Bad feeling for future game performance

[Malafra.4769]

I've played this game for a long time (started with Gw1) so I hate having to write anything negative regarding the game. 

However, I have been getting very frustrated lately thinking how game performance has been become absolutely HORRIBLE.

Before I get all the suggestions and videos on what to do, asking about my specs, I know it all and have always put the right options for massive open world content. Nor am I randomly blasting the game because I've read tons of comments when people feel endangered for what they like.

None of that should be an excuse for, frankly, downwards optimization since SotO released. You can't just tell me the game runs better even just standing in other previous expacks and (filled) zones but here it just goes down the drain. (Amnytas being a great example)

A new expansion coming up without any way to address this issue makes me fear for its future, as I do believe game performance entails better player enjoyment and retention alongside it.

[VaegaVic.6394]

You're not wrong, I'm also a vet from GW1 and yea, performance is not...steady...to say the least, especially on my aging hardware. 

But what's the solution?

They need to add better graphics to make everything look spiffy, they've given us multiple new graphics options now including a DX11 update, and worst case you can play through Geforce Now. 

I can average 4k60fps on a 4770K and a 2060, we all know the game is CPU bound, so we make adjustments to live with it. 

 

[Vavume.8065]

36 minutes ago, Malafra.4769 said:

None of that should be an excuse for, frankly, downwards optimization since SotO released. You can't just tell me the game runs better even just standing in other previous expacks and (filled) zones but here it just goes down the drain. (Amnytas being a great example)

I would guess this is the same for 90% of players, I hear it said all the time, forums, streams etc, as you say I hope it won't be an issue with Janthir Wilds.

[Edge.1653]

2 hours ago, Vavume.8065 said:

I would guess this is the same for 90% of players, I hear it said all the time, forums, streams etc, as you say I hope it won't be an issue with Janthir Wilds.

As much as I'd like to believe this, the hilariously horrid performance of Amnytas gives me zero confidence that Anet is actually designing around how their game/engine performs on consumer hardware. Nothing is better than turning your camera towards the center of that map and seeing your FPS crater to like 8 for no bloody reason.

[Incurve Giidis.7829]

it just keeps getting worse as well

throughout soto i no longer even get 60fps in 10man instances LMAO i believe the last downgrade was postprocessing settings - turned all off and its still kitten, unlucky

open world no longer designed around the shortcomings of the engine, every single player on the map needs to be on the screen at the same place

the dx12 mod that a 3rd person user made provided the biggest performance upgrade the game ever had and they did nothing to learn from them. anet, small indie company, does a purely cosmetic dx11 upgrade for pr

[Fueki.4753]

For me, the game looked and performed better, before they forced DX11 on everyone.

I don't know if that switch is related to your issues, but to me, the game continues to feel worse since then.

Sometimes, the game even tries to compete with non-Remastered Blighttown's frame rate.

Edited June 17 by Fueki.4753

[Dean Calaway.9718]

The game performed a lot better in 2012 than it does in 2024 in much more powerful hardware.

One of the reasons is the fact every bit of armor and weapons today has some sort of trail or particle effect which persists even when you set players quality to low, those grey characters still walking around with performance killing backpacks and a bunch of effects... Why... ?

Over time this issues has been exacerbated over the fact most of the player base ties prestige with effects and they actively scoff at anything without it. Thankfully we can hide cosmetic infusions, but there's still far too many useless effects bring rendered.

Let them have it if they want it, but I want an option to turn it all off on my screen.

If all that wasn't already a problem in SotO, for example, as you're going down stairs on the final episode your frame rate tanks. In an instance, on a stairway, only a handful of NPCs around, this is one million percent a culling problem and poor optimisation.

[Cuks.8241]

I've bought a new PC last year. Mid tier but new. Can play pretty much any game on decent higher end setting with smooth fps. I port to Wizard's Tower and my fps plummets. 

[BlueJin.4127]

8 hours ago, Cuks.8241 said:

I've bought a new PC last year. Mid tier but new. Can play pretty much any game on decent higher end setting with smooth fps. I port to Wizard's Tower and my fps plummets. 

Similar with me. I can play graphically demanding games on high settings on my new laptop and I'll barely notice my laptop is on, but when I play GW2 with medium settings and go to Wizard's Tower, my laptop's fan goes crazy.

Edited June 18 by BlueJin.4127

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

In regards to how terrible Amnytas runs, it was the same when PoF came out. The branded half of Domain of Vabbi suffered the same problems on release and never got entirely fixed. It looks like it is what it is.

