Thanks for the Steam version Anet!

[Veprovina.4876]

Just wanna show my appreciation for Anet that they did the Steam version.

 

Because, with the Steam version - because of Valve's push towards linux - unofficially, Guild Wars 2 needed to be made sure to work on Linux as well.

After all, Anet couldn't miss the Steam deck demographic. 

But also thank you for allowing us to log in with our anet accounts as well!

Everyone wins now. I can play Guild Wars 2 finally stable on Linux, without lutris and janky script installers (though, lutris isnawesome, just the gw2 script broke a lot) that have to change with almost every update. And new people can discover the game as well.

 

So, thanks Anet! And i hope you keep Linux in mind when doing future updates, making sure it works with proton.

[Sindust.7059]

Yeah, GW2 never seemed to work for me via lutris. But no issues since I could install it via Steam. Been playing like that for over a month now. I don't even boot to windows any more.

[Veprovina.4876]

5 hours ago, Sindust.7059 said:

Yeah, GW2 never seemed to work for me via lutris. But no issues since I could install it via Steam. Been playing like that for over a month now. I don't even boot to windows any more.

Guild Wars 2 was one of the reasons i was tethered to Windows as well!

Now that it works on linux, i think i can finally fully make the switch that i wanted for so long!

And it lowkey works better than on windows lol. AND i can use FSR which i couldn't in windows haha!

It's just a great experience so far.

 

I was on POP!_OS for about a month, and it didn't work great there via Lutris. Broken script that i needed to adjust just to get it to install, and then in game, input lag, low fps... Playable but stretching even my limits of playable which are pretty low, i used to finish games and played them on 25 fps lol.

 

On Manjaro, i couldn't get GW2 to run on Lutris, so i went to Steam version, and well, it just works!

Had to switch to wayland to stop the frameskipping X11 was doing because of some vsync issues, but now it runs better than on windows!

[Sindust.7059]

1 hour ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Had to switch to wayland to stop the frameskipping X11 was doing because of some vsync issues, but now it runs better than on windows!

I'm getting some stuttering too. I'll give this a try.

[Veprovina.4876]

Just now, Sindust.7059 said:

I'm getting some stuttering too. I'll give this a try.

Worked for me. Don't delete X though, while i haven't had any issues with Wayland, i read all over internet that it's the devil or something so, idk, if something breaks under Wayland, you'll still have X to fall back on.

[Saisya.1492]

This is something I have been keeping an incredibly close eye on as well. I am curious as to what type of performance you are seeing in Linux, and with what PC specs?

 

I distro hop quite a bit, and was using an edited fshack lutris installer once the GE one broke with the August GW2 update. Problem was within the last several weeks, another update broke it beyond use, where it was crashing every 60 seconds. So I tried a couple other distro's, newer kernels, and eventually got to a point where it simply wouldn't install via lutris at all anymore, neither with GE or Fshack.

When I was first testing out the performance differences, Steam was stable, but it ran SO MUCH BETTER on lutris. I don't have a high end computer by any stretch, but with the following specs, I was able to maintain 60+ FPS on mostly HIGH settings through Lutris. With Steam, Low settings were a struggle to get to 60 FPS.

 

AMD 5600X

16GB DDR4@3600

500GB M.2 NVME drive

AMD RX6650XT

Running on a 32" 4K 144hz monitor at 4k. (I don't expect to hit that refresh, but prior to the updates, I was easily maintaining over 60 at 4k res.

 

Because of the poor experience I had with Steam and the struggles with Lutris, I ended up going back to Windows. (And am hating life right now from it.) So any benchmarks or real world comparisons you could offer would be great!

 

Also, which distro, kernel, and DE are you all using? Do you see a performance difference from 1 DE to another?

[Smoky.5348]

On 12/26/2022 at 10:58 PM, Veprovina.4876 said:

But also thank you for allowing us to log in with our anet accounts as well!

Wait, did they actually do that properly or do you mean the shortcut command? I'd be surprised they'd change their mind on it after saying for so long they're not doing it.

