Post-Process Effect?

My Guild Wars sometimes achieves 60 fps but usually settles for 30 in missions or explorable areas. I was messing with my options little bit and found out that I can keep 60 fps constantly with all the highest graphic settings as long as I turned Post-Process Effects off.

I looked it up and saw that Post-Process Effects are what enables drunken effects to be shown, but I couldn't find much else.

Can someone tell me what I will be missing if I turned this off for everything I do?

Image-processing techniques can improve the quality and realism of a scene, as well as achieve some specific effects, such as scene-wide blurring. In Direct3D, image processing is usually performed as a postprocess after the rendering is completed. An application first renders its scene onto a texture, then processes the texture with a pixel shader to produce a different image with the enhancement or alteration. The use of pixel shaders makes this operation very efficient, so it can be performed in real time.

Postprocess effects can achieve interesting results particularly when a sequence of one or more postprocesses are applied to the original scene. Four such postprocess effects are included in this sample:

* Blur - Combine a pixel color with surrounding pixel colors to blur the focus.
* Bloom - Magnify bright spots in the image, as well as the area around the bright spots.
* Depth of Field - Blur a pixel based on the pixel's depth or z value. Pixels very far away or very close get blurred.
* Edge Glow - Use object normals to find an object's edge, and then use blur to help create a glow on the edges.


Taken from here

Edition: Thx for asking, you made me learn stuff

For some people, Post process effects can also be painful to the eye, so if you have any complaints playing (And not 23 hours per day + 1 hour pee-break) Then you should try turning it off.

Miska Bow pretty much summed it up. In Guild Wars, the most noticeable effects (to me) are the glow effects (which also seems to wash out the colors a little bit) and a smoothing of edges (less jaggies).

I prefer it off since higher FPS is what I'm looking for, I don't notice the jaggies much anyway, and I like the more saturated colors vs glow.

Also if you care, Post-Process animates the portals more in EoTn (and probably other places too, not sure).

From what I read you are looking to find out why you are getting a max of 60 fps? If not, ignore this

The "Vertical Sync" option is what is making 60 fps the highest you can get not "Post-Process Effects".

As stated by Miska Bow, PPE increases the amount of bloom and lighting effects aswell adding the blurred effects such as Guild Wars version of being totally hammered. This option can have a great impact on your overall performance when playing most areas of Eye of the North or some high quality areas in the other campaigns due to lighting effects used. Note that you may need to enable some form of Anti Aliasing to remove any jagged edges PPE may add, even if its just 2x.

The PPE (post processing effects if you havent realised yet :P) I have described is from other games such as Half Life 2 (and its mods like CSS) and UT3, but I imagine it to work the same. To conclude, "Vertical Sync" is what is maxing your FPS at 60, disable this and your FPS will increase.

Now im off to crack the kettle on for a cuppa tea

Quick EDIT:
Just found this for you mate, may be of interest (didnt check if its outdated sorry).
http://uk.gamespot.com/features/6129...pe=tech&page=2
Its a guide to Guild Wars graphical settings (and other tabs above it for CPU and Memory etc), could be of use

Yeah noticed that now lol must of been summet in my tea, anyways, more info never hurt anyone

No supervillain, that's not what he asked =)
He asked how he could keep his fps from dropping to 30 and if Disabling PPE would help.

Which it does, turn it off and you'll have smoother gameplay :3.

Yeah, the OP was saying his FPS sometimes drops from 60 to 30. VSync will cap your FPS at 60 (or at whatever your monitor's native refresh rate is) - it won't stop it from dropping below that

Thanks for all the answers. I was actually planning on keep this off for good and wondering what graphical features I might be missing out by keeping this turned off. Looks like I won't be seeing too much of those fuzzy screen effects, drunken effects, and illuminated EotN portals.

Nightfall brought with it poison/disease and death effects, and some unique animations for some of the dungeon trap effects (the madness darts I think?). If I remember correctly, they mainly just recolor the screen and make it blurry/shakey.

I have a question myself about this.

Does it effect the animations of skills, or anything that you should be taking notice of in PvP anyway, or just the extra things like portal animations, small effects such as being drunk and traps being set off?

@ Tyla
You may see slight changes to the enviroments but nothing too fancy because they didnt make the PvP areas :O style xD.
I dont think skills are affected by PPE due to them having a set animation that isnt affected by lighting. Weapon spells and avatars may have a slight change, but I doubt it.