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


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  • 2 weeks later...

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 said:New update is out. See first post for Changelog and Download links, now with 100% more Mesa friendly :-)

Thanks for doing the work on this.

your self contained wine and launcher works much better on my laptop than PlayonLinux was. It ran fine but I get better performance without it no matter how I set it up.

I was wondering about the version of wine you used and how I can go about changing and updating that to run with what you already have setup? I am not that savvy with scripting but pretty good at figuring things out overall. I have been looking at your configs for user and such and made some changes slightly. I would like to try your setup here with wine-staging 3.10. I am not sure it matters at all from what I think is 3.7 in your package but am always up to experiment.

I am trying to learn more about wine in general as well.

Thanks again.

PS it also helped on my old desktop as well and can get the details twice as high with same FPS and some screens that never loaded right in guild hall now load right for me. :)

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@jbrother.1340 said:

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 said:New update is out. See first post for Changelog and Download links, now with 100% more Mesa friendly :-)

Thanks for doing the work on this.

your self contained wine and launcher works much better on my laptop than PlayonLinux was. It ran fine but I get better performance without it no matter how I set it up.

I was wondering about the version of wine you used and how I can go about changing and updating that to run with what you already have setup? I am not that savvy with scripting but pretty good at figuring things out overall. I have been looking at your configs for user and such and made some changes slightly. I would like to try your setup here with wine-staging 3.10. I am not sure it matters at all from what I think is 3.7 in your package but am always up to experiment.

I am trying to learn more about wine in general as well.

Thanks again.

PS it also helped on my old desktop as well and can get the details twice as high with same FPS and some screens that never loaded right in guild hall now load right for me. :)

Thanks for the kind feedback, glad it's helping.

Technically the 4 folders: bin, lib, lib64 and share are what make up Wine. If you wish to use a newer version delete those and unpack the new ones, Don't forget to backup the user_run/config/regedit scripts though, these are not part of Wine. Whenever I need to upgrade Wine for my Windows games I follow the same procedure, I don't like installing it system wide since one Wine version may not work the same for another game.

In the case of GW2, using a Wine build without the PBA patches will yield worse performance, especially in large group events. These patches help the game maintain a smooth framerate and prevents it from dipping way too low during large events. Currently the author stopped working on them and the latest version of Wine supported is 3.7.

This isn't the end of the road though, the Mesa driver stack is getting a lot of attention both from Intel and AMD.

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@"Stormy Dragon.9210" said:Has anyone been having issues since the WINE 3.10 -> WINE 3.11 upgrade? I never had problems before and now the launcher is suddenly crashing as soon as it starts.

haven't tried any as I'm still using 3.7 for GW2.


In other news, here's what I'm currently up to:

I've recently been reading about a new Wine-related project called "esync" github: https://github.com/zfigura/wine/releases. This helps CPU-bound games achieve a little more performance in Wine, which as of lately it is popularly combined with DXVK.

So here I am once again trying to squeeze a little more performance out of GW2. It will either sink or swim :-)

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I wanted to say thank you to you @"ArmoredVehicle.2849"I now finally can run GW2 with a decend and stable fps.

I had ~10-12 fps before, which was absolutely unplayable.Now I get to a whopping 35-45 stable fps on high details (except shadows).

87f8c019d6dcc7b0b4088187182185f7-full.pn

EDIT:Specs:CPU: i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHzGPU: GeForce GTX 1080 TiRAM: 32GiB@2400MHz

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@""ArmoredVehicle.2849" :

If it helps, this is the error log I am getting:

--> Crash <--Assertion: jobThreads && (jobThreads <= hardwareThreads)File: ......\Services\JobManager\Windows\JobManager.cpp(521)App: Gw2-64.exePid: 47Cmdline:BaseAddr: 0000000140000000ProgramId: 101Build: 90455When: 2018-07-13T17:19:09Z 2018-07-13T13:19:09-04:00Uptime: 0 days 0:00:01Flags: 0

My first hypothesis is that it has something to do with the changes in 3.11 made to the way the number of cores are calculated?

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@Stormy Dragon.9210 said:@""ArmoredVehicle.2849" :

My first hypothesis is that it has something to do with the changes in 3.11 made to the way the number of cores are calculated?