[Vayne.8563]

9 minutes ago, Smoky.5348 said:

Wait, did they actually do that properly or do you mean the shortcut command? I'd be surprised they'd change their mind on it after saying for so long they're not doing it.

Just the command shortcut. You have to make a couple of changes to boot GW 2 through the steam UI, which I saw on several reviews on steam. Until people figured out how to put the shortcut up so it worked, it wasn't working. now it is. But the two versions are still seperate versions.

 

You can't buy steam updates for GW 2 version or vice versa.

[Smoky.5348]

25 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Just the command shortcut. You have to make a couple of changes to boot GW 2 through the steam UI, which I saw on several reviews on steam. Until people figured out how to put the shortcut up so it worked, it wasn't working. now it is. But the two versions are still seperate versions.

 

You can't buy steam updates for GW 2 version or vice versa.

Ah, I see. So, basically the same as it was last time l checked.

[Vayne.8563]

39 minutes ago, Smoky.5348 said:

Ah, I see. So, basically the same as it was last time l checked.

Yep, I don't really see any way to change it, because anything bought in the steam version costs ANet money. Why would they want existing players to buy on steam when it costs them a percentage of their profits?  

Obviously some people will only use steam and those people will now be able to log into guild wars, and it gives them some exposure and advertising to be there, but at the end of the day, every sale made on steam is giving them less money than sales they make themselves.

[PzTnT.7198]

Ah yes, this was handy when i jumped onto linux (Specifically garuda linux) myself a few months back. Though i ended up moving things to lutris as i couldn't get arcdps to work with proton under steam. But with wine-ge under lutris it works perfectly and runs about as well as it ever did on windows. Its probably possible to get it running under proton in steam as well, but i wasn't really sure how to enable dll features that were missing in the proton versions. 

It does crash after like 5-6 hours of being logged in, but I'm pretty sure that happens on windows as well.

Edited December 28, 2022 by PzTnT.7198

[Sindust.7059]

2 hours ago, PzTnT.7198 said:

i couldn't get arcdps to work with proton under steam

I just run the addon manager via wine (the default prefix on the system, not steam proton) and it takes care of it. Just add a symlink to the folder containing GW2 files of the steam install to a folder within the prefix where you run the addon manager where it would expect to find the game install.

 

12 hours ago, Saisya.1492 said:

I am curious as to what type of performance you are seeing in Linux, and with what PC specs?

Same performance as on windows, but over time as the system runs, the stuttering seems to increase on X. Tried it on wayland now as was suggested here, and the performance degradation seems to be gone. But I can't tell yet if it's just a coincidence, or if wayland was the fix, because it was only one day. One thing that seems to be consistently worse than on windows though is the loading times.

System: Manjaro KDE, R7 1700, RX580, 16GB RAM and game is installed on a SATA SSD.

[PzTnT.7198]

55 minutes ago, Sindust.7059 said:

I just run the addon manager via wine (the default prefix on the system, not steam proton) and it takes care of it. Just add a symlink to the folder containing GW2 files of the steam install to a folder within the prefix where you run the addon manager where it would expect to find the game install.

Ah yes, its not a problem to install it. The problem was that the game instantly crashed when the arcdps dll file was present. I think the dx9 version worked fine though. 

However to be more specific to what needed to be done to fix it its basically to add something called d3d-extras, with the specific part that was needed is "d3dcompiler_47" since the dx11 version arcdps relies on that to run. This was not installed or activated by default in proton but it was included in lutris.

I think you can add that via protontricks, but when i figured it out i had already swapped to lutris. Ill leave it here anyway in case someone in the future finds this post useful.

Edited December 28, 2022 by PzTnT.7198

[Veprovina.4876]

  

16 hours ago, Saisya.1492 said:

This is something I have been keeping an incredibly close eye on as well. I am curious as to what type of performance you are seeing in Linux, and with what PC specs?

My spec is Basically Ryzen 5 5600g with 16 GB RAM. I don't have a GPU.

