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Guild Wars 2: Your Graphics Card And CPU Performance Guide

　　12:00 AM - August 27, 2012 by Don Woligroski

　　The anticipated sequel to Guild Wars is here, and we're putting this MMO through its paces to let you know what hardware you'll need in order to play it at its highest details. We also explore which processor architectures work best with Guild Wars 2.

　　(Update: Because we tested the game's beta client in order to get this story ready in time for launch, the Guild Wars 2 lead engine programmer, Chad Taylor, dropped us a line to let us know that the game was updated with performance optimizations in the final build. One key change was putting the renderer in its own thread so that blocking driver calls wouldn't create stoppages in the main game loop. He mentioned that this change should make a notable difference on machines with four or more CPU execution cores, and that a few of the graphics preset options were also tweaked.

　　As a result of these changes, we'd like to revisit Guild Wars 2 in the near future to re-benchmark CPU performance and update the driver settings images with examples from the full release. Stay tuned for the update, due in mid-September.)

　　The original Guild Wars (back in 2005) was the premiere release from ArenaNet, a company started by ex-Blizzard employees. Guild Wars was the first MMO that I could convince a group of friends to join me in playing, mostly because it didn't involve an ongoing subscription fee.

　　ArenaNet’s business model involved charging a one-time fee for the game, and then charging again for each subsequent expansion pack. It worked brilliantly, and is one of the forerunners of today's free-to-play model. This is becoming a standard for MMOs. Even noted holdout Bioware plans to go free-to-play with its Star Wars: The Old Republic title.

　　In a crowded MMO market, can Guild Wars 2 achieve the same distinction as its predecessor?

　　

　　The max-level PvP (player versus player) focus of Guild Wars was never a compelling aspect of the game to me, though I can certainly understand its appeal. If you're too busy to set aside free time that matches a guild schedule, you'll have a hard time deriving the richest possible experience from an MMO, much of which is designed for big groups. Some games have found ways to accommodate more casual players. However, you're usually forced into pick-up group queues with people you don't know or meta games.

　　The real solution is a way for players to log on and cooperate with others without being forced to wait for a new player group to form. As I was reviewing the Guild Wars 2 final beta prior to its August 28th launch, I was surprised to discover a potential answer: dynamic events.

　　
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　　The game does not attempt to explain dynamic events in any way. Instead, they simply happen naturally and fluidly. For example, I was playing my low-level Sylvari (a race of plant people with a heavy dose of Elf influence) when the town was attacked by a group of angry mobs. My natural inclination was to help fight off the invasion. In this situation, however, other players in the town lent a hand to stomp out the threat.

　　Thwarting the attack created a shared a sense of satisfaction among the group, and I realized we had just participated in a sort of player versus environment (PvE) group experience—a way to engage in an event without queuing, similar to what Trion Worlds achieved in Rift.

　　I later learned that all players involved were awarded the same amount of “group-PvE” experience. Eliminating kill-stealing, this creates a powerful incentive for players to cooperate, especially since Guild Wars 2 automatically increases event difficulty proportionally with the number of players involved.

　　ArenaNet claims that these dynamic events cause lasting consequences in the game world, affecting subsequent quests, too. My limited time with the beta prevented me from exploring the implications of this. But I find the concept quite interesting in the way it conceptually facilitates different experiences for different characters.

　　
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　　In addition to dynamic events, Guild Wars 2 also introduces several other interesting game play elements. Combat is based on skills and stats, but it also involves some twitch play; dodging and timing are important. Tactical positioning is crucial on battlefields where environmental objects can be employed. Basic melee skills are derived not from not the class of your character, but rather from the type of weapons you're wielding. There is considerable accommodation of unique play styles, and archetypes are not as strict as they are in other titles.

　　

　　Guild Wars 2 features an array of characters and customization capabilities, including five races with their own unique starting area and story. They include the Asura (short mystical scientists; think WoW’s Gnomes), the Sylvari (plant people with more than a passing resemblance to Elves), Humans (the game’s underdogs, given their fall from power in the two and a half centuries since the original Guild Wars), the Norn (tall and stocky Barbarians from the north), and, surprisingly, the Charr (the first game’s antagonistic race of warriors that bring to mind the unholy union of a wolf, bear, and boar).

　　Add to this list eight professions: mesmer, guardian, necromancer, ranger, elementalist, warrior, thief, and engineer. With every character’s basic melee skills derived from their choice of weapon, there are many permutations for customization and playing a unique avatar. I should also mention that every character begins the game with its own pet, which also includes several options.

