Guild Wars 2: ‘Upgrading to DirectX11 is the first step toward being able to do more shiny things’

If the Revenant, Warrior, and Elementalist aren’t your Cup of Light-Roasted Coffee, then next week’s Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons beta round might not spark your attention. But not so fast: There’s more to the beta than just the new elite specs. As promised, ArenaNet is also going to run the DirectX 11 beta the same week, beginning on September 21st.

“Client performance is a priority for us, and we want everyone to be able to play with the highest possible framerate,” ArenaNet’s James Fulop explains. “We pinpointed that sometimes the game could stall waiting for rendering work to complete. Guild Wars 2 has been live for nine years now and implementing some DirectX11-dependent features can help the game continue to look beautiful over time. DirectX11 also offers some modern technology options that aren’t available in DirectX9. Upgrading to DirectX11 is the first step toward being able to do more shiny things. After careful research we decided to integrate the open source rendering library BGFX into Guild Wars 2. BGFX is well-written and supports various graphics backends and is already used in many games industry-wide.”

Fulop’s dev blog is pretty technical, so the engineers and graphics snobs in our follows will want to go read the whole thing, but the short version is that the upgrade will make the game strong and pretty. To test out the changes, you’ll need to log in, opt-in in the graphics options menu, and restart the game come September 21st.