Can't say for 3.11 but I just checked 3.12 (clean prefix) and it works just fine for me. Keep in mind that GW2 benefits a lot from the PBA patches, using a Vanilla or Staging Wine build yields less performance, sometimes even up to 20-30fps less.

I'm running a AMD 1700X (8 core / 16 threads) no issues at all.

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@Stormy Dragon.9210 said:WINE 3.12 had the same problem as with WINE 3.11, and reverting back to WINE 3.10 allows it to run, so it definitely seems to be a WINE thing, but it also seems to not be affecting everyone.

Which distro are you using? Maybe it's an Ubuntu 17.10 problem?

I test the game on 3 different PC's each without issues, running a different distro: Mint 18.1, Debian 9, Ubuntu 18.04. Have you tried to run the game in a clean prefix?

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This works great! Can I talk you into putting it on Lutris? Lutris is an open gaming platform for Linux. It helps you install and manage your games in a unified interface kinda like playonlinux but way better IMO. So I feel like it's way smoother for game installs.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just dropping in here to say how much I love this. Guild Wars 2 has long been a solid reason for the justification of my Windows partition. I'm getting very close to Win10 framerates and playability with your setup. After installation I made a GW2 shortcut in Lutris pointing it play.sh as the executable so it meshes in nicely and I can launch from here. I haven't booted into Win10 for about three weeks and I couldn't be happier.

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I checked a bit how Lutris works and how to distribute a customized version of Wine, I might do it but cannot give an estimate when. I am currently trying to improve the installer script so I can distribute a single archive which will automatically detect which GPU you're running and adjust the settings accordingly, a small non exciting update but it's been on my to-do list.

So far there isn't much I can do to improve the performance any further.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi. Desperately trying to get my GW2 up on linux mint 19. Brand new user, zero success. I tried the link on page 1 (Nvidia Package: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cxXoJuz_q2jh4RMDzx15zx0GtQeFr6f6 - MD5 Checksum: 6ab133357943ce84e55196bcfa134e54) and, after the 'external link warning' get a new but mostly blank page with a little box in the middle saying 'Whoops! There was a problem with the preview.' and a tiny blue box with 'download' in. Clicking on that gives me another new mostly blank page telling me Google drive can't scan etc coz too big ... and another tiny blue box saying 'Download anyway' ... Clicking on this give me a pop-up with the option for Ffox to 'Open with' or 'Save file' neither of which do anything ?I've also tried 'Play on Linux' which puts a link on my desktop that does nothing when I click it.

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@Zync.2301 said:Hi. Desperately trying to get my GW2 up on linux mint 19. Brand new user, zero success.

For a long time, I have used staging wine to run gw2, and with that, I'm pretty sure it works right out-of-the-box. Basically, add wine staging to your repositories, update to replace stable wine with that, and install gw2. You can install 64-bit version. I can't remember all the details, but command line to add staging wine is:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

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Thank you, I will try that tonight when I get in. Would you please explain what 'staging' is/means/does. At the moment it's all pretty much greek (no offence intended - please choose any 'generic' foreign language to suit :) ) to me ! From reading, I understand that a 'repository' is another name for a top end file in which all other programs are kept ? I'm still finding it a bit awkward to navigate around.[i haven't found the mental key to hang it on so it all starts making sense yet ... I'm literally a brand new user; I got a new computer in bits, with advice from my son and his friend on what to have, the friend built it with my 'help', and I decided to try running it on linux, something I've wanted to try for a long time, instead of windows (YUK!) 3 days ago so forgive me if I don't get terms, that to you may be perfectly obvious, straight away ...

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@"Zync.2301" said:Thank you, I will try that tonight when I get in. Would you please explain what 'staging' is/means/does.

Wine has two "lines" - stable version, and development (staging) version. Stable version is always much older, and development version is always "bleeding edge" version. Nowadays, GW2 might run happily with off-the-shelf Wine, but I haven't tried it, as I needed to start using staging version earlier to get it working, and haven't changed it back.

From reading, I understand that a 'repository' is another name for a top end file in which all other programs are kept ?

