Guild Wars 2 graphics settings analysed

One of the draw cards which is being flaunted for Guild Wars 2 is that it’s a very pretty game, both in terms of art and world design, as well as the engine’s pure rendering finesse.

Our media invites for the closed beta obviously got lost in the electronic ether, but luckily PC Gamer has posted a bunch of interesting insights about the game, most recently taking a close look at its various graphics settings and how the performance scales between them.

One thing we noticed immediately in the video demonstration is that it is possible to adjust the game’s graphics settings on the fly, no restart or even loading screen required. Throughout the demo PC gamer was able to switch between graphics settings without even stopping the game. This is a feature which should make it a lot easier for gamers to tweak the game settings to perfectly accommodate their PC’s performance potential.

In its beta form, the game has pre-set options, including “best performance”, “balance”, and “best appearance”. These options are obviously in place for gamers who simply want to get on with the game and not spend too much time tweaking the settings.

In the game’s current form, the anti-aliasing options do not make a huge difference to the way things look. This is apparent in the video and was also noted by the PC Gamer staff. In contrast, the terrain options make a very noticeable difference to the look of the game. The game is also capable of rendering beautiful shadows and reflections when these options are enabled.

Currently the high-resolution character textures do not seem to have been implemented, and depth of field does not seem to be working either. Despite this, with high settings enabled, the world is beautifully detailed and the textures rich and vibrant.

The game’s auto-detect option seems a bit conservative, taking the PC Gamer test rig (AMD 3.2GHz 6 core CPU, 8 GB RAM, HD 6970) and setting most of the graphics options to medium or low. PC Gamer did note, however, that the test rig was able to run the game comfortably on all settings.