Guild Wars 2 Forum

I have had some big issues with "white fog" (everything is in a whitish fog, in caves you don't see further than the whidht of your character), both on my desktop (gt8600 + kernel 3.9.x + nvidia 319.49) and media center (gt8600 + kernel 3.7 + nvidia 310.19).
Yesterday I did some experiments on the media center (as other half used the desktop), tested to add command line arguments when starting gw2 and got two quite different results

-cuda: NPC will be invisible

-dx9single -cuda: white fog almost gone, NPC are visible

-dx9single: excessive amount of fog

The "-dx9single -cuda" made the fog to disappear for me, but a few times you could have hiccups and the map took a while to generate each time you loaded a new section (first the map looks strange, but all the signs are readable, after a minute or two the map looks normal).

I'm a bit thinking of getting myself a gtx650/gtx660, anyone with those two cards who could tell if they are affected by white fog and if the adding -cuda helps them.
Thanks in advance for any replies.

This is a bug in CrossOver which I am currently trying to solve. The bug only happens with the ARB shader backend, which is used on Nvidia cards for performance reasons. If you switch to GLSL the problem will go away, but the game will stutter more when compiling new shaders. To do so, run regedit and create the string value "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/UseGLSL" and set its value to "enabled" (both without the quotes).

If you are unsure how to do any of those steps, just ask and Caron, Andrew or myself will provide more details.

I did try that hack, for me it don't make any difference, I have the same amount of fogginess. Using the -cuda option seem for me do a lot more, but it freezes sometimes for a short moment, but the game is a lot more playable for me when I can see things around me.

The fogginess, is it the same on all cards or there cards which seems to have less/more fog?

Edit: Seems my wife had a lot more issues with the fog, on the desktop we have different X servers, so adding the Dircer3D hack removed a lot more of the fog than it did for me. I haven't yet tried the cuda on hers, to see if it would clear out even more fog.

I found out why the ARB shader backend draws too much fog. It seems that the precision of the EXP instruction isn't good enough. Switching to the slower EX2 makes the fog look the same in ARB and GLSL.

However, I have no idea what is wrong in your case. Can you file a support ticket about the issue? This will make sure we properly track it.

Thanks,
Stefan

Seems I had the hack enabled anyway, just that when I initially tested it, the area may have been quite foggy and didn't give me any visible difference at that point, and then didn't think of it as playing it on another computer, but you still have the same settings when you have your $HOME on a NFS share.

Registry hack together with "-cuda -dx9single" gives me a really nice visual experience. I wish it could be as simple to add command line options in CX as it was in Cedega.

I have to agree with Stefan. Send in a ticket, there shouldn't be any "fogginess" if you do the registry hack. The most I have noticed with the hack is a slight performance hit but that's going to be taken care of pretty soon. What distro are you using? What video card?

Fog with ARB shaders should be fixed in the upcoming CrossOver 13.