8 years of updates and content but biggest game issue is still here

[Merzhin Hudour.4698]

Hi there, so this is a very honest congratulations to Arenanet for expanding, improving and making gw2 a better game throughout the year, along with a high-five for being able to do so and keep people playing it for so long by working on everything but the one that ruined the whole experience at launch and still does today, 8 years after :let me introduce you to guild wars 2's graphic engine.So when the game came out, it couldn't handle epic fights with more than 30 fps whenever it involved more than 5 players using skills against more than 5 enemies, even with high-end computer.But imagine my surprise when, coming back almost 10 years after, to realize that during all this time, not a single improvement to the engine was made.It wasn't able to deal with dynamic events when there are enough players to actually do and succeed the event in 2012, and it still isn't able to do so today.No matter which gpu / cpu you play with. all the flaws and limits of the engine we had in 2012 are still there.Arenanet developers did a lot of work on evrerything, and even if I don't like all of it, my overall experience of the game is way better from what it was when I first played it, and this is amazing.But I'm just really wondering how could everybody at Anet read about all players complaining about their game's poor performances for nearly a decade without ever trying to fix it.I mean almost all big online game studios upgraded their graphic engines so they could benefit from new technologies and hardware / software / api improvements, but gw2 's engine remain exactly the same that it was day one.

And in a world of cloud gaming, cloud computing, rtx, vulkan, directx 12, machine learning techs and evolving AIs, with direct competitors using modern stunning graphics, I really can't find a single good reason why they didn't work on that yet.Either the graphic engine is so broken there is no way they could improve it, either all those who knew the engine forgot or left.

Now that they've announced a third expansion coming, it means that they don't plan to let it die yet, so I think it would be the perfect time for them to really work on the engine and give it the improvements and upgrades it deserves and desperately needs.By doing so, they would attract a lot of new players, make old players come back, make current players happy, and it would grant gw2 a second life of success and fame and allow it to remain popular and active for five more years at least.On the contrary, adding content will give them few months of popularity, but won't be enough to keep it alive five more years.

[Rukia.4802]

Hm I only have a gtx 1060 and i5 processor and run it fine 60 fps on high for normal events, I turned settings down because of world bosses so its a mix of medium/high with character models on low. If my gpu was better I would definitely be getting better performance at higher settings. There are some issues during world bosses like drakkar and such but not unplayable. What are your specs?

Google GW2 DX12 and use the reddit link, that will help your performance.

I agree about DX12 though its pretty hilarious the game is still DX9It must be on the list right behind that mythical spell effects slider and hiding party/squad nameplates...

[Pirogen.9561]

May I ask what kind of PC do you have?

[Zaklex.6308]

@Merzhin Hudour.4698 said:~snip~

As you yourself noted this has been brought up before, and if you've read those older threads then you would know why ArenaNet hasn't tried to update the engine. They've answered the query themselves on several occasions including that at one time pointing out that they want maximum coverage of computers that can run the game, there's a sizable amount of players that still run DX9 computers that play GW2. I'm not going to bother explaining all the various reasons(including the spaghetti code from the enghanced GW engine they used), but if you want the answers from ArenaNet they're out there.

P.S. I have my graphics settings on maximum, and really don't notice the difference between 20fps and 60 during large meta's with all the graphical explosions.

[Merzhin Hudour.4698]

Using dx9 was relevant in 2012 because it was cheap and fast for them to work with it, and because most pc owners were still running on it.Nowadays, even computers from public / poor schools use at least directx 11. And it's not just a question of directx, but the whole engine need what is called optimization, because it's not acceptable to have modern online games with high-end graphics running way better than an 8 years-old one.

I play with an i7 4770K and gtx 980 Ti and 16 gb of ram on an ssd, and the game runs mostly great as long as you play solo and story mode.The problem is that gw2 is an mmorpg, which is meant and designed to be played with other players, in big fights and events.And when a lot of other titles offer better graphics and smoother gameplay than your game, even if they're brand new and played on the same computers than your game, it make players go play the other titles instead of yours.The fps drops in events etc were understandable at launch, or even some months, years after, but they're not anymore today.

With a computer like mine and a lot of others less powerful, we should be able to do all the content of the game with constant 60 fps considering it uses dx9 and a more than ten years old engine.You can pick any other old online game using dx9, it will run perfectly on almost all computers with more than 100 fps. Aion, Tera, Neverwinter, they were all developed with dx9.There are even some studios which decided to stop support for dx9 computers and still made a ton of money and happy players.

[robertthebard.8150]

@Merzhin Hudour.4698 said:Using dx9 was relevant in 2012 because it was cheap and fast for them to work with it, and because most pc owners were still running on it.Nowadays, even computers from public / poor schools use at least directx 11. And it's not just a question of directx, but the whole engine need what is called optimization, because it's not acceptable to have modern online games with high-end graphics running way better than an 8 years-old one.

I play with an i7 4770K and gtx 980 Ti and 16 gb of ram on an ssd, and the game runs mostly great as long as you play solo and story mode.The problem is that gw2 is an mmorpg, which is meant and designed to be played with other players, in big fights and events.And when a lot of other titles offer better graphics and smoother gameplay than your game, even if they're brand new and played on the same computers than your game, it make players go play the other titles instead of yours.The fps drops in events etc were understandable at launch, or even some months, years after, but they're not anymore today.

With a computer like mine and a lot of others less powerful, we should be able to do all the content of the game with constant 60 fps considering it uses dx9 and a more than ten years old engine.You can pick any other old online game using dx9, it will run perfectly on almost all computers with more than 100 fps. Aion, Tera, Neverwinter, they were all developed with dx9.There are even some studios which decided to stop support for dx9 computers and still made a ton of money and happy players.

