Guild Wars 2 Beta – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2012
Genre: MMORPG
Developer: ArenaNet
Publishing house: NCSoft

Russian fan site Guild Wars 2

 

Guild Wars 2 is a computer game, a continuation of the first part of Guild Wars from ArenaNet. In the game: 5 races; 8 professions; 80 levels, which will take approximately 90 hours of play to complete. The game is scheduled to be released on August 28, 2012. On the official website of the game it is possible to place a pre-order, which gives the right to participate in the beta weekend.

Five races and eight professions will be available in the game. Any of the five races – Char, Sylvari, Norn, Asura and Human – will be available in all eight professions. Professions are divided into subgroups according to the armor worn – adepts who use light armor, adventurers who use medium armor and soldiers who use heavy armor.

The game will not have the usual MMORPG task system; instead, there will be dynamic events that occur and affect the world regardless of whether the player participates in them. The player, by his participation or non-participation, can influence the outcome of the event, which will be reflected in the world around him.

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Guild Wars 2 is supported by the major Windows operating systems, which include Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers and are unlikely to receive support.

 

The priority and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Guild Wars 2 Beta is DirectX 9. With the release of the final version, the developers promised to introduce support DirectX 10 – let’s see how they keep their promise.  The game requires 16 gigabytes of free space on the HDD, and in the final version the game will require about 22-25 gigabytes.

 

During the testing process for Guild Wars 2 Beta, some systems encountered an error when launching the game. If there is an error launching the game on Windows Vista and Windows 7 on AMD video cards, set the game shortcut properties to compatibility mode with Windows XP SP3 (it is quite possible that this manipulation will be required in the final version of the game).

Game engine

Guild Wars 2 uses a heavily modified engine originally developed by ArenaNet for Guild Wars. Improved graphics and animation. The Havok physics system is also used. The game’s performance is being improved by Umbra Software, which specializes in graphics optimizations.

 

Havok Physics is a physics engine developed by the Irish company Havok. The engine creates a real-time simulation of physical interaction, which makes the game world more alive and realistic, similar to Ragdoll physics. Havok Physics is a multi-platform engine.

Havok SDK 1.0 was released at the Game Developers Conference in 2000. At the moment, the seventh version of the product has already been developed, which was released in December 2009. Since the introduction of the first SDK in 2000, it has been used in more than 150 computer games. Initially, most of the games running on Havok technologies belonged to the first-person shooter genre. For example, the Source physics engine, created by Valve Corporation and used in Half-Life 2 and its expansions, includes some reworked Havok Physics version 2 code.

 

Umbra Software Ltd. is a Finnish private company, developer of computer graphics technologies. Umbra Software specializes in graphics optimizations and provides middleware for optimizing graphics engines for PC and console games. Umbra Software works or has worked with the following companies: Intel, Microsoft, Epic Games, Sony Computer Entertainment, SpeedTree and others.

 

Umbra Software was founded in 2005 in the capital of Finland, Helsinki, as a spin-off from Hybrid Graphics. After that, in September 2006, she purchased the “dPVS” program from Hybrid Graphics and continued its development. Umbra Software’s latest product, “Umbra”, is a hardware-assisted graphical occlusion processing routine.

Advanced Game Settings

Guild Wars 2 offers both basic and advanced graphics settings. There are five levels of graphics quality available: ultra, high, medium, low and very low. You can also manipulate the settings more flexibly using advanced settings. 

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between minimum, medium, high and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

High quality settings

Very high settings

As we can see, there is still a difference between graphics settings in Guild Wars 2 Beta, and this is especially noticeable in the improvement in quality when moving from low to medium and from medium to high graphics quality settings.

This time there were some surprises – during the testing process it was discovered that video cards of the AMD Radeon HD 5XXX series show unusual performance, superior to that of their older counterparts. A careful examination of the graphics quality on these video cards helped to identify the reason for this:

 As it turned out, AMD Radeon HD 5XXX series video cards had a problem with image output quality. Upon closer inspection, you will notice that the quality of the textures (especially the character) is very blurry and unclear. Different driver variations have not solved this problem, and most likely it needs to be solved at the developer level.

General visual design and game physics

This weekend, the final beta testing of one of the largest and most anticipated MMO games of this year, Guild Wars 2, took place. So both we and, accordingly, our readers will be able to find out what system requirements this game puts forward for modern PCs.

 

Guild Wars 2 has one of the best graphics in the MMO games niche, and this despite the fact that the game supports the currently very outdated DirectX 9. Beautiful style can be seen in everything – from the exquisite work of web designers to very high-quality game images.

 

The locations in Guild Wars 2 are striking in their beauty and diversity – for each race the developers were able to flawlessly organize their own color niche. As for the locations themselves, they are quite bright, varied and rich, especially when playing on high graphic settings.

 

The controls in the game are quite convenient, which is not surprising, given that Guild Wars 2 is an entirely PC product. The game interface is customized by the player according to his wishes – in any place and any size. Among the disadvantages, one can highlight the extremely high glow, which is regulated by graphic settings.

 

Well, then we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average FPS was taken as a performance indicator. Below is a video of the test segment:

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 at the highest maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Guild Wars 2 Beta. The test was conducted with very high graphics quality settings. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD do not work adequately. At the beginning of testing, we will raise a few questions so that there are no problems in the future:

– SLI I was able to make money only on a video card GEFORCE GTX 690, and then every time the game is restarted after installing the settings necessary for the test. WITH GeForce GTX 590 failed this trick…

– AMD video card series HD 5XXX, in graphics tests is highlighted in yellow, as we wrote above this problem is associated with poor-quality texture display and, as a result, higher FPS…

 

Testing at high quality settings 1680×1050 

 

At a resolution of 1680×1050 at high settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 6790 or GeForce GTS 450 level showed an acceptable minimum FPS. The optimal video cards would be Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti and higher.

 Testing at  high quality settings 1920×1080

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at high In the settings, video cards at the level of Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti again showed an acceptable FPS indicator. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 460 and higher.

 Testing at  high quality settings 2560×1600 

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at high In the settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 560 level showed an acceptable minimum FPS. The optimal video cards would be Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 480 and higher.

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050

 

At a resolution of 1680×1050 at maximum settings, an acceptable minimum FPS was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce level GTX 550 TI. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 6950 or GeForce GTX 470 and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 460 level again showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 560 and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 4700 level showed an acceptable minimum FPS. The optimal video cards would be Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 480 and higher.

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.

Testing at high memory GPU quality settings 

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The optimal amount of video memory for this game is 500-800 MB for various graphics quality settings, which is quite modest by modern standards.

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 12 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of video cards for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1024×768 with minimal graphics quality settings. 

Testing at minimum quality settings 1024×768

 

Guild Wars 2 Beta was very poorly optimized in terms of performance for CPUs. Greater performance is seen on newer CPU architectures at fairly high clock speeds.

RAM test

Testing of the RAM consumed by the game was carried out by monitoring directly through the Windows task manager. The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 [email protected] GHz with 8GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed video memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Guild Wars 2 Beta is at the level of 1100 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have minimum 2-x GB of RAM installed in your PC. The best option is to have 3-x GB of RAM on your system.

As we can see, the game turned out to be quite voracious in terms of using system resources. There are also some errors and omissions. Hopefully, these omissions will be corrected by the release of Guild Wars 2, which is scheduled for August 28th. Well, at the moment, owners of the latest generation Intel Core i processors and owners of NVIDIA video cards of older models of the GeForce GTX series will be able to feel comfortable in the game, and accordingly with the release of the project.

We also express our gratitude to the resource management guildwars-2.ru to assist with this testing.

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