I'd like optimisation over content at this point...

[Rhailex.2513]

Standing in Amnytas, high up on the tower the the SW mastery point; no players loaded, just the environment, I am getting around 25 fps.
https://imgur.com/a/xtD3XDd - A picture of settings and CPU/GPU utilization

I'm playing with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3080, pretty much maxing out most games at 4k (!!!) and 60 fps.

This is ridiculous, makes me not want to play the game because it's straining my eyes. At 24 fps and even lower when the meta event is going, you can't even follow an object on the screen because the frames are so scarce. And this is an occurance in other places too.

Can't imagine how it is for a lot of other people who have budget PCs and can't afford something better to maybe push their fps from 10 to 20.

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

It tends to be a CPU bottleneck not GPU with GW2, always has been. I get similar frames on an old GTX1070, and even that doesn't run the game much better than whatever card I had before that, back when the game launched.

The game engine itself is ancient, running a modified version of the original GW engine, it simply doesn't support any new tech developed since, including proper multi-threading. Which is why the CPU bottleneck is such a problem too.

At this stage the game would most benefit from a complete engine upgrade, although that's highly unlikely to ever happen. The resources required to do so simply cannot be justified, as optimisations also don't sell copies nearly as well as new content.

[Rhailex.2513]

1 minute ago, Remus Darkblight.1673 said:

It tends to be a CPU bottleneck not GPU with GW2, always has been. I get similar frames on an old GTX1070, and even that doesn't run the game much better than whatever card I had before that, back when the game launched.

The game engine itself is ancient, running a modified version of the original GW engine, it simply doesn't support any new tech developed since, including proper multi-threading. Which is why the CPU bottleneck is such a problem too.

At this stage the game would most benefit from a complete engine upgrade, although that's highly unlikely to ever happen. The resources required to do so simply cannot be justified, as optimisations also don't sell copies nearly as well as new content.

I'm not someone who is expert in how optimisation would affect long-term profits, which I understand they need to take into consideration. So all I can base this next part on is my own experience and people's who can't afford a medium/high-end gaming pc; Optimisation, i.e. squeezing out some more frames, would improve it also for a lot of other people who are used to playing below 20 fps during meta events and in e.g. Lion's Arch. If they have a better experience, they will likely play for longer and spend more time in the game and be more likely to swipe their cards or buy expansions.

The game is getting a lot of praise and there are a lot of new players all the time in the starter zones, but it makes me wonder what their reaction is when their mid-range PC can't even push the game above 20-30 fps when they finally get to the epic meta-events and such that the game offers.

And yes, my CPU is showing 30-something % utilization, where one core usually sits at ~70%. Still, just that should be saying something.

I'm not expecting it to be optimised to run at 60fps in any situation, but at least 30+, around 40 fps would be completely fine. Considering that you can set player model limit & quality to "Lowest" to gain a bunch of FPS in a lot of other places, some just can't be helped as even when put everything to it's lowest, it only changes by max 5 fps.

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

1 minute ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

I'm not someone who is expert in how optimisation would affect long-term profits, which I understand they need to take into consideration. So all I can base this next part on is my own experience and people's who can't afford a medium/high-end gaming pc; Optimisation, i.e. squeezing out some more frames, would improve it also for a lot of other people who are used to playing below 20 fps during meta events and in e.g. Lion's Arch. If they have a better experience, they will likely play for longer and spend more time in the game and be more likely to swipe their cards or buy expansions.

The game is getting a lot of praise and there are a lot of new players all the time in the starter zones, but it makes me wonder what their reaction is when their mid-range PC can't even push the game above 20-30 fps when they finally get to the epic meta-events and such that the game offers.

And yes, my CPU is showing 30-something % utilization, where one core usually sits at ~70%. Still, just that should be saying something.

I'm not expecting it to be optimised to run at 60fps in any situation, but at least 30+, around 40 fps would be completely fine. Considering that you can set player model limit & quality to "Lowest" to gain a bunch of FPS in a lot of other places, some just can't be helped as even when put everything to it's lowest, it only changes by max 5 fps.