I really stopped reading after your first paragraph. It's not only acceptable that an 8 year old game would underperform vs a new one, it's expected. I'm not sure what world you're living on, but come home, mate, it seems you're living in bassakwards land.

[Ashantara.8731]

I have to lower player model quality during big events on my 5-10 year old hardware, but other than that I don't have any issues, really. I'm not experiencing any lag (except for WvW, which is a server issue, though) or stutter. I wouldn't mind a performance optimization of the engine, sure, but I am sceptical whether this could be done without having to start from scratch.

In general - on the technical side of things - this is a pretty solid engine in many departments; especially camera, movement and animations are awesome and super smooth - a true luxury compared to some other games of the genre. :+1:

[Bladestrom.6425]

The game is extremely solid, and still looks damn good (artistic talent beats number of pixels) . have a look at eso which is an absolute performance car crash in pvp. Or wow where they had to prune skills to oblivion to get a feel for how solid this engine is.

[Akame.8736]

Yeah I run the game at literally MAX on all graphics settings.... and have been in countless world boss fights with massive amounts of players around, without any problems getting high frame rates.... The problem could very well be your GPU, or even your CPU/RAM.

[kanemi.4903]

Vulkan all the way buddy ;)

[Ayakaru.6583]

(Ever took a close up of asura NPC? It's like a 360p YouTube video)

[amnessa.6154]

Good for you friend cuz having SLI gtx980 and i7 with overclocked speeds doing me no good. Even with lowest settings I cant get 60fps in world bosses. The only time I can see actual graphics of game is when I play solo and it kills the meaning of mmorpg for me.Btw I track numbers of usage percentages, actually The game depends massively on CPU(between 60-100% while gpu's wont go above 20%). Probably new multicore AMD cpus(that are perfect fit also for emulators :S) could help solve the problem.OR maybe careless but happy people in this topic may give some info about their happy setups and we can fix ours. what the hell is "game runs pretty solid", "getting high frame rates no problem" . Give numbers or dont write in this topic.

[NaramSin.2693]

I don't think they will do it, probably because of the code, it seems to be a lot of effort and money involved and actually they don't have money and resources to do this, as You can see from the past they rarely fix bugs on the game, specially the old content, most of the people left the company so knowledge seems to be missing and all the new expansions/living are of lower quality every year and the only goal seems to let the company/game survive incrementing just the income with things they think will work but overall quality it's low every year, still the game it's in my opinion one of the best for general play system, really fun because it was well designed at the beginning, sadly many wrong design/marketing decisions let them reach the actual situation, so I think they will not fix/improve the graphical engine at this point because seems too dangerous to put hands on code now, just my 2c

[TPMN.1483]

This is an older post that I created on this same issue:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/9ntaqg/gw2_graphics_engine/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf - which was before dx9->DX12 (dx9proxy) then got released proving that even an 3rd party wrapper will boost performance if the game runs in DX12 compared to dx9.

This is a good example of constructive feedback with +500 reddit upvotes which is rare knowing how reddit works.

There are many reasons why it would benefit gw2 to upgrade the graphics engine, including giving them access to a bigger library of graphical effects without having to write extensive workarounds to make it happen in dx9.

It has been proven 100% that there is a FPS boost in a large number of scenarios using dx9dx12 proxy and there is absolutely no reason to believe that recoding into DX12 natively would not now give a FPS boost and help preserve the ability to add to the game for the next 10 years.

[Merzhin Hudour.4698]

Yes I heard about it, I will give it a try, but I still believe Arenanet should work on that for the next expansion and all players would benefit from it.I'm also pretty sure 100% of gw2 players use dx11 / 12 capable gpus, so it would be a total win for everybody. Thanks for your reply anyway

[Ayrilana.1396]

@Merzhin Hudour.4698 said:But imagine my surprise when, coming back almost 10 years after, to realize that during all this time, not a single improvement to the engine was made.

They've made plenty of improvements since the game launched. It may not be the improvement, DX12, that you want but that doesn't mean that they haven't.

Also, please be consistent with the years that you list out. The game has been out for 7.5 years. Sure, rounding up to 8 years is okay but 10 years is a bit of a stretch and exaggeration.

[dace.8019]

Fully agree with this thread. It's a little bit absurd.

This has, I'm sure, been a thorn in Arena Net's paw all these years. They doubled down on big, map-wide meta events because of the positive reaction the system garnered, but the game runs like crap during these events. Like they painted themselves into a corner.

I'm sure a lot of people over the years at ANet have wanted to fix this mess but one assumes the time/cost budget is too big.

[Vrath.1754]

@amnessa.6154 said:

Btw I track numbers of usage percentages, actually The game depends massively on CPU(between 60-100% while gpu's wont go above 20%). Probably new multicore AMD cpus(that are perfect fit also for emulators :S) could help solve the problem.

The issue is the best cpu for most current MMO engines is those with the highest single core speeds which is intel currently. Most older and current games dont utilize multiple cores. That will change with new consoles coming as Devs will start deving for multi core usage, but it wont matter or help for the older game engines that all current MMOs are built on. (Although Mark Jacob's claims to have created an engine that can handle 100v100 RvR without issue, we'll see).

I have an i9 OC'd to 5.0 gz and tbh I hardly ever noticed fps dips or performance issues unless its server lag at Tequatl which I use to never get when I played in past years.

I have been using the dx12 option but I never had a max gain but it seemed to improve my lows although I havent really tracked it enough to be sure.I'll have to check I use geforce experience which shutdown non essential tasks and processes when gaming, it also tracks fps so I can see the lows and highs hit.