Guild Wars 2: Your Graphics Card And CPU Performance Guide
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.
Image Quality And Settings
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.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Current page: Image Quality And Settings
Prev Page Guild Wars 2 Is Here. How Does It Run? Next Page Test System And Graphics Hardware-
haplo602 get your graphs and test setup to match:Reply
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 ... -
rdc85 I'm wonder how my pII x4 955BE will perform, there none in the chart...Reply
Anyone know? at stock speed and at 3.8 O.C.... -
EzioAs Interesting. The less-than-$100-without-external-power-connector Radeon 7750 is a balance card providing appealing visual while still runs good framerates at 1080p. I imagined if you tinker with the Best Appearance preset a little bit you can get better image quality without framerates dropping below 30. I mean let's face it, who plays on their PC without tinkering the settings here and there, that's just stupid.Reply
Great review as always! Really appreciate it -
stingstang I'm disappointed that this neglects the post processing bar when determining if the best appearance setting is enabled when taking in to account processing ability. I have an fx4100 and an hd 7950. How will that do at high grahhics settings?Reply
Duh, we want to know this stuff. -
EzioAs 9536678 said:get your graphs and test setup to match:
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 -
serhat359 stingstangI'm disappointed that this neglects the post processing bar when determining if the best appearance setting is enabled when taking in to account processing ability. I have an fx4100 and an hd 7950. How will that do at high grahhics settings?Duh, we want to know this stuff.It will be cpu limited, you'll get around 35-40fpsReply -
tomfreak Guild wars 2 min system requirements is Core 2 Duo 2.0 Geforce 7800, I would like u to test base on that too.Reply