More News for Upcoming Beta Weekend

[RoyHarmon]

I have to repeat what I have said before: During the second press beta I could attend as part of the GWO team, the game ran smoothly at all times on high GFX settings, even when in a DE in Svanir's Dome with about 15 to 20 people blasting of skills and moving about.
At the first BWE it was pretty OK in PvE, but bad in WvW - during the one hour of Stress Test Friday it was almost unplayable on medium settings when there were a few people around.

I would also like to note that while many people reported an improvement in performance during the last stress test, I saw no change whatsoever. This doesn't surprise me, since they had made no mention of optimization for the stress test--in fact, they said the build was the same, with only some back-end changes.

I guess we'll see what happens this weekend, but I don't expect much until they tell us they changed something. Even the leaked notes said little about performance optimization.

[Alaris]

Double the server probably means twice as many people online with the same lag.

Aside for some disconnects, I had very little lag, I was impressed by how well the beta 1 and press beta went.

[sorudo]

this BWE is not just "search the bugs/glitches" but also "stress the servers at full power", they do need to be ready for launch so it's better to overestimate the player-base then underestimate it.

[Domitilde]

Not only that, but GPU floating point performance is at least an order of magnitude faster than a general purpose CPU. Even if all 4 cores are used a CPU won't come close to a GPU in FLOPS. A midrange GPU like the GTX 560 gets around 1000 GFLOPS while top of the line Intel i7 runs around 100 GFLOPS.

-T

I think you're so smart, don't I?
Hmm, did I write that correctly?

[djacob]

Hmm, just opened guild wars 2 to see how much it needed to patch... so it does 4mb on initial load, then 1mb... and all of a sudden I'm downloading all 86k files. At least it's no longer saying that it's for a stress test. So, does that mean everyone's going to have to redownload everything again? If so, hope this helps others remember to patch well in advance.

[Gorani]

Hmm, just opened guild wars 2 to see how much it needed to patch... so it does 4mb on initial load, then 1mb... and all of a sudden I'm downloading all 86k files. At least it's no longer saying that it's for a stress test. So, does that mean everyone's going to have to redownload everything again? If so, hope this helps others remember to patch well in advance.

I did that late yesterday evening and it looks like it downloaded a whole new DAT file of 16 gigs over night.

[Alaris]

Woah, I hope not. My internet provide won't be happy with big downloads like this.

[Gorani]

It's downloading a new batch of 6.5k files right now.... (~700mb)

and patching again ... this time it wiped the previous settings I had made for the GFX card and set me back to German language automatically.

Client 14,394 right now (I think the "Animation" tab in the options is new?)

[Shrandar]

It's downloading a new batch of 6.5k files right now.... (~700mb)

and patching again ... this time it wiped the previous settings I had made for the GFX card and set me back to German language automatically.

Client 14,394 right now (I think the "Animation" tab in the options is new?)

Hmm yes I cant remember having seen that one before either, wonder if it has something to do with the spell effects?

[Gorani]

Hmm yes I cant remember having seen that one before either, wonder if it has something to do with the spell effects?

Could also be the animations of the characters during cut scenes. I experienced an increased fan speed activity on my GTX275 (?) when watching longer cut scenes, e.g. at character creation. As they are not pre-rendered, they might put some heavy load on the GFX card which you can reduce with that option?

Too bad they always say "look at out forums" when there are no answers there....