　　

　　It is important to stress how fleshed-out and complete this game seems compared to its predecessor. The character creation process is joined to a letter-writing paradigm where personal and seemingly whimsical choices form your avatar. The Guild Wars 2 story is also much more compelling than the original right from the start. Each race has a unique area and art style, and conversations are often voiced along with 2D animations and slideshows that advance the story.

　　
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　　There is a lot more to Guild Wars 2's game play that I could discuss. For example, one of the main aspects of the game is PvP. But, given relatively little time with the beta and our focus on performance testing, there was simply no time to explore.

　　Image Quality And Settings

　　
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　　The game’s art features lots of bright colors. It's almost cartoonish, but in the style of a graphic novel rather than the exaggerated caricatures of World Of Warcraft. Guild Wars 2 doesn't push any stylistic envelopes. However, it's still a great-looking game.

　　

　　There are a number of different sliders available for tuning Guild Wars 2's graphics options, but we're focusing on the three main presets here today: Best Performance, Balanced, and Best Appearance.

　　The Best Performance preset applies no anti-aliasing, uses low-quality textures, low-quality details, and no shadows or post-processing effects. Bad as all of that sounds, it still looks decent, and it runs well on low-end hardware (as you'll see in the benchmarks).

　　

　　The Balanced preset also neglects anti-aliasing, but it benefits from Medium texture detail, shadows, terrain and sky reflections, and Low post-processing effects. It looks markedly better than Best Performance, but understandably requires more graphics muscle to achieve adequate performance.

　　

　　The Best Appearance preset enables FXAA anti-aliasing, high-quality textures, the Ultra shadows setting, High post-processing effects, All reflections. Performance takes a significant hit under this setting, taxing the upper bounds of many low- to mid-range graphics cards.

　　

　　Test System And Graphics Hardware

　　We strive to represent game performance across a wide range of graphics hardware. Today, we're including cards ranging from the low-end Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce 210 to the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670.

　　

　　Gigabyte Radeon 6670 DDR3: GV-R667D3-1GI

　　Because Gigabyte sells a broad range of graphics cards up and down the product stacks of AMD and Nvidia, we chose to use the company's boards for testing. The first, which we consider ideal for gamers on a budget, is the Radeon HD 6670 DDR3. This is the minimum discrete card that we deem viable in Guild Wars 2. It's able to handle many titles at 1920x1080 or 1280x720.

　　Gigabyte's GV-R667D3-1GI comes equipped with 1 GB of fast-enough DDR3 memory and an aftermarket 100 mm cooler to keep noise low and temperatures down under load. Despite its entry-level billing, this Radeon HD 6670 board represents a good choice for upgrading a desktop PC without a big power supply, since it doesn't need an auxiliary input. The GV-R667D3-1GI draws all of the power it needs from a PCI Express slot.

　　

　　Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 Overclocked: GV-R777OC-1GD

　　AMD's Radeon HD 7770 is a powerful sub-$150 piece of hardware, and Gigabyte's GV-R777OC-1GD takes it a step further with a 100 MHz core overclock (to 1100 MHz) and a 125 MHz memory overclock (to 1250 MHz). Like the GV-R667D3-1GI, a 100 mm fan keeps the card cool and quiet under load.

　　

　　Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 Super Overclocked: GV-N580SO-15I

　　With an 855 MHz core and 1025 MHz memory, Gigabyte's GV-N580SO-15I is one of the fastest GeForce GTX 580s-based graphics cards available. Its Windforce 3x cooler delivers excellent thermal performance, helping ensure longevity and quiet operation under overclocked conditions.

　　

　　Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 Overclocked: GV-N670OC-2GD

　　The newest card in this story, GV-N670OC-2GD features Gigabyte's Windforce 3x cooler with what the company calls its Triangle Cool technology (a specialized inclined-fin design that Gigabyte claims lowers air turbulence and increases cooling efficiency). The card's 980 MHz base clock is overclocked by 65 MHz compared to Nvidia's reference spec, and it's rated for around 1058 MHz under GPU Boost.

　　

　　Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Overclocked: GV-R797OC-3GD

　　Gigabyte's GV-R797OC-3GD features a 1 GHz core clock (75 MHz over stock) and 3 GB of RAM. Like the company's specially-tuned GeForce GTX 670, a Windforce 3x cooler equipped with Triangle Cool technology offers better-than-reference acoustics and temperatures. That's particularly important on a Radeon HD 7970 board, since AMD's own cooler is so loud.