[AliamRationem.5172]

Playing at 1440p with all settings maxxed (CPU: 7800X3D, GPU: 3060ti).  Took a few snapshots:

Wizard's Tower: 50 FPS

Amnytas (Bastion of the Natural waypoint): 80 FPS

Mistlock Sanctuary: 110 FPS

Lion's Arch (bank): 90 FPS

Queensdale (not near a waypoint or people): 220 FPS

Verdant Brink (Mellaggan's Valor waypoint): 110 FPS

Crystal Oasis (Amnoon waypoint): 120 FPS

New Kaineng City (Outside of Ministry Ward waypoint): 140 FPS

Auric Basin (Tarnished Traitor with the entire mapload of players jammed into a tiny space): 40 FPS

Clearly, there is a big drop in peformance in the new maps.  Granted this is at max settings, but it's also an aging game with aging graphics and I'm running it on probably the best CPU you can possibly have for playing this game.  On older or lower end hardware and I imagine especially for players using laptops, this is a major issue and I doubt the situation will improve with the next expansion.

[Astralporing.1957]

9 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

The game performed a lot better in 2012 than it does in 2024 in much more powerful hardware.

You should invest in a better memory, because the one you have seems faulty. Original Southsun event was a slideshow to many players, even on good hardware. So was original Frozen Maw (yes, it was bad even many years later, but still nowhere close to how it was initially). Sandstorm on Dry Top caused your fps to plummet to floor levels. Culling and skill lag was an everyday occurence (and not just in WvW).

Sure, the game does not seem to be well optimized today, and in many places this has actually become worse recently, but it's still nowhere close to how bad it's been in first years of the game.

[Trejgon.9367]

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Culling and skill lag was an everyday occurence (and not just in WvW).

For clarity - we talking here about server side culling, not even something game client would do. The character model settings we got were part of direct response to AN trying to fix wvw issue of people being murdered by zergs that were made invisible by server.

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Original Southsun event was a slideshow to many players, even on good hardware

My memory of ancient karka assault - wildly varying amount of players on the screen, single digit fps, kzarkas everywhere :)

[Dean Calaway.9718]

12 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

in much more powerful hardware

 

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

You should invest in a better memory

 

12 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

The game performed a lot better in 2012 than it does in 2024

 

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Sure, the game does not seem to be well optimized today

🤣🤣🤣

[Trejgon.9367]

@Dean Calaway.9718 "You should invest in a better memory" was referring to your own memory not your PCs RAM. Because 2012 GW2 performed atrociously and pretending it performed better than it does in 2024, even with the optimization issues of 2024 state, is inaccurate to say the least.

[Teknomancer.4895]

Speaking for myself, I've noticed that with every significant patch the zone-load screens keep getting longer and take for-bloody-ever to finish. Trying to do a quick WP jump is never quick. Launching the game with the -mapLoadinfo command line switch, my average load time is between 45-60 seconds per map, occasionally jumping to 90+ seconds mainly in cities and other social zones. Despite my PC being very far beyond what the required system specs call for, I still spend an awful lot of time waiting to have fun instead of having fun, and right now it's right on the edge of the delay I'm willing to put up with. I'm hoping some of it is festival traffic that will die down in a few days, but that may not make a difference.

If it gets much worse I'll probably end up abandoning the game, because there are plenty of other games that don't have this problem. If a game loads and runs so poorly that literally nothing I do will make a difference in its performance despite my system's specs suggesting that it should be blazing along at max settings without even breaking a sweat, I'm not likely to keep beating my head against that wall.

[Noidea Incognito.9607]

In my case; can run gw2 unlimited framerate(100-120 most maps.) on ultra settings 1440p with a very old gen i7 with a gtx 1660 super. map loads are under 20 sec with a cheap ssd, this rig is very power efficient.  If you can still run games in a playable state by lowering some setting i think you will be fine.

 

In fact the worry for future gaming should be about something else entirely but just as relevant;

All those fancy bells and whistle everyone wants will require a lot more power... times this with all players around the world that will likely upgrade to ride on the bandwagon.

(Consumers wanted this of course. its in their nature to consume till the end of time, a hunger that never will be sated)

Nobody thinks about the possibility of the global energy demand exceeding what the supply is capable of providing?

Many have not experienced the horrors of multi-day blackouts it seems. It easily becomes chaos/stress because of the intricate dependency  with electronics.

The power needed to use high-end electronics etc requires a finite energy(solar/wind wont cut it, we are talking old style powerplants with uranium/hydro.