Repositories are the locations where system goes look for software packages, to install them to your (local) system. As you use Linux Mint, it uses repository provided by Mint developers to install software for you, and keeping it up to date. If you need software outside the Mint repository, your options are (1) add another repository, if that is provided (which is the case with Wine), or (2) install the software manually, either from some package (.deb or similar), from tarball (.tar.gz) or maybe even from sources (get sources, compile them, and install them).

I'm still finding it a bit awkward to navigate around.

No problem, it will get easier when you get more used to system. Modern Linuxes are much more user friendly than their ancestors back in decades. But time to time they still need some tweaking to get more exotic things (like games made for Windows) running. In practise, games and some very brand new fancy hardware are usually the things where you are struggling, if you are struggling. Luckily, compared to many other Windows games, GW2 is very friendly game to be played at the top of Wine.

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@TamX.1870 said:

For a long time, I have used staging wine to run gw2, and with that, I'm pretty sure it works right out-of-the-box. Basically, add wine staging to your repositories, update to replace stable wine with that, and install gw2. You can install 64-bit version. I can't remember all the details, but command line to add staging wine is:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

Be aware that those builds don't include the PBA patches, which in turn makes the game perform slow, especially in heavy player scenes.

@"Zync.2301" said:Hi. Desperately trying to get my GW2 up on linux mint 19. Brand new user, zero success. I tried the link on page 1 (Nvidia Package: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cxXoJuz_q2jh4RMDzx15zx0GtQeFr6f6 - MD5 Checksum: 6ab133357943ce84e55196bcfa134e54) and, after the 'external link warning' get a new but mostly blank page with a little box in the middle saying 'Whoops! There was a problem with the preview.' and a tiny blue box with 'download' in. Clicking on that gives me another new mostly blank page telling me Google drive can't scan etc coz too big ... and another tiny blue box saying 'Download anyway' ... Clicking on this give me a pop-up with the option for Ffox to 'Open with' or 'Save file' neither of which do anything ?I've also tried 'Play on Linux' which puts a link on my desktop that does nothing when I click it.

Hi, the google drive link can't preview it because it's a tar.gz type archive (If I provide it as a .zip file it creates a mess with file permissions), clicking "Download Anyway" will ask you to save the archive, from there you need to go in the folder where you saved it and extract it to a location of your choosing.

The last part you have to do is to install the 32bit libraries for your distro, this can be found in your package manager named "ia32-libs".

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The ./setup.sh ran ok, but both the ./play.sh and ./debug.sh basically freezes my computer (the ./play shows an overlay with some numbers downloading something, but it's just the text and nothing else, outside of the of the console window). Anyone else has experienced this? I'm on Ubuntu 16.04, 64-bits, i7 7700HQ, GTX 1060 (8 GB), 16GB Ram.

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@Morslath.3296 said:The ./setup.sh ran ok, but both the ./play.sh and ./debug.sh basically freezes my computer (the ./play shows an overlay with some numbers downloading something, but it's just the text and nothing else, outside of the of the console window). Anyone else has experienced this? I'm on Ubuntu 16.04, 64-bits, i7 7700HQ, GTX 1060 (8 GB), 16GB Ram.

I tried running it directly on PlayOnLinux and it seems to work only if I set a virtual desktop on wine. Could you tell me where on your code I could change that to make it work?

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Massive thanks to ArmoredVehicle.2849! On and off I've been tinkering with GW2/PoL/WINE on Ubuntu for some time, usually resulting in a - at best - handful of FPS at an unplayable resolution. Linux is a challenge, being completely unfamiliar to me, but I am working my way through and learning one step at a time (seriously, this OS is so easy to reinstall ;)).

Thought that I'd take the time to post here, firstly to say thank you for your efforts, but also to report that so far my M17XR4 (PROCESSOR, IVB, I7-3610QM, 2.3/2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 7970M) seems to run on average 20+ fps, sometimes higher depending on area, pop etc. I'm launching the script using DRI_PRIME, which has a noticeable effect, so I assume that I am doing it correctly - I can see the difference mainly at character select: with DRI_PRIME, I get 60 fps and without it drops to around 15fps. Can't get that in game, but I assume it's using the AMD (not sure how to tell).

Thank you for all of your hard work putting this together :)

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