That's because it's simply not the graphics that is causing the issue. Your GPU is going to be sat there going "is this it? I'm ready to give you more frames already?" while your CPU is running around screaming "help help I'm on fire trying to juggle all these lemons with one hand, I'll give your renders to the display in a minute".

If that CPU bottleneck was somehow optimized, most players would experience an enormous improvement in performance. It's just not a simple task, the resources required to upgrade the engine with the whole game built on top of it, without potentially causing innumerable game breaking bugs in unforeseen parts of the game is going to be huge.

While I don't doubt that players getting more enjoyment out of the existing game with double the performance is going to have a positive impact on the reception of the game and therefore generate some additional income, I doubt it would be sufficient to justify the costs. I can't understate what a massive undertaking it would be, compared to just adding some skins and calling it a day.

 

[Rhailex.2513]

1 hour ago, Remus Darkblight.1673 said:

That's because it's simply not the graphics that is causing the issue. Your GPU is going to be sat there going "is this it? I'm ready to give you more frames already?" while your CPU is running around screaming "help help I'm on fire trying to juggle all these lemons with one hand, I'll give your renders to the display in a minute".

If that CPU bottleneck was somehow optimized, most players would experience an enormous improvement in performance. It's just not a simple task, the resources required to upgrade the engine with the whole game built on top of it, without potentially causing innumerable game breaking bugs in unforeseen parts of the game is going to be huge.

While I don't doubt that players getting more enjoyment out of the existing game with double the performance is going to have a positive impact on the reception of the game and therefore generate some additional income, I doubt it would be sufficient to justify the costs. I can't understate what a massive undertaking it would be, compared to just adding some skins and calling it a day.

 

Look, I didn't even mention GPU in my last reply... Also, I didn't say to perfectly optimise the engine. Smaller optimisations are enough, just to bump up the fps. It doesn't necessarily have to be the code in the engine, it can involve optimising some maps. I suspect Amnytas is very low FPS simply because there are a lot of floating islands, so you can't really use occlusion culling like in normal "whole terrain" maps where things are usually hidden behind mountains/hills. But even then, standing up high somewhere in other maps won't bring you down to 20fps.

Also; Standing up high on a tower where no other players are loaded or anything is happening just shows that it's not a CPU/GPU bottleneck, but the engine itself that bottlenecks.A CPU or GPU bottleneck would be either of them being maxed out to 100%. But they aren't... And to be honest, this is pretty extreme when the FPS dips from an excess of 120fps to 20fps in popular places.

You can always optimise, that's how it works in programming. I don't even know if they have any of the original developers still in the development team. If they don't, then it would be extremely difficult for someone to get onboarded, learn the ins and outs of the engine and start optimising. Probably not deemed worth the time for a senior developer to spend months on getting familiar and then months on just optimising wherever performance can be gained.

[kharmin.7683]

Playing GW2 can be like pushing a camel through the eye of a needle.  Eventually, it will come out the other side.  Optimizing the camel won't really make a difference.  /shrug

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

that's why I capped the frames to 30. No matter what, you'll never going to get a stable framerate and like you said, in the new maps, even with no players, you can't get more than 30 fps in some areas. Even with all setting at the lowest, any group fight is going to kill your framerate.

sure, it takes some time to get use to that framerate but after a while, your brain stop caring.

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

7 minutes ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

Look, I didn't even mention GPU in my last reply... Also, I didn't say to perfectly optimise the engine. Smaller optimisations are enough, just to bump up the fps. It doesn't necessarily have to be the code in the engine, it can involve optimising some maps. I suspect Amnytas is very low FPS simply because there are a lot of floating islands, so you can't really use occlusion culling like in normal "whole terrain" maps where things are usually hidden behind mountains/hills. But even then, standing up high somewhere in other maps won't bring you down to 20fps.