 

On a 1440p 75hz monitor, with everything on low and subsample enabled, the game runs 30-40 FPS in super busy areas with medium amount models, a bit better with low amount of modes, and 60 pretty much everywhere else. This is about the performance i was getting in Windows 10 as well though there - FSR wasn't available, and now GW2 looks better in linux due to AI upscaling haha! And FSR takes WAY less resources than just running on native resolution, so i'm not disabling subsampling.

 

But bare in mind, this is 1440p resolution, that's a huge amount of pixels! If i had a smaller monitor i'd probably run it on med/high on 720p. So for the simple APU, this is amazing performance! I wasn't getting this much on lutris!

 

16 hours ago, Saisya.1492 said:

I distro hop quite a bit, and was using an edited fshack lutris installer once the GE one broke with the August GW2 update. Problem was within the last several weeks, another update broke it beyond use, where it was crashing every 60 seconds. So I tried a couple other distro's, newer kernels, and eventually got to a point where it simply wouldn't install via lutris at all anymore, neither with GE or Fshack.

When I was first testing out the performance differences, Steam was stable, but it ran SO MUCH BETTER on lutris. I don't have a high end computer by any stretch, but with the following specs, I was able to maintain 60+ FPS on mostly HIGH settings through Lutris. With Steam, Low settings were a struggle to get to 60 FPS.

Yes, the installer script has gotten a bit buggy lately, updates messed it up. I managed to change the script to make it install on Pop!_OS, but it just wouldn't work on Manjaro.

Put this in the launch options for steam:

 

gamemoderun  WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command% -provider Portal

 

(only put gamemoderun in there if you have gamemode installed).

16 hours ago, Saisya.1492 said:

AMD 5600X

16GB DDR4@3600

500GB M.2 NVME drive

AMD RX6650XT

Running on a 32" 4K 144hz monitor at 4k. (I don't expect to hit that refresh, but prior to the updates, I was easily maintaining over 60 at 4k res.

4k 144hz is a bit tough for that GPU card, especially with high settings. Try subsampling, then enable FSR in Steam to upscale it back up, you might get a noticable performance upgrade, and maybe lower the amount of models of other players rendered.

16 hours ago, Saisya.1492 said:

Because of the poor experience I had with Steam and the struggles with Lutris, I ended up going back to Windows. (And am hating life right now from it.) So any benchmarks or real world comparisons you could offer would be great!

 

Also, which distro, kernel, and DE are you all using? Do you see a performance difference from 1 DE to another?

Distro is Manjaro, the latest one, 22.0, KDE Plasma desktop, wayland compositor (this is important - X11 made GW2 skip frames and be unplayable) but with xanmod and latest GE proton, i forget which one was it. I'm using the default kernel now cause of a fresh install, and i'm getting a bit less FPS.

I'll update the kernel later and install Proton GE, maybe see if there's a huge difference, but it shouldn't be on my machine. On beefier gfx cards there might be though.

 

I think your issue was that you were running X11 compositor - i had to switch to wayland because of how X11 handles vsync. It made the game horrible, and turning on vsync in game made it worse. Just disable vsync where you can and try wayland.

 

8 hours ago, Smoky.5348 said:

Wait, did they actually do that properly or do you mean the shortcut command? I'd be surprised they'd change their mind on it after saying for so long they're not doing it.

What @Vayne.8563 said. Maybe wasn't super intentional on their side, but it's still an option that someone decided to keep in, so yes, you can use your Anet account, and i hope they keep it that way in the future. 🙂

 

6 hours ago, PzTnT.7198 said:

Ah yes, this was handy when i jumped onto linux (Specifically garuda linux) myself a few months back. Though i ended up moving things to lutris as i couldn't get arcdps to work with proton under steam. But with wine-ge under lutris it works perfectly and runs about as well as it ever did on windows. Its probably possible to get it running under proton in steam as well, but i wasn't really sure how to enable dll features that were missing in the proton versions. 

It does crash after like 5-6 hours of being logged in, but I'm pretty sure that happens on windows as well.

Last time i used ARcdps a few days ago, it was just a drag and drop inside the folder thing, it just worked... Not sure why it didn't for you though. 😞 Proton also works great on steam, what dll features did you need for GW2? And what for? I'm curious.

