DXVK - The easiest way to use DXVK to render the game (no addons necessary)

Background:

I started GW2 a few days ago after a long hiatus and noticed a general lack of "smoothness" when panning the camera around, with the game hitching quite badly despite the game running between 225-250 FPS. I've played GW2 on Linux in the past using DXVK to translate the DX11 API calls to Vulkan, and remembered it was quite a bit smoother than what I was experiencing on Windows 11 using native DX11. This led me to start exploring if I could use DXVK on Windows just like I do on Linux, as I've heard that the DX11 Radeon drivers can be quite bad, with the Radeon Vulkan drivers are quite good in comparison. The answer is, yes you can and it's stupid simple!

Following this awesome guide, I got DXVK 2.5 working perfectly on Windows 11, but I was a bit turned away by the need to install an addon loader, two separate addons, and then having the addons be out-of-date (and confusingly still referencing DX9, even though DX9 doesn't exist in the game anymore). So I started looking into how to run the game using DXVK in the easiest way possible, without the need for all of the addons. It turns out it was indeed incredibly easy to do, with only needing to copy+paste two specific .dll files into the root directory of your GW2 directory. Likewise, removing DXVK is just as simple, with only needing to delete these two files from the root of the GW2 directory.

Installation:

1. Download DXVK 2.5 (or whichever is the latest when you're reading this) from this GitHub repo. Note: I used the regular DXVK build, not the "dxvk-native" build.
2. Extract the .tar.gz file somewhere, and inside if you should see a folder named "x64".
3. Inside the "x64" folder, copy + paste two files into the root of the Guild Wars 2 directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2)
   • d3d11.dll
   • dxgi.dll
4. Start up the game.

If these instructions worked and DXVK is being used, you should noticed a couple of new log files get created in your Guild Wars 2 directory, Gw2-64_dxgi.log and Gw2-64_d3d11.log*.*

Uninstallation:

1. Simply delete d3d11.dll and dxgi.dll from your root directory (and the two associated .log files if you want to as well.)
2. Start up the game.

Initial Observations:

• Immediately when loading in with DXVK, the game feels smoother from frame to frame. Yes, there is a bit of hitching initially as the vulkan cache populates, but after a short amount of time all of the stuttering disappears completely. This is unlike using native DX11 which would hitch constantly when panning the camera back and forth.
• My raw FPS seems to be nearly exactly the same, which is neither good nor bad. It just means that DXVK isn't performaning any 'worse' than native DX11, but the lack of stuttering is wonderful and makes it all worth it.

Disclaimers:

• My testing was done using Windows 11 24H2, an AMD 5800x3D, 32GB of RAM, and a Radeon 7900XT on the 24.10.1 Adrenalin Drivers.

• I am using Windows 11 with a Radeon 7900XT GPU. I have no idea if these instructions apply to Nvidia as well, but I would suspect they do.

• For people using Reshade, I don't really know what other steps you would need to get it to work with DXVK. Maybe someone who uses Reshade can investigate that and report back.

Cheers,