Thorium development was left in an infant state so that's not viable alternative let alone the 5-10 year construction of such plants).

 Imagen the frustration of getting constant blackouts during game play sessions(dont worry i am wireless on a steamdeck, right right and all those servers dont use the same energy then?) ... it will take out of the enjoyment real fast, but that will be the least of your worries.

 

But dont let this far farfetched perception of the bleak future bother you people.  o7   Enjoy playing gw2 in the moment. The future is still far off.

 

     

[Teknomancer.4895]

My system (below) isn't the issue, especially compared to the potato-level required specs I linked up above.

Quote

Operating System: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 22000)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: Z370 AORUS Gaming 7
BIOS: F15 (type: UEFI)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz (12 CPUs), ~3.7GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 32682MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Display Memory: 24304 MB
Dedicated Memory: 7963 MB
Shared Memory: 16341 MB

AFTER the map loads, there are no issues at max settings. But before that, the maps load so painfully slow that they're on the edge of making me ragequit.

NO OTHER GAME OR APPLICATION has this problem.

[quake.9023]

23 hours ago, Malafra.4769 said:

I've played this game for a long time (started with Gw1) so I hate having to write anything negative regarding the game. 

However, I have been getting very frustrated lately thinking how game performance has been become absolutely HORRIBLE.

Before I get all the suggestions and videos on what to do, asking about my specs, I know it all and have always put the right options for massive open world content. Nor am I randomly blasting the game because I've read tons of comments when people feel endangered for what they like.

None of that should be an excuse for, frankly, downwards optimization since SotO released. You can't just tell me the game runs better even just standing in other previous expacks and (filled) zones but here it just goes down the drain. (Amnytas being a great example)

A new expansion coming up without any way to address this issue makes me fear for its future, as I do believe game performance entails better player enjoyment and retention alongside it.

spot on! at this point.....its soo bad,there is no point coming out with new content and more complex assets when there is no OPTIMIZATION at all. its a cluster kitten fps killer even with very good specs in 2024 for a 2012 game...cmon anet step up and sort the fps killer especially in amnytas. unacceptable

[Trejgon.9367]

2 hours ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

Speaking for myself, I've noticed that with every significant patch the zone-load screens keep getting longer and take for-bloody-ever to finish.

About those load times, GW2 is the only game that did not get shorter loading time when I moved from oldie laptop to new banger PC (including fancy nvme or however it was called drives, that is at the practical limits of read/write speed for gaming. I have no idea what is happening during those load times, to take virtually no impact with the upgrade. Every other game, mmos included started loading considerably faster on new specs)

[quake.9023]

only reason not looking forward to janthir wilds....and have no confidence at all is the FPS drop there......its like u can bet the new expansion will beat the last one to produce a lower fps lag thn before...........lol its so sad its funny. even with a 14th gen running at 5.3ghz n 3060 n 32gb ram 1440p mid/high setting.....cant pass 39fps facing center of amnytas standing still with no one around. wt flying kitten man. how can it be this bad....lol 

[itspomf.9523]

23 hours ago, Edge.1653 said:

Nothing is better than turning your camera towards the center of that map and seeing your FPS crater to like 8 for no bloody reason.

Ok, so this is something interesting about how different hardware actually handles stuff, particularly shadows.

Around the time Path of Fire went live, I was still using an NVidia card (GTX 1060 6GB), which up to that point was handling things just fine on maxed-out settings at ... I want to say an atypical 1920x1200 resolution display at the time.  However, the very instant PoF dropped, I suddenly had this exact experience:  notable and prolonged stutters over nothing more than turning the camera.

The culprit was having Shadows set to maximum; the instant I dropped it down to anything else, the problem was resolved.

Surprisingly, AMD cards haven't seemed to be affected by this (at least in my experience, and particularly running a RX 6600 over PCIe 3 (which theoretically means it's actually running at x4 rates, rather than the baseline x8 of the mainstream 6000-series cards, so we can discount bandwidth being at fault as the 1060 was a proper x16) at 2560x1440, no less).

20 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

One of the reasons is the fact every bit of armor and weapons today has some sort of trail or particle effect which persists even when you set players quality to low, those grey characters still walking around with performance killing backpacks and a bunch of effects... Why... ?

Not to defend ANet here, but most of these are done with shaders -- which means they're not only way cheaper to render, but way more efficient than trying to handle particles via CPU updates (by which I mean several orders of magnitude).

