. Hell, even an R9 280x would be a massive improvement, and you can get those for 20-30€ used, and they even support DX12.

[Smoky.5348]

6 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Notice, that Anet themselves mentioned, that the dx11-based optimization will be done in a later stage. We're still in the dx11 implementation stage. They've only barely finished adding it to the game engine, but they haven't started actually taking use of it yet. That will take time.

Also, yes, there's a lot of optimization that can be done outside of the renderer. Which is irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is that anyone that doesn't have a dx11-capable computer, is also lacking a computer capable of running this game at any sensible level (so, anything above slideshow-tier at lowest settings).

Unless DX11 can stop models from being CPU-dependent, I don't see how it's going to fix anything. And if it can, I don't see how ANET's going to roll it out correctly on the first try, at which point, what will there be to fall back on? The old DX11? I'm being a bit facetious, but I do wonder this in earnest.

 

3 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

It's hilarious they're gonna go all-in on DX11 now, despite it being farted out the door last year for the Steam release in an unfinished state.

I gotta say it: You only release on Steam once.

[Fueki.4753]

Arenanet should work on fixing the bug-riddled dx11-version first, before even announcing a forced migration. As it's now, the dx9-version runs better for many players.

And graphical improvements mean nothing, when large parts of the game and combat are caked over by all the particle vomit anyway.

 

 

Edited January 6, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[Eleazar.9036]

I find it funny that people think the aim is graphic improvements and it's a bad idea because everything is so poorly optimised and it will affect performances. 

Didn't they explain already the reason they wanna switch to DX11 ? https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/directx11-support-is-coming-to-guild-wars-2/

 

If you want better performances, this is the way.

 

[Colin.4568]

12 hours ago, vesica tempestas.1563 said:

 

 

following says it all really.

Your Store 

 

New & Noteworthy 

Categories 

Points ShopNewsLabs

 

https://store.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/public/images/blank.gif

 

<< Back to Overview

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: December 2022

Sort By: Percent Share % Change this month Item Name 

PC VIDEO CARD USAGE DETAILS

OVERALL DISTRIBUTION OF CARDS

AUG

SEP

OCT

NOV

DEC

 

DirectX 12 GPUs

91.23%

91.59%

91.79%

90.68%

90.26%

-0.42%

DirectX 11 GPUs

1.88%

1.62%

1.50%

1.61%

1.65%

+0.04%

DirectX 10 GPUs

1.08%

0.92%

0.87%

0.94%

0.96%

+0.02%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2b and 3.0 GPUs

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.02%

0.00%

DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 GPUs

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

DirectX 8 GPUs and below

5.79%

5.85%

5.82%

6.75%

7.11%

+0.36%

 

I am not sure what is the relation between DX11 hardware compatibility and crashes. My hardware is compatible with DX12, in fact it's pretty recent as I bought it 3 years ago. However DX11 crashes from time to time while DX9 never did. It has been reported by more than one person already and we have no follow up from anet on this part.
Note that other games are running fine, so it's certainly coming from anet DX11 implementation not doing something properly in some place or another.

I can understand that if you never have any crash running gw2 DX11 you consider this an impactless change. However it will affect players who already have the correct hardware. It's not because anet labeled it "out of beta" that it should be considered as stable, it is not.

[Danikat.8537]

I think I'm going to bookmark this topic for the next time people elsewhere on the internet start complaining that consoles are holding back gaming because they "only" bring out new hardware every 5 years or so and it can take a year or two for significant numbers of people to buy them. For some reason there's this on-going assumption that because the best possible PCs are usually a couple of steps ahead of the best available consoles that means all PC gamers are always using better hardware than all console gamers. Meanwhile PC gamers are worrying their machines may not be compatible with software that came out over a decade ago.

Having read through a lot of the comments on Facebook from people who think they'll be affected by this (which unsurprisingly went into more detail than Twitter) I suspect the bigger problem is lack of knowledge and confidence to find out on the part of the user. A lot of people were worrying their PC won't be able to run it or assuming it wouldn't because they know it's 'old' but have no idea what the specs are and don't realise how old DX11 is. but when someone told them how to check they found out it's fine (and usually can run DX12 as well). There were several people saying they'd have to give up on GW2 and go back to WoW since their PC can run that, only to be told WoW has required DX11 for several years now so if they can run it they'll be able to run GW2 as well.

It's possible some people simply won't try to log in after the update, even though they actually could run the game, because they just assume it won't work.

[Colin.4568]

1 minute ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I think I'm going to bookmark this topic for the next time people elsewhere on the internet start complaining that consoles are holding back gaming because they "only" bring out new hardware every 5 years or so and it can take a year or two for significant numbers of people to buy them. For some reason there's this on-going assumption that because the best possible PCs are usually a couple of steps ahead of the best available consoles that means all PC gamers are always using better hardware than all console gamers. Meanwhile PC gamers are worrying their machines may not be compatible with software that came out over a decade ago.

Having read through a lot of the comments on Facebook from people who think they'll be affected by this (which unsurprisingly went into more detail than Twitter) I suspect the bigger problem is lack of knowledge and confidence to find out on the part of the user. A lot of people were worrying their PC won't be able to run it or assuming it wouldn't because they know it's 'old' but have no idea what the specs are and don't realise how old DX11 is. but when someone told them how to check they found out it's fine (and usually can run DX12 as well). There were several people saying they'd have to give up on GW2 and go back to WoW since their PC can run that, only to be told WoW has required DX11 for several years now so if they can run it they'll be able to run GW2 as well.

It's possible some people simply won't try to log in after the update, even though they actually could run the game, because they just assume it won't work.

Most people can run DX11, that's not the issue. The issue lies with Dx11 crashing while DX9 doesnt. Forcing a crashing version of the game is what we are complaining about. Also the title is saying that it is a good thing to move forward. We are only saying that they need to iron out the DX11 implementation before removing the stable version of the game.