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.

- Guild Wars 2 Is Here. How Does It Run?
- Image Quality And Settings
- Test System And Graphics Hardware
- Benchmark Results: Best Performance Preset
- Benchmark Results: Balanced Preset
- Benchmark Results: Best Appearance Preset
- Do CPU Frequency And Core Count Matter?
- Guild Wars 2 Is Accessible, But Still Very Scalable

Great review as always! Really appreciate it
intel has moved on from their core2 line, and came out with higher preforming parts, amd has moved from athlon and phenom line to... a new architecture, i dont know if they match the old one yet or not.
but when you are doing a cpu test on a game like this where its very scaleable, it would be nice to see the core 2 dual and quad, also a phenom dual tri and quad core (from what i understand athlon and phenom for most gaming scenarios are the same) because many of us have the old dual core, and quad core cpus, and dont feel the need to upgrade because its just not nessassary for normal computer use yet.
Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5
Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3
Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5
where's the 6850 in the graphs ? There's a 6870 instead ...
Anyone know? at stock speed and at 3.8 O.C....
Great review as always! Really appreciate it
Duh, we want to know this stuff.
Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5
Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3
Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5
where's the 6850 in the graphs ? There's a 6870 instead ...
Although it's probably a typo, there's probably no need to use the 6850 as well since the 7770 should perform similar
It will be cpu limited, you'll get around 35-40fps
gpu wise, the gt version of the 7800 will perform about the same level as the 6450 in question. a low end core 2 duo will be on the lower end of the cpu chart.
Also DX9, are they serious? THIS IS 2012. DX10 is 6 years old. Get with it already and learn to code a game engine. Its not like this is a multi-platform game.
the 650m will perform similarish to the 7750 in question
being dx9, it allows users who still use windows XP to play without someone creating a mod or use the directx hack to force xp to run it. I mean skyrim also runs on DX9
Thats why I really hope that piledriver/steamroller pulls through.
That really makes you wander, if games/programs really know to put Bulldozer to work. I think it just sits there, idling at least 50% of processor raw power.
intel has moved on from their core2 line, and came out with higher preforming parts, amd has moved from athlon and phenom line to... a new architecture, i dont know if they match the old one yet or not.
but when you are doing a cpu test on a game like this where its very scaleable, it would be nice to see the core 2 dual and quad, also a phenom dual tri and quad core (from what i understand athlon and phenom for most gaming scenarios are the same) because many of us have the old dual core, and quad core cpus, and dont feel the need to upgrade because its just not nessassary for normal computer use yet.