Playing Guild Wars 2 on Linux - Performance optimizations and more.

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

Hello Linux Gamers,

This package aims to provide an easy way to play Guild Wars 2 on Linux without having you jump through hoops. It's completely portable and it comes with many performance tweaks ready for use.

Technical Details:This version of Wine has been custom built from source using a Debian 9 base package and has also been tested to work on Ubuntu 16.04 (and derivatives such as Mint) as well as newer versions of these distros, it may also work on other distros such as Arch and OpenSuSe.

Installation Tutorial:

Note to existing Linux users or migrating Windows ones: If you'd like to use your existing game data without re-downloading everything, let the setup finish normally and at the end there are notes explaining how to do it.

Changelogs: All updates of this package can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kG0HzKR6-LHqDEgDjsceLlk3TGMiLPMOEN5CVYa9vgQ

Note to Intel HD users: Vulkan on Intel HD GPU's is mainly supported on 5th Generation CPU's and newer (for example the i3-5005U).

 

---

Download Links:

• Package: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pUA3WQsfQN4G_BLaNGlPbAkolF2ArRSS - MD5: 00c66cef81a24cecf59a9f0dd0c8c0f5

 

---

 

Troubleshooting:

If the game is crashing or freezing randomly, chances are that your system's maximum open file limit is too low. In order to fix this, open "/etc/security/limits.conf" in a text editor (must be ran as sudo) and then edit the hard + soft lines as shown in the pic below:https://i.imgur.com/xk4xJ6o.jpg When you're done save the file and reboot your system. In some distros these lines may not be present at all, in such a case you have to add them in manually as shown in the picture.

Alternative solution - If the above doesn't work, don't revert those changes, instead try this:

• (with sudo) In a text editor open up the 2 files '/etc/systemd/system.conf' and '/etc/systemd/user.conf'
• Find the line named #DefaultLimitNOFILE= and change it to DefaultLimitNOFILE=1048576 (Both files have this entry). It's Important that the # symbol is removed otherwise the function/value won't have any effect.
• Reboot.

To verify if your changes have been applied successfully in terminal run ulimit -Hn and ulimit -Sn if they both print '1048576' then you should be good to go. Depending on the configuration of some distros, solution 2 may take precedence over the settings from solution 1.

 

Known Issues:

- No text in GW2 Launcher: On some distros, the GW2 launcher may appear without any text. This is normally caused by a missing 'libfreetype6' package.

- Launcher Window Freezing: In some cases the launcher window may freeze, enabling Wine's Virtual Desktop which may work around this issue. You can set a Virtual Desktop by launcher the 'wine_settings.sh' file.

 

Any other Issues:For any other issues you encounter not covered above, please run the 'debug.sh' file in a terminal and post the contents here, uploading screenshot also helps a great deal to identify the issues.

Credits: I would like to say thanks to everyone for the contributions and feedback 🙂

 

Edited July 10 by ArmoredVehicle.2849

[jbrother.1340]

I have been running GW2 in linux for a couple years now and must just be lucky to have the right set of older gear.

I get good performance on an old phenom II deneb. I don't get giant FPS but I don't expect to either. I get around 30 most places and that is fine. I have no issue with the parts of the game that I play.

Although doric leather farm is like a slide show for me if I go there and 50 people are there :) Somehow I still can farm it lol.

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

The wine-pba patches make much better use of the CPU, GPU and even memory. In some cases you won't get a higher fps, instead your framerate will remain smooth and not plummit from 30 to 3 at the sign of action, that was something that really bothered me but now it's history.

Tonight I've played in the new area (and PoF in general) the game was pulling a smooth average of 40-48 fps, which is pretty good considering the expansion maps are a bit more demanding and lots of players are checking out the new area.

[dixi.1483]

I have to confirm that these patches do bring performance boosts.It is noticeable on my T430 with an i5-3632QM and HD4000 at 1920x1080. Frame rate is much more stable and somewhat higher. I have only tested it in low-intensive areas now, but I will do more testing as time goes by. I will try it on an X230 as well.

