Meant to be Seen

NVIDIA is messing with us. The last WHQL drivers ran Guild Wars 2 quite well. Then the beta version mangled GW2 up completely. Today, the new drivers for the 660 were released as beta drivers for the rest of the cards. THIS beta actually works quite nicely.

The game has been really great stuff in 3D. The character select screen and the dialog videos look horrible but the game itself is quite good. Best of all, the pointer is 3D and gets rendered at depth! I did notice a place where the shadows were just a little bit off. I didn't even notice it until I walked over one and it looked like I was floating.

I'll get an entry into the database after I've done some more playing/research.

Sweet!

Regards,
Neil

And now it's broken again. The shadows are completely mangled. Sheesh!

Patches are coming in fast and furious.

Edit 8/30: And fixed yet again!!

Edit Sept 1: And broken yet again!?! This is getting fishy.

Edit: I've now had it work and not work without having a patch. Something else is going on that's making 3D break.

New info - if you have the NVIDIA drivers set up to 'Always' or 'Only when 3D programs run' then you'll likely have issues starting the game up. The login/startup program is actually kicking the 3D in early and, when the game itself tries to kick in to 3D, it gets messed up and you get an error about initializing 3D and how you should check to see DirectX 9 is installed. It WILL work occasionally but it will break most of the time.

Set your drivers to only start 3D when a full screen 3D application starts and it should work far better. Just remember to switch it back again before doing any 3D in windows (like 3D Vision Live).

(Except that the 3D has been completely mangled again. It was great for a few days, broken for a day, great for a couple of days, and now it has been broken for a couple of days.)

Sigh - never mind. It turns out I just got lucky when I did that. It still gets an error over and over.

Edit Sept 3 - oh boy, I tell ya, some bugs are just EVIL. You know what makes it so the 3D initializes fine? If I open up Internet Explorer and just leave it there when I start the game, the game starts fine. If I close it so I have no windows open, the 3D fails to initialize. So, when I go look up a fix for the problem and try it, the "fix" works because IE is still open. Then I try it the next day with no browser and it fails again. It wasn't the fix fixing the bug, it was the act of looking for it! The philisophical implications are enormous.

I strongly doubt IE is actually doing the fix. It's probably just the act of having any window open.

Greetings, this is my 1st post. <g>

I bought GW2 during the Thanksgiving Holiday (NOV'12) and what I'm seeing is much much different than what you've seen in the past.

There are 3 areas that provide somewhat minor 3D issues:

1st being the before mentioned toon selection screen. Your toon is rendered in 3D while the rest of the screen appears 2D. It looks a little odd and a bit hard on the eyes. This can be improved with depth/convergence settings adjustments. However, this 'issue' (personally) falls into my 'who cares?' bucket as this is more/less a title screen and not even 1% of game play.

2nd being cut scenes. They also appear 'odd'. While annoying this also falls into the same bucket as above for nearly the same reasons - the cut scenes are mostly part of your 'personal story' and are such a small percentage of your screen time.

3rd and finally - the shadows. (as a work-a-round) The shadows need to be set on LOW for this title. Also recommended is setting the water reflections to 'mountans/scenery only' to gain a nice 15fps.

Outside of what is described above, EVERYTHING renders in 3D. Peoples health/name markers, your cursor/mouse and even the full screen MAP! This game is actually BEAUTIFUL in 3D and is easily the best example of 3D gaming done right that I've personally played.

Add in a Helix Mod (when and if it ever comes available) and the shadows issue may get fixed.

The default depth and convergence may not be 'optimum' for everyone. I ended up setting depth to 50% and the convergence so that my toons legs were just behind the HUD when I had the mouse/scroll wheel zoomed in all the way. When I rotate my toon, their arms 'pop out' of the screen. (many plants and flying objects do to now!)

I'd rate this as a Platinum title.

Running at the current DEC 15th game patch level. Nvidia driver set - current - but does not seem to matter as I used v285 drivers in attempts to get 5.1 sound working and did not notice any difference in the display quality.

Rig: i7-2600K/8GB/Win7-64/GTX570SLI/SSD