BlishHUD and TacO unfortunately don't work as far as i tried, bummer, but not a dealbreaker for me.

 

 

[PzTnT.7198]

18 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Proton also works great on steam, what dll features did you need for GW2? And what for? I'm curious.

As i understand d3dcompiler_47 is the one needed. Its used for the UI stuff of arcdps in dx11 mode as far as i recall. Gw2 itself ran fine under proton but if i installed arcdps it would crash when i launched it if it was in dx11 mode. I suppose proton may have added the d3d-extras stuff which includes d3dcompiler_47 since when i was poking around.

[Veprovina.4876]

5 minutes ago, PzTnT.7198 said:

As i understand d3dcompiler_47 is the one needed. Its used for the UI stuff of arcdps in dx11 mode as far as i recall. Gw2 itself ran fine under proton but if i installed arcdps it would crash when i launched it if it was in dx11 mode. I suppose proton may have added the d3d-extras stuff which includes d3dcompiler_47 since when i was poking around.

I see. Yeah, proton probably added that then.

I did use Proton GE though, and not Steam's, so maybe GE version is needed for arcdps.

[Veprovina.4876]

@Saisya.1492 Ok, just tried GE-Proton7-43 vs Proton experimental, it's noticabely smoother on GE. So definitely use that.

I have to make a snapshot in Timeshift, and compile xanmod, then i'll see if it works any noticabely better.

[Zaraki.5784]

Everything works just fine on windows (which is THE OS worldwide), why would someone hinder himself by using a different OS?

[PzTnT.7198]

3 hours ago, Zaraki.5784 said:

Everything works just fine on windows (which is THE OS worldwide), why would someone hinder himself by using a different OS?

My reason was that i wanted to try something different (And toss windows 11 in the bin) and the tinkering is something i usually find interesting. Lets you learn a /lot/ about how things work. 

[Saisya.1492]

21 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

@Saisya.1492 Ok, just tried GE-Proton7-43 vs Proton experimental, it's noticabely smoother on GE. So definitely use that.

I have to make a snapshot in Timeshift, and compile xanmod, then i'll see if it works any noticabely better.

 

@Veprovina.4876 Just to confirm, running the steam version, or as a non-native (wine/lutris) game through steam?

 

9 hours ago, Zaraki.5784 said:

Everything works just fine on windows (which is THE OS worldwide), why would someone hinder himself by using a different OS?

 

Respectfully, just because they are the dominant OS does not mean they are the best, nor without their flaws. We could go down a rabbit hole debating their differences, benefits, drawbacks, but many before me have already done that, and a quick web search will yield more than enough content in that segment to keep one busy reading/watching for a long time. For me personally, I have many sticking points which keep me trying to stay away from windows, but I'll only mention my top 2:

1. The amount of times Windows Updates have failed and broken my system, forcing me to reinstall from scratch are vastly more than in Linux in the 20 years I have been dabbling with Linux.

2. Telemetry - Despite my turning off everything in Windows, and even editing the registry to keep it off, each update somehow manages to turn a lot of it back on. (You know how they say if a product is free, you are the product? With Windows, it feels like I am "paying to be the product")

Edited December 29, 2022 by Saisya.1492
Grammar and Context

[Veprovina.4876]

@Saisya.1492 Steam version. Running Steam (Native) client, and downloaded the game from steam.

 

This is what's in the launch options:

 

gamemoderun WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command% -provider Portal

 

You need "-provider Portal" line to log in with your Anet account. Or else Steam will treat it as a free account because you haven't bought the expansions on Steam.

[Veprovina.4876]

11 hours ago, Zaraki.5784 said:

Everything works just fine on windows (which is THE OS worldwide), why would someone hinder himself by using a different OS?

Everyone has their reasons. How about letting people choose the OS they want?

Or do we need to bow to our corporate overlords that want to know what i have for breakfast just because "stuff just works" and needs a little tinkering on another OS?

 

Also, debateable how sutff just works, but not going into this in this thread.