[dixi.1483]

I will also use this thread to plug our guild for users of unix-like operating systems - [unix] Penguins And The Like.I thought it would be nice if players had an active channel to ask for help with Guild Wars 2 on linux. If you wish to join, let me know and I will send you an invite.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

well, I am using d3d9 patched wine for some time on amd hardware. And with the exception of wvw performance is mostly fine.

[jbrother.1340]

@"dixi.1483" said:I have to confirm that these patches do bring performance boosts.It is noticeable on my T430 with an i5-3632QM and HD4000 at 1920x1080. Frame rate is much more stable and somewhat higher. I have only tested it in low-intensive areas now, but I will do more testing as time goes by. I will try it on an X230 as well.

x230 so tiny. I would go blind playing on that.

It runs great on T460p. We have tons of them at work and I "borrowed" one and tested and it runs pretty well overall.

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

Just to keep you people up to date. This project moves slow by nature, sometimes new Wine versions and patches cause regressions, making the game worse, so no update doesn't mean the project is dead :-)

Today I gave a test run with Wine 3.3 + Staging + PBA, the performance was slower than the current build based on Wine 2.21.

[dixi.1483]

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 said:Today I gave a test run with Wine 3.3 + Staging + PBA, the performance was slower than the current build based on Wine 2.21.

I have tested wine-2.21 on both T430 and X230. Performance increase is very very noticeable. We are able to play PvP without the game freezing for a few seconds and we do not get average of 20fps anymore. My T430 can sit around 40-50fps (small fights) on minimal settings with native sampling at 1920x1080. Interestingly, lowering the resolution does not increase performance at all. Should I build and test the new version as well?

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

@dixi.1483 said:

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 said:Today I gave a test run with Wine 3.3 + Staging + PBA, the performance was slower than the current build based on Wine 2.21.

I have tested

wine-2.21

on both T430 and X230. Performance increase is very very noticeable. We are able to play PvP without the game freezing for a few seconds and we do not get average of 20fps anymore. My T430 can sit around 40-50fps (small fights) on minimal settings with native sampling at 1920x1080. Interestingly, lowering the resolution does not increase performance at all. Should I build and test the new version as well?

If you can build and test it that would be great, can you give me your full specs on that T430 + Which version of Mesa are you running? 40+ fps is already more than I'm getting on my own laptop. :D

[ladydemoriel.4658]

My setup right now is a Linux Mint 18 box, running Ryzen 7 1700 (overclocked mildly to 3.6 with 3200 memory). I am running Guild Wars 2 through Lutris --- thought i would try that out instead of PlayOnLinux.i tried both the pba-2.21 and pba-3.3 versions. In PvE content, i did not have as large a FPS rate as i did with the staging-2.0 (although now staging-2.0 is suspect to time-outs and crashes for me). I did not test pba-3-3 in WvW yet. I did test pba-2.21 and did see very good results in WvW. Though my fps hovered around 20-30, i did not experience any extreme lag in very large zerg fights (although i did stay at range to minimize that). My settings were probably much higher than the OP used (antialiasing set to High FX, Character Model Limit set to medium at last test). Ran well in small scale fighting with no issues whatsoever. I will try the pba-3.3 hopefully this weekend and report my findings.

[jbrother.1340]

@dixi.1483 said:

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 said:Today I gave a test run with Wine 3.3 + Staging + PBA, the performance was slower than the current build based on Wine 2.21.

I have tested

wine-2.21

on both T430 and X230. Performance increase is very very noticeable. We are able to play PvP without the game freezing for a few seconds and we do not get average of 20fps anymore. My T430 can sit around 40-50fps (small fights) on minimal settings with native sampling at 1920x1080. Interestingly, lowering the resolution does not increase performance at all. Should I build and test the new version as well?