　　Testing Notes

　　Although many of these boards ship overclocked from Gigabyte, we configured them to run at their reference speeds in order to represent a greater majority of cards available on the market.

　　With no in-game benchmark tool available to test Guild Wars 2, we created our own sequence for measuring performance. We figured out that the game's Norn starting area was among the most taxing, probably as a result of its lush forest detail. Then, we ran the same pre-set path with Fraps running for 20 seconds. Our results are repeatable, and suffer very little variance.

　　Test System

　　CPU

　　Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 3.3 GHz @ 4.25 GHz , Six Cores, LGA 2011, 15 MB Shared L3 Cache, Hyper-Threading enabled.

　　Motherboard

　　ASRock X79 Extreme9 (LGA 2011) Chipset: Intel X79 Express

　　Networking

　　On-Board Gigabit LAN controller

　　Memory

　　Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T

　　Graphics

　　GeForce 210 1 GB DDR3

　　GeForce GT 440 512 MB GDDR5

　　GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1 GB GDDR5

　　GeForce GTX 460 192-bit 768 MB GDDR5

　　GeForce GTX 580 1.5 GB GDDR5

　　GeForce GTX 670 2 GB GDDR5

　　Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5

　　Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3

　　Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5

　　Radeon HD 6870 1 GB GDDR5

　　Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5

　　Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5

　　Hard Drive
　　Samsung 470-series 256 GB (SSD)
　　Power
　　ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1200W
　　ATX12V, EPS12V
　　Software and Drivers
　　Operating System
　　Microsoft Windows 7 x64, Service Pack1
　　DirectX
　　DirectX 11
　　Graphics Drivers
　　Catalyst 12.7 Beta, Nvidia 301.42 WHQL
　　Benchmarks
　　Guild Wars 2 Beta
　　Norn starting area, Fraps run

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Benchmark Results: Best Performance Preset

　　The game’s Best Performance preset represents our lowest-detail testing, and the litmus test for determining whether entry-level graphics cards can cut through Guild Wars 2's demands at 1920x1080.

　　

　　Guild Wars 2 scales well on low-end hardware. Even the $40 Radeon HD 6450 is able to deliver more than a 30 FPS minimum at 1920x1080. The only graphics card we tested that isn't able to handle this resolution and detail setting is Nvidia's GeForce 210 DDR3. You'd need to use that board at a lower resolution, if you wanted to use it at all.

　　Graphics cards like AMD's Radeon HD 7750 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 550 Ti are considerably overpowered for this level of detail. You'd be much better off stepping them up to the Balanced preset.

　　Benchmark Results: Balanced Preset

　　The medium-detail Balanced preset presents better-looking textures, shadows, and post processing effects—but it still doesn't employ anti-aliasing. More demanding visual have a measurable effect on performance, as indicated by the benchmark results.

　　

　　The Radeon HD 6450 and 6670 DDR3 didn't have a problem on the previous page, but they render this game unplayable using the Balanced quality setting.

　　It takes stepping up to a GeForce GT 440 equipped with fast GDDR5 to handle this detail level at 1280x1024. Of course, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 7750 have no problems averaging more than 60 FPS.

　　

　　Nudging the resolution up to 1680x1050 knocks Nvidia's GeForce GT 440 out of contention, as it falls under 30 FPS. However, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 7750 still have no trouble delivering solid performance.

　　

　　Even at 1920x1080, Guild Wars 2 is plenty playable on the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 7750 using the Balanced preset.

　　Benchmark Results: Best Appearance Preset

　　The Best Appearance preset adds FXAA, with maximum texture, shadow, post-processing, and reflection detail. These benchmarks reveal how mid-range and high-end cards fare when Guild Wars 2 is cranked up as high as it can go.

　　

　　The Radeon HD 7750 and GeForce GTX 550 Ti had no trouble through 1920x1080 at the Balanced preset. However, they're both knocked down to about 30 FPS minimums using the Best Appearance setting. The graphics cards we add to the field scale pretty much as we'd expect.

　　

　　Three of the cards cannot quite manage a minimum of 30 FPS at 1680x1050, but they're close enough that we'd still consider them playable. More than half of our GPUs aren't able to push minimum frame rates higher than 40 FPS at 1680x1050.

　　

　　At 1920x1080, you need at least a Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 560 to use the best-looking graphics preset offered in Guild Wars 2. It's preferable to get smoother performance using the Balanced setting when it comes to slower cards.

　　Cranking our test resolution up to 2560x1600 complicates the story quite a bit.

