Ok, let's be honest. Guild Wars 2 on maximized settings looks good but some areas are just a little outdated.
There is no way to increase the size of textures or the ammount of polygons, but there are several ways to do some post processing effects. The answer? Reshade.
tIt's a pretty light-weight addon to your Guild Wars 2 client that allows you to sharpen, blur, color grade to the game. There are alot (ALOT) of different shaders to use that load up when guild wars does. -Let's get started. First. Download Reshade from the designated site: https://reshade.me/ Watch this video for a fancy preset guide: (17) Guild Wars 2 - ReShade for DirectX 11 Version - Settings, Migration - YouTube
Tip: keep in mind you need to have a decent graphics card and don't use too many shaders or the loading time of the game will be very slow.
There is also an option for Nvidia users. Press Alt-Z to open the ingame overlay (must have Geforce Experience client) and go to Game filter, add fiddle arround with all the options and finetune them to your liking! Nvidia doesn't show as many shaders as Reshade does but is more stable and high performance.
Personally I actually use both Reshade and Geforce Experience, on DX11 and max ingame graphics settings. "Note that unfortunately you need to use some hooks to make some shaders work like 'Depth-Blur' and 'PPAO' (ambient occlusion)". I've used alot of things like GemFX and Reshade customized pipelines made for other games like Assasins Creed. After fiddling alot and having performance issues I went back to Reshade and GForce experience. I use shaders like sharpening, Sharpening +, Brightness and contrast, Vibrancy and exposure,
and I keep my settings to minimal changes, just a tiny bit of sharpening already really makes the game bloom.
- To get depth blur and PPAO to work you need this proxy guide: GitHub - Serfrost/ReShade-GW2: Modifications to ReShade to better facilitate D912Pxy & Guild Wars 2
Read carefully and take your time. There's no rushing this.
Note: You will fail and need to redo the whole thing first time most likely. This is a procces of 'trial and error'.
Good luck and enjoy better graphics!