How old is the T430 you are using? I can get these things dirt cheap and my current laptop is suck and plays it bad.

How much ram are you using, is it maxed out?

What distro are you running on it? I am just curious.

[jbrother.1340]

@"ladydemoriel.4658" said:My setup right now is a Linux Mint 18 box, running Ryzen 7 1700 (overclocked mildly to 3.6 with 3200 memory). I am running Guild Wars 2 through Lutris --- thought i would try that out instead of PlayOnLinux.i tried both the pba-2.21 and pba-3.3 versions. In PvE content, i did not have as large a FPS rate as i did with the staging-2.0 (although now staging-2.0 is suspect to time-outs and crashes for me). I did not test pba-3-3 in WvW yet. I did test pba-2.21 and did see very good results in WvW. Though my fps hovered around 20-30, i did not experience any extreme lag in very large zerg fights (although i did stay at range to minimize that). My settings were probably much higher than the OP used (antialiasing set to High FX, Character Model Limit set to medium at last test). Ran well in small scale fighting with no issues whatsoever. I will try the pba-3.3 hopefully this weekend and report my findings.

I found I had issues with Lutris when testing the various ways to get windows stuff going in linux. I found that I had the same performance using straight wine cli style and PlayOnLinux. Granted my performance is not great overall as I am playing on some fairly old PC parts here but it works. It actually works equal to my tests with windows 7 on this same hardware and overall I would say "better" because I would rather have someone slapping my face with a dead fish than use windows.

[Volkie.7301]

I'm currently on KDE Neon LTS 5.12Using Lutris for playing Gw2. I found Lutris to be awesome because you can easily menage wine version without installing wine to your PC ( it all happens inside of Lutris ).I've been paying Gw2 on wine-pba-2.21 with "-dx9single" argument from wine. ( without -dx9single argument, there is 10+ seconds more loading time ).I've got better fps in group events and smoother experience in game which is why I play the game even more now :astonished:PC specs:CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 1300x ( 4 cores ) 3.5 Ghz with 8Gb of RAMGPU: Gainward GeForce® GTX 650 with 1024Mb GDDR5 memorySSD: Kingston 120Gb

I've tried new release of wine-pba-3.3 but it's not as good as 2.21 one.

[Malediktus.9250]

Seems like a waste to buy good hardware just to play the game on Linux at garbage settings

On Windows a 10 year old GPU will play the game at better settings

[dixi.1483]

@jbrother.1340 said:How old is the T430 you are using? I can get these things dirt cheap and my current laptop is suck and plays it bad.The xx30 series has been produced around 2012 I think. I actually have two of them, one of which has a quad core CPU (i7-3632QM) and other has stock i5-3320M. I also have an i5-3360M to test with, but there is not much difference between them. One of them has Coreboot flashed with Intel Management Engine disabled. I have a Full HD modification as well as the classic keyboard mod. It makes the most useful machine you can get today, in my opinion.

The game runs perfectly well on both machines, modded and stock.

How much ram are you using, is it maxed out?8GB. Theoretical maximum is 16GB as far as I know.

What distro are you running on it? I am just curious.I am currently using ArchLinux.

[Volkie.7301]

@Malediktus.9250 said:Seems like a waste to buy good hardware just to play the game on Linux at garbage settings

On Windows a 10 year old GPU will play the game at better settings

I bought a few new things for my PC just so I can keep with technology and to be in peace for a next 5 years.Comparing Linux and Windows for gaming doesn't really make sense because games will mostly always run better on Windows for that matter.As a daily PC user, it makes no sense for me to use Windows just so I can play 1 game that I own and play in my free time.P.S. don't be afraid of terminal , it doesn't bite :smirk:

[Malediktus.9250]

Why not just use multiboot then if you like Linux so much? Surely as a daily PC user that would make a lot of sense

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

@Malediktus.9250 said:Why not just use multiboot then if you like Linux so much? Surely as a daily PC user that would make a lot of senseMultibooting to play a Windows game on Linux is old and not very practical. With KVM/QEMU (A native Linux Virtual Machine) you can install Windows in it and expose your real graphics card (PCI Passthrough) to the VM making games playable at about 95% the performance compared to a fully booted Windows.