　　

　　Using a 30" screen and Guild Wars 2's Best Appearance preset causes most graphics cards to choke. Only the top four cards manage to maintain more than 30 FPS throughout the benchmark run. None of the boards we're testing can keep above 40 FPS, including the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670. At its highest detail setting, Guild Wars 2 clearly demands a potent graphics subsystem.

　　Do CPU Frequency And Core Count Matter?

　　We now know how a number of different graphics cards handle Guild Wars 2's various detail presets complemented by a fairly capable platform. But what happens when we pull the rug out from under the GPU with varied processor settings?

　　Using a trio of processor architectures (Intel's Sandy Bridge, AMD's Bulldozer, and a Llano-based APU) we isolated clock rate with quad-core configurations.

　　

　　Sandy Bridge proves itself over and over in gaming workloads. Here, it's able to let our Radeon HD 7970 stretch its legs even at 3 GHz. Overclocking to 4 GHz yields very little extra performance.

　　AMD's dual-module FX-4000-series demonstrates a colossal gain between 3 and 4 GHz, though, telling us that the processor is bottlenecking performance in a big way at lower frequencies.

　　Pushing the Llano-based APU up to 3 GHz (from 2 GHz) is less rewarding, though there is a speed-up to be had. (Ed.: Clearly, it appears that AMD's best shot at catching Sandy Bridge at 3 GHz is a quad-core Bulldozer-based chip at 5 GHz or so. Sorry, couldn't resist).

　　

　　The next experiment involves altering each architecture to determine how many processing cores Guild Wars 2 is able to exploit.

　　Four physical cores appear ideal, based on our results from the Sandy Bridge design. Sandy Bridge-E doesn't seem to introduce any benefit at all. Intel's dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and dual-core Pentium are notably slower, though they still embarrass the eight-core AMD FX at 3 GHz.

　　The six- and eight-core FX processors perform fairly similarly, while the quad-core FX-4000-series is quite a bit slower. Remember, though, that the eight-core chip actually consists of four Bulldozer modules. The six- and four-core parts feature three and two modules, respectively. Each module involves notable resource-sharing, which likely affects performance.

　　Three cores appear optimal on AMD's Llano-based APU. The fourth one yields very little performance gain. The dual-core Llano demonstrates the lowest results in this test.

　　Guild Wars 2 Is Accessible, But Still Very Scalable

　　Guild Wars 2 looks good, even at its lowest detail settings. And it runs smoothly at 1920x1080 on a $40 Radeon HD 6450 using that entry-level preset. Only Nvidia's GeForce 210 can't handle such a combination. Stepping up to the Balanced detail preset, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 7750 are both well-suited to smooth performance 1920x1080.

　　Switching on the Best Appearance option is smooth enough if you're using a Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 560 at 1920x1080. If you game at 2560x1600, however, you need at least a Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 580 to achieve a minimum of 30 FPS.

　　

　　We think all of that is great news for gaming enthusiasts ready to enjoy countless hours in Guild Wars 2 without being forced into an expensive hardware upgrade. We can't help but love games that scale well on a wide range of graphics hardware, giving everyone the chance to play, and then rewarding the folks with high-end machines to push the details even higher.

　　

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　　A Sandy Bridge-based Core i5 is all you need for the best possible experience. However, a Core i3 or Pentium processor will also perform well. Clock rate is particularly important if you're using an FX-based chip from AMD. Take full advantage of those unlocked multipliers to push 3.5 GHz or higher with the FX-8000 and -6000 CPUs, and over 4 GHz with the FX-4000 series if possible. The Llano-based APUs struggle more with this game, presumably because they lack L3 cache. If you have an A8-3870K, the only unlocked model, try to get up above 3.5 GHz with it.

　　
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　　Our time spent playing Guild Wars 2 before the beta closed was far too brief, unfortunately. But the game left us with a favorable impression, and a great sense of anticipation. The dynamic event aspect is engaging, and will likely be very popular with casual gamers.

　　One concern we do have is whether the title's free-form structure proves detrimental when it comes time to connect with other players. An MMO's strength lies in its ability to bring people together in lasting relationships. However, a dynamic events system like the one in Guild Wars 2 may marginalize its relationship-building capability.

　　ArenaNet may have a great solution to this potential drawback that we may not know about yet. The good news is that, like its predecessor seven years ago, Guild Wars 2 requires no monthly fee, and our experience with it thus far suggests it'll be worth its purchase price.

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CPU农企给日到飞起

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