Can you spot the difference?

Below are 2 nearly identical view of ascalon city, notice any different?












You'll notice that one of the tent in the 2nd picture is blured. To be exact, it's not 3D but a low res rendering of the 3D object. I am not sure if it's my video card or GuildWars doing the 'optimizations' which caused this undesirable side-effect. the 2 pictures are taken in the same game session, no twiddling of graphics settings, I just merely moved my avatar forward/backwards (and hence the view) by a bit to trigger the change. This 'optimization' is to reduce the number of polygons the video card has to draw by subsituting 3D objects that are far away into a 2D rendered drawing of the object. but the annoying thing is that it seem to render objects that are not that far away on some occasions.

tell me, is this a graphics rendering bug or it's because my video card cant handle all the polygons? I use a ati X700 256meg video card which i run in 1280x1024 with 2x AA.

your video card is perfectly capable of handling the game. It might be the ATI SmartShader...which is a technology ATI has created to accelerate Pixel and Vertex Shaders. Because of this...the driver is very very important and may be the reason you are experiencing the problem. Have you made certain your drivers are up to date? and/or thought about a roll-back?


on a side not: you shouldn't have purchased an ATI card....but updating your drivers will most likely fix it...I wouldn't be surprised if the driver was corrupt.

I can see the difference but really if you hadn't asked me to look and compare I'd have never noticed. I agree with Algren, check your drivers.

It isn't a ATI thing. nVidia cards do it too. I notice it a lot on the last mission, where it is VERY noticeable on the singed trees. It's just a non editable setting for the draw distance of objects. My guess is it is tied to a LOT of things, like other players.

I've noticed sometimes Guild Wars lags on the rendering, I would be running in an Instance and suddenly there would a lot more background is if it all got rendered at once.

Also, in Tribes Vengeance, there is a part of a map where you go over a bunch of rocks, when you close up, sometimes you can see the game render the rocks so they have more detail, since you could not see the detail from far away.

Call it a glitch, or what have you, but it's nothing to be worried about.

that's not a glitch...thats how video cards work. They render images closest to your perspective first and then work their way out...it's completely normal.


as far as nVidia cards doing what the OP is suggesting...I've never experienced it...though that doesn't mean it isn't possible

I have the exact same card and haven't noticed this. Thanks a lot lol! Now I'll be lookin for it.

mmm.... same card. Maybe I'll try running in that rez as I've been using 1024 X 768 which is the default the game gave me.

he's most likely experiencing the problem for two reason...corrupt drivers...or he's running at a resolution higher than it handle...if you bump your res up and start noticing it post back here as that will be the reason why.

This is a technology widely used in the Matrix game from a couple of years back. I don't know that they developed it but they certainly popularized it. Half Life 2 alos uses this technolgy to great effectiveness.

As stated it's not at all in the video card because a video card would not have the ability to substitue a lower resolution version of an existing in map item. Those tents are objects, much like NPCs, placed in maps and just like all the characters and objects in Guild Wars they have progressive versions. View that tent (or player or tree or whatever) at 100 yards and you get low res/low poly, at 50 it substitues a slightly higher res version, and finally at 10 yards you're seeing the fully textured and rendered 3d model in all it's high poly glory.

As I said, the Martix game with the Reloaded plot tie-in used this technology on it's player models so that one could go from far away (low poly model) to zoomed right in (high poly model) for cut scenes without needing to do any pre-rendering. The game just knows at what distance to sub in the more crisp model and at that particular spot you just happen to be on the border and your forward and back movement left the game confused as to which model was appropriate.

Again, this is not a video card or driver issue but simply a trick used by ALL modern games that show large wide open areas or need high poly player models for zoomed in cut scenes. Older 3d games never showed large open areas in which you could look straight from one end to the other because the concept of this trick had not been discovered (think Quake 2 and the Original Half Life). You actually nailed it in your post, look at the drop in Tri's, that's because that's the low poly tent being subbed in, as for the accidental rendering of closer objects as low poly or 2d... it happens. Many times the game is so busy drawing the other polys (landscape, other players, etc.) that it just simply pops in a lower res version of a less important object to speed up processing.