I'm not having a go at you, you mentioned people with different ranges of PCs, it doesn't matter. Believe me someone on a mid-range PC is not getting much worse FPS than your 3080. Newer maps have a lot more visual clutter going on in general, so they do tend to perform worse, even with no players in view. I'm pretty sure that individual map optimisation will only go so far when there is a massive core issue with the engine itself, always has been.

10 minutes ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

Also; Standing up high on a tower where no other players are loaded or anything is happening just shows that it's not a CPU/GPU bottleneck, but the engine itself that bottlenecks.A CPU or GPU bottleneck would be either of them being maxed out to 100%. But they aren't... And to be honest, this is pretty extreme when the FPS dips from an excess of 120fps to 20fps in popular places.

It's still a bottleneck due to engine optimisation. What we ask of that ancient code these days is probably far beyond what the original engine was intended to do.

 

11 minutes ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

You can always optimise, that's how it works in programming. I don't even know if they have any of the original developers still in the development team. If they don't, then it would be extremely difficult for someone to get onboarded, learn the ins and outs of the engine and start optimising. Probably not deemed worth the time for a senior developer to spend months on getting familiar and then months on just optimising wherever performance can be gained.

You are right here, many of the original developers have long moved on. It has been stated by Anet themselves in the past that some of the code in there is complete spaghetti and the people who originally wrote it are no longer working on GW2 or with the company. Making any changes to the game at this stage is far more arduous of a task than working with more modern tech.

[Sansar.1302]

In the end I fear that the spaghetti code Wil be the end of gw2 

 

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

3 hours ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

Standing in Amnytas, high up on the tower the the SW mastery point; no players loaded, just the environment, I am getting around 25 fps.
https://imgur.com/a/xtD3XDd - A picture of settings and CPU/GPU utilization

I'm playing with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3080, pretty much maxing out most games at 4k (!!!) and 60 fps.

This is ridiculous, makes me not want to play the game because it's straining my eyes. At 24 fps and even lower when the meta event is going, you can't even follow an object on the screen because the frames are so scarce. And this is an occurance in other places too.

Can't imagine how it is for a lot of other people who have budget PCs and can't afford something better to maybe push their fps from 10 to 20.

CPU matters more in GW2. My old i5 4460 | 750 Ti PC ran GW2 around the same level as the 9400F | 2060 setup I had after it, 60-65FPS at 1080P, uncapped. Compared to that my current 5700X/6700XT runs the game at 75FPS(capped) and since I rarely check it uncapped I only know that in Amnytas I get a comfortable 141FPS max.

My laptop has a weak i5 4300M without a dedicated GPU and even that runs the game at ~30FPS at 1080P.

A buget PC nowadays would have the same performance as what I had with a 9400F.

[Bladestrom.6425]

1 hour ago, Sansar.1302 said:

In the end I fear that the spaghetti code Wil be the end of gw2 

 

a symptom of spaghetti code is an ability to change or grow, thats not the case here.  Where are you getting your 'spaghetti' concerns from?

[fatihso.7258]

Make enough noise and they might consider not just optimize but actually offload main thread into more threads to solve bottleneck. Same as how they did the transition from. Dx9 to 11 while everyone doomed and gloomed it can’t be done. A young guy showed up and just did it. 

[RisingDawn.5796]

5 hours ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

Standing in Amnytas, high up on the tower the the SW mastery point; no players loaded, just the environment, I am getting around 25 fps.
https://imgur.com/a/xtD3XDd - A picture of settings and CPU/GPU utilization

I'm playing with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3080, pretty much maxing out most games at 4k (!!!) and 60 fps.

This is ridiculous, makes me not want to play the game because it's straining my eyes. At 24 fps and even lower when the meta event is going, you can't even follow an object on the screen because the frames are so scarce. And this is an occurance in other places too.

Can't imagine how it is for a lot of other people who have budget PCs and can't afford something better to maybe push their fps from 10 to 20.

 

You should expect your frames to drop, during meta events, using Highest character model and limits, but yeah, it shouldn't be running at 25fps in less crowded areas.