Personally, i've had it with Windows spyware - and i'm not a paranoid person, i don't much care on a cookie here and there or whatever, but Windows pushed even my limits.

[Sindust.7059]

10 hours ago, Zaraki.5784 said:

Everything works just fine on windows (which is THE OS worldwide), why would someone hinder himself by using a different OS?

If windows was as good as you say it is, they wouldn't have had to implement such a thing as WSL.

 

And there are plenty of features that just don't exist on windows. As an example of one that would be useful even for regular users is copy-on-write file systems (btrfs, ZFS etc). Microsoft did develop a file system themselves that has similar features (ReFS), but it is only available on windows servers, not on desktop. And the lack of btrfs and ZFS support out of the box makes it very difficult if not impossible to install windows on these file systems. So if you want to protect your data from bit rot, or you want to create snapshots of your system to roll back to later before opening a file you downloaded from a sketchy website, you're out of luck.

 

Also if you want to run something in an isolated environment as software developers often do, you have to use full blown virtual machines with all the drawbacks that they bring in terms of performance and hardware access. In linux you can use things like chroot or docker to run things natively but isolated from the rest of your system. The only way to use those on windows is through WSL, which itself is just a linux VM.

 

Then you also have to consider the workflow. Linux comes with all the tools you need for software development. And the ones it is lacking, you can install like you would install an app via the app store. Go try to find a cross-compiler for RISC-V or ARM64, and see how much work you have to do to just get it running in windows.

 

For these and many other reasons most of the software development is done in linux. And that's what I need it for too. And while dual-booting is an option, I often want to have a break without closing all the work related applications, so that I could continue working after my gaming break. Or as is the case right now, I'm actually running a test on the software I'm working on that needs about 2 hours to complete, and I would like to be able to play GW2 while it's running, which would be impossible if I had to reboot to be able to play.

 

Then there are the philosophical or economic reasons. Some people don't want or can't pay for windows, some have a problem with the tracking, some want more customization, some don't like microsoft's patronizing or pushy approach, and much more. Linux offers solutions to all of the above, and they are by no means a complete list.

 

So as you see, there are plenty of reasons to use linux over windows. You just don't see them if all you ever needed an OS for is browsing the internet and playing video games.

[Veprovina.4876]

2 hours ago, Sindust.7059 said:

browsing the internet

Honestly, i'm having a better experience with linux with just browsing too... 😄

And general use stuff like music, video playback, etc...

 

And of course, there's the added benefit of - i don't have to create an online account just to use my operating system.

Like seriously what the hell were they thinking. I know i'm the product, i've been a product since we all sold our privacy to google and for fancy toys, microsoft followed closely behind since windows 7.

 

But this is just getting out of hand and overly creepy for my comfort so i want to get away from WIndows as fast as possible.

I'm only tehtered to it by few applications still, but i'm already like 90% on my linux desktop rather than Windows.

 

The end goal will of course be, delete windows permanently.

[Khisanth.2948]

On 12/28/2022 at 12:43 PM, Veprovina.4876 said:

I see. Yeah, proton probably added that then.

I did use Proton GE though, and not Steam's, so maybe GE version is needed for arcdps.

GE incorporates winetricks and protonfixes. Winetricks includes fixes for d3dcompiler_33 to 47. So in a way ... yes.

The way the fix is implemented is actually by downloading the Firefox 62.0.3 installer and extracting the dll from it.

Although things go a bit further than that. d3dcompiler_47 is not specified for GW2 which means if it is working fine for you then you are playing some other game which also requires d3dcompiler_47 and does have it listed as a requirement. This can lead to the situation where Proton GE works with arc for you but not someone else.
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/6.1-GE-1  looks like installing another Steam game which requires d3dcompiler_47 and uses the common redistributable should do it as well.

39 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Honestly, i'm having a better experience with linux with just browsing too... 😄

And general use stuff like music, video playback, etc...

 

And of course, there's the added benefit of - i don't have to create an online account just to use my operating system.

There seems to be some fixes for enabling things that would otherwise require running Windows XP so for anyone interested in some older releases that might be another benefit.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Khisanth.2948