Throughout the Beta Weekend Events run by Guild Wars 2 developers as the launch approaches, users have seen fluctuating performance. The issues were due to the game being strictly CPU-bound, though ArenaNet says performance is improving.

Bill Freist, a Quality Assurance tester at ArenaNet, focuses on "gathering information from you, the players, about performance and compatibility issues" according to his blog post. He also makes sure the programming team knows how to replicate, and fix, issues quickly.

"Guild Wars 2 engine programmers have made major client-side and back-end improvements over the past couple of months, including several different kinds of optimization that have led to performance gains," Freist added. Apparently Guild Wars "has received a massive amount of optimization," probably improving performance for players seeing issues previously. Mobilenapps.com played the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Events and the latest stress tests, and performance is smooth on a Core i5 processor and Radeon HD6850 graphics card.

Freist published a chart showing how different driver versions can increase performance, from around 45 to 75 frames-per-second in extreme cases. Decreasing the shader quality in-game may also increase performance. Also published is a chart collecting cards from users running a Core i5 processor, and the performance in terms of FPS measurements. Performance fluctuated from the mid-20s to mid-70s.

"If you find yourself suffering from poor performance and nothing in our Knowledge base resolves the issue, open a support ticket and provide our Support Team with the appropriate information," Freist said to users. The Knowledge Base is basically a frequently asked questions hub for issues with Guild Wars 2. He added that optimizations will continue after launch.

Guild Wars 2 has been touted as a rival to World of Warcraft, potentially taking a quarter of its subcriptions.

Guild Wars 2 launches on August 28, 2012, though users who pre-purchased the title have access to the game from August 25. ArenaNet ran a 4-hour stress test from Noon PDT Aug. 21, and it would not be a surprise to see another stress test on Thursday.