[Solvar.7953]

Rewriting the engine to be fully multithreaded is a lot harder than updating library calls from dx9 to dx11.  I think the main thing about the dx11 upgrade is that some people were expecting massive performance increase, because it must have been using that old dx9 that slowed things down, because other games that use dx11 perform much better.  While the dx11 gave performance upgrades for some people, it wasn't a massive upgrade that many expected.

The original GW1 dates from a time when number of cores on most peoples computers were much lower.

I suspect the effort of rewriting (or at this point, they'd probably go to an engine maintained by someone else, like unreal) is on par of writing a new game.  The classes, plot, etc, might remain the same, but all interactions with objects, maps themselves, etc, might all need considerable work to upgrade.  So it then becomes a business question for Anet is it better for GW2 to limp along with an old engine and develop a new game, or update GW2.

 

[quake.9023]

agreed. no point having new map like amnytas that is completely annoying and unplayable, pointless. there is nothing great about the map, it looks basic but 25-30fps. i went to older maps recently like verdant brink.....with sooo much more detail and things going on thn current maps and my fps didnt even blink.  something is seriously not optimised 

[starlinvf.1358]

18 hours ago, Rhailex.2513 said:

Look, I didn't even mention GPU in my last reply... Also, I didn't say to perfectly optimise the engine. Smaller optimisations are enough, just to bump up the fps. It doesn't necessarily have to be the code in the engine, it can involve optimising some maps. I suspect Amnytas is very low FPS simply because there are a lot of floating islands, so you can't really use occlusion culling like in normal "whole terrain" maps where things are usually hidden behind mountains/hills. But even then, standing up high somewhere in other maps won't bring you down to 20fps.

Also; Standing up high on a tower where no other players are loaded or anything is happening just shows that it's not a CPU/GPU bottleneck, but the engine itself that bottlenecks.A CPU or GPU bottleneck would be either of them being maxed out to 100%. But they aren't... And to be honest, this is pretty extreme when the FPS dips from an excess of 120fps to 20fps in popular places.

You can always optimise, that's how it works in programming. I don't even know if they have any of the original developers still in the development team. If they don't, then it would be extremely difficult for someone to get onboarded, learn the ins and outs of the engine and start optimising. Probably not deemed worth the time for a senior developer to spend months on getting familiar and then months on just optimising wherever performance can be gained.

Ok so the problem is that “small optimizations”  will not accomplish what you want.  Theyve been doing small passes for years, and while it improves, that overhead get gobbled up by all the new content assets and effects. You think it runs bad “now”, try 6 years ago with less than half the effects and models loaded as it does today.  30 FPS in any world boss was a feat of pure brute force of your hardware.  There was a reason they capped condi stacks and later added a consolidated tick as an option. 

Despite what you might think, map specific issues are also limited by how the engine works, as much as assets and bad asset management.  How do you think those assets get rendered?

The engine needs an architectural overhaul. And keep in mind new GPUs and drivers are optimized toward newer APIs.  There is only so much you can do with DX9/11, which is single thread heavy,  when everything is moving to parallel designs like DX12 and vulkan; that trades single thread performance for  multithread and multinode scaling.  e 

But justifying that is hard when GW2 isn’t even NCsofts biggest money maker by a wide margin.  The work they’ve done so far to uplift into DX11 is due to lack of options. e hit 

They’ve hit the wall for performance returns on assets years ago.  Other than bugs in certain maps, the only long term path forward is redesigning the engine, and very likely a total repass on all assets to take advantage of the new design methods.  

 

 

Edited October 18, 2023 by starlinvf.1358

[Sansar.1302]

On 10/17/2023 at 2:34 PM, vesica tempestas.1563 said:

a symptom of spaghetti code is an ability to change or grow, thats not the case here.  Where are you getting your 'spaghetti' concerns from?

As i have understood adding new maps etc is fine but bigger engine changes are out of the table ( dx11 aside since that is mainly clientside )