| BASIC GAME INFORMATION |
Year of construction: 2012
Genre: MMORPG
Developer: ArenaNet
Publishing house: NCSoft
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. There are five races and eight professions 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 does 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 on major Windows operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, with more to come Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and are unlikely to receive support.
The priority and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Guild Wars 2 is DirectX 9. With the release, the developers promised to introduce support DirectX 10/11, but as we see, at the moment, they did not keep their promise. The game requires 15 gigabytes of free space on the HDD.
| 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 |
The same basic and advanced graphics settings are available in Guild Wars 2 as in the beta. 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 a difference between graphics settings in Guild Wars 2, and this is especially noticeable in the improvement in quality when moving from low to medium and from medium to high graphics quality settings.
| General visual design and game physics |
We examined the visual and technical components in detail in the beta test of Guild Wars 2, so the game has not changed at all with the release of the full release. This review aims to convey to our readers exactly what requirements the game puts forward in its release state.
Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.
| TEST PART |
|
Test configuration |
|
|
test stands |
Test bench No. 1 based on the Intel Socket 2 platform011 Test bench No. 2 based on the Intel Socket 1155 platform Test bench No. 3 based on the Intel Socket 1366 platform Test bench No. 4 based on the Intel Socket 115 platform6 Test bench No. 5 based on the AMD Soket AM platform3 Test bench No. 6 based on the AMD Soket AM3 platform Test bench No. 7 based on the AMD Soket AM platform2 Test bench No. 8 based on the Intel Socket 1155 platform Test bench No. 9 based on the AMD Soket AM3 platform Test bench No. 10 based on the AMD Soket AM3 platform+ |
|
Multimedia equipment |
3D monitor LG W2363D Monitor LG E2750 Dell U3010 monitor product provided by the company AMD 3D Vision Kit product provided by the company Nvidia |
|
Software configuration |
|
|
Operating system |
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64 SP1 |
|
Graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 306.23 AMD Catalyst 12.8 |
|
Monitoring program |
MSI Afterburner v2.2.3 |
| 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 (it is heavier and consumes more video card resources in terms of load than in the beta version):
Our video cards were tested at separate screen sizes of 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 only at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Guild Wars 2. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD currently work without any problems.
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 7770 or GeForce level GTX 465. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 580 and above.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080
At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 560 level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 670 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 480 level showed an acceptable minimum FPS. The optimal video cards would be Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 590 and higher.
| NVIDIA 3D Vision Test |
In the 3D Vision drivers, the rating for Guild Wars 2 is called “Excellent” and as our users can guess, the 3D quality in the game is simply excellent. The loss of performance when switching to 3D mode is 45-35% of work in standard mode.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 NVIDIA 3D Vision
The minimum that is needed for comfortable 3D gaming in DirectX 9 mode is a GEFORCE GTX 680-level video card. The most optimal solution should be considered a top-class GEFORCE GTX 690 video card. Thus, the most optimal for playing 3D is the latest generation of GEFORCE GTX and is preferably in multiprocessor mode.
| 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 maximum memory GPU quality settings
The optimal amount of video memory for this game is 500-800 MB for various graphics quality settings.
| 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 maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of the test segment:
Testing at minimum quality settings 1024×768
The result of the processor test is almost similar to the previous testing. The only annoying thing was that the latest generation of AMD processors in open spaces showed lower performance than in the previous testing…
| 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 is at the level of 1000 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 up to 3-x GB of RAM on your system.
As we can see, the Guild Wars developers have corrected some errors in the graphical component and have fully presented a ready-to-use product. The only issue that remains is the issue of some AMD cards working only in compatibility mode with Windows XP SP3…
| IRONSPONSORS |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
||
| GAME SPONSORS |
 |
 |
 |
|
Rate the test |
Rate the graphics |
Evaluate optimization |