They're not the culprit so much as the increasingly-high polygon count of models in the game, coupled with already antiquated pipelines that aren't actually DX11, but still based on DX9c (and only recently updated to better exploit DX11 texture compression, per a blog post earlier this year).  They've been using a tool called BGFX, which acts a little like a translation layer to let extant DirectX code render in higher API-levels (ie. DX11/12) -- kind of in the same way that DXVK translates DirectX calls to Vulkan on Linux hardware for Steam's Proton compatibility library.

However, and here's the unfortunate part, it's still reliant on the original code before translation, so that's one of the major reasons that the early DX11 "beta" didn't see major performance improvements outside of an improved low-end, as frame-dispatch was no longer completely tied to the singly-threaded render-and-input loop.

For context:  DX9 and earlier force a single rendering context, whereas DX11 and later permit asynchronous rendering calls and multiple active contexts, thus allowing for potentially dramatic improvements in performance (at the expense of greater complexity of code and synchronization primitives).

This is why, when your framerate drops below a certain threshold, you can still experience "input lag" where the game fails to pick up your key inputs -- it likely still polls after the frame is present, rather than in a separate thread! -- and why, until very recently, you could watch as each model was loaded "between" frames (as this was the only valid time to load assets into memory in DX9, when the renderer wasn't busy, but is absent in DX11 and later) and suddenly "pops in" to the game world.

For the curious:  this is why GW2 uses default models, to ensure that you can at least see a player (within your character model limit) while the game waits to load their actual model, textures, shaders, and so forth.

16 hours ago, BlueJin.4127 said:

Similar with me. I can play graphically demanding games on high settings on my new laptop and I'll barely notice my laptop is on, but when I play GW2 with medium settings and go to Wizard's Tower, my laptop's fan goes crazy.

This is very true, and likely related to an anomaly (possibly still) found in an area around the mastery point near Champion's Dawn in Isle of Istan.  I suspect there's a serious problem with culling here (and the Wizard's Tower), where overmany assets are being processed and potentially rendered, resulting in severe performance degradation and artificially low framerates.  Similarly, any compute or otherwise intensive shader processes would have a likened impact.

It seems likely, as the release of Heart of Thorns resulted in the recompiling of the Gw2.exe executable to be 64-bit (it was originally only 32-bit and could only access just under 4 GB of memory, except on Large Address Aware / Physical Address Extension supporting systems), due to the dramatic number of assets and textures used in the new maps -- a trend which has continued since and only exacerbates the problems outlined above.

Anyway, I shall now be returning to my hermitage.  Have fun, Tyrians.

[Teknomancer.4895]

A full remove-&-reinstall (that download time is no joke) made almost no difference on the load-screen delays, per the -mapLoadinfo command line readout.

On 6/18/2024 at 2:06 PM, itspomf.9523 said:

The culprit was having Shadows set to maximum; the instant I dropped it down to anything else, the problem was resolved.

It shouldn't even be necessary for a game this old, but I gave this a try and got a very slight improvement: maybe 5 seconds off the time. Then I also dropped the Shaders down a single notch and started averaging about 15-20 seconds total load time on previously visited maps. Oddly, when I tested with Shadows back on Ultra there was no perceptible change, so the Shaders setting seems to be the key offender on my system.

"New" maps that haven't been downloaded since the reinstall take longer of course, but before the R&R, all the maps had already been downloaded and visited so that wasn't a factor.

Honestly I'd rather spend the $25 they're charging for expansions on a "no new features, just bug fixes, optimization and balance -- for all 3 game modes." I'd pre-pay for that, in fact.

Edited June 21 by Teknomancer.4895
C&P glitch

[Astralporing.1957]

7 hours ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

"New" maps that haven't been downloaded since the reinstall take longer of course, but before the R&R, all the maps had already been downloaded and visited so that wasn't a factor.

It's not GW1, there's no such thing. The "already downloaded" works only till you close the game, there's no local cache or anything like it. Well, unless you use DXVK, which has a cache of its own.

[Teknomancer.4895]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

It's not GW1, there's no such thing. The "already downloaded" works only till you close the game, there's no local cache or anything like it. Well, unless you use DXVK, which has a cache of its own.

Believe what you like, the -mapLoadinfo numbers were 4X faster on maps that had already been visited post-reinstall. For maps that had NOT been visited on any character since the reinstall, downloads were much longer. Note that the very last items to finish before displaying the zone are (in order) ModelLoadCompletion and MapLoadCompletion.

When the game's own tool tells me that the map is the last & slowest thing to load, who am I going to believe: the tool's actual output, or unsourced assertions from some rando on the Internet?

Edited June 21 by Teknomancer.4895