[Malediktus.9250]

To each their own I guess. But 5% performance is 5% performance. But on the other hand I am a person who disabled Meltdown/Spectre fixes and uses no anti virus because that costs performance :PAnd installing Windows in a VM does not seem that much more practical than multiboot to me. Might as well use Linux in a VM on Windows.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

why putting the good system in the vm, just to play a game on a bad system, if you can put the good system on the hardware and the bad system only used for one game in a vm?

And face it, windows is bad. Really, really bad. The only 2 things windows has going for it:printinggames

and printing is only a problem with cheap printers.

So, I enjoy a stable system that I can repair in cases of catastrophic failures (ever had a ssd gone bad? I had. Twice), with noting but echo, sed, cat and cp. I have to support windows machines at work. I don't want that level of stupid on my machine at home.

[jbrother.1340]

@"Malediktus.9250" said:To each their own I guess. But 5% performance is 5% performance. But on the other hand I am a person who disabled Meltdown/Spectre fixes and uses no anti virus because that costs performance :PAnd installing Windows in a VM does not seem that much more practical than multiboot to me. Might as well use Linux in a VM on Windows.

Yes indeed each his own...

And since it is obvious for your "each" and "own" Linux is not what you want. I wonder then why you bother commenting? Are you trying to derail a thread that has nothing to do with what you want?

Some of us have other reasons to run Linux. My reasons are not gaming. I want to play GW2 though still. I do not and will not use MS products and do not have a need to so that helps me out a lot.

If all I did with a puter was game I would prob have a Windows box and that is all that would happen with it. Seems wasteful.

EDIT:I am not sure I am quoting the right user.

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

I'd appreciate if this thread doesn't turn into a Windows vs Linux debate. The game was built for Windows so naturally it performs best on it, however thanks to Wine and some recent improvements, Linux users can get very good performance while still using their OS of choice. For the record, I understand how macOS users felt before the release of the new/native client.

Every OS does something better than the other in a sort of way and Linux users are gamers too :-)

If it's any indication this site says a lot: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/

[jbrother.1340]

@"ArmoredVehicle.2849" said:I'd appreciate if this thread doesn't turn into a Windows vs Linux debate. The game was built for Windows so naturally it performs best on it, however thanks to Wine and some recent improvements, Linux users can get very good performance while still using their OS of choice. For the record, I understand how macOS users felt before the release of the new/native client.

Every OS does something better than the other in a sort of way and Linux users are gamers too :-)

If it's any indication this site says a lot: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/

I don't want that either and will refrain from further comments that lead to that road.

I will however not capitulate to people trying to use their opinions as fact. I won't do that and I won't accept it from others.

there are reasons I am doing what I am doing and I could care less what others think of that.

This thread is helpful to people and info about this is more important than my opinions or anyone's about their preference in OS.

None of them really do what I think most people overall would want when they look deeper into the subject. Humans what can you say :)

[ArmoredVehicle.2849]

I recently built another system, this time with - Intel G4560 / 8GB DDR4 2400MHZ / Nvidia GT 1030.

I must say GW2 runs very well for such a budget CPU+GPU build. Performance wise is mostly in the 40-60 FPS mark (1080p), where with events such as Tequatl it dips to 17-21 but remains smooth (no stutters). In PoF and HoT maps it also performs quite well although fps can be a bit lower than core areas.

Although I'm happy with the results, I would suggest those looking into a budget build to get the Ryzen 3 2200G, the extra cores will offer smoother gameplay and it doesn't cost much more than the G4560. As for the rest of the GPU, I chose the GT 1030 because of its' low price and low power draw.