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

[DETOX.6098]

For me, KDE Plasma works best on Open SUSE and I've probably tested everything, at least on my hardware. As for the question: RADV_PERFTEST=nggc - Enable NGGC can slightly improve performance on RX6000 series, but may reduce performance for other cards.
RADV_PERFTEST=gpl - Should lead to a behavior similar to shader caching on Windows, but you need mesa-git or mesa 23 for it to work.

[Veprovina.4876]

21 minutes ago, DETOX.6098 said:

For me, KDE Plasma works best on Open SUSE and I've probably tested everything, at least on my hardware. As for the question: RADV_PERFTEST=nggc - Enable NGGC can slightly improve performance on RX6000 series, but may reduce performance for other cards.
RADV_PERFTEST=gpl - Should lead to a behavior similar to shader caching on Windows, but you need mesa-git or mesa 23 for it to work.

Ah, i see. i removed DXVK_ASYNC and added PREFTEST=gpl but didn't see any difference lol.

But i'm on mesa 22.3.6 still so that's probably why.

😄

I have a vega card so nggc won't do my any good.

But, when i update to mesa 23 i'll try PREFTEST again, thanks for the tip!

[DETOX.6098]

55 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Ah, i see. i removed DXVK_ASYNC

You should continue to use GE Proton 7_43 as you are on mesa 22 and DXVK_ASYNC as someone here wrote earlier in the forum. This will give you the best performance. At least with me was like that until mesa 23 appeared in the respositories.

[Veprovina.4876]

55 minutes ago, DETOX.6098 said:

You should continue to use GE Proton 7_43 as you are on mesa 22 and DXVK_ASYNC as someone here wrote earlier in the forum. This will give you the best performance. At least with me was like that until mesa 23 appeared in the respositories.

Yeah, i didn't change the proton version, i know the ones above 43 have some other way of doing things, which probably requires an updated mesa to work.

Weird that i didn't get the update yet, Arch is usually pretty fast with those things but whatever, the game works, i'm not in a rush haha. I'll tinker with other protons and stuff when mesa updates.

[DETOX.6098]

2 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

I'll tinker with other protons and stuff when mesa updates.

Share your observations if you find anything interesting regarding better performance of the game 🙂 

[zistenz.1945]

I'm already on mesa-23 (Nobara Fedora 37), I'll try those settings tonight.

Edit: With the usual "DXVK_ASYNC=1" I saw 50-55 fps running around Minister's Waypoint, full of players (6650XT, 1080p, medium/high settings). Adding the two RADV setting added 5-15 fps and the movement and the camera rotating felt smoother.

But I now also have some unknown issue that I couldn't change compatibility mode  on GW2 anymore. The switch is on but there's no selection dropbox below that. Checked other games and there's no problem, they work as intented. So I can't switch to 7.51 to try out the game without DXVK_ASYNC for now. I'll look on it again tomorrow.

Edited March 21, 2023 by zistenz.1945

[Veprovina.4876]

1 hour ago, DETOX.6098 said:

Share your observations if you find anything interesting regarding better performance of the game 🙂 

Will do!

Currently, on wayland, i get theese occasional microstutters - where the whole game like, freezes for a split second. Nothing too annoying, and it could be just my hardware, but i'm hoping it could fix that.

Now i just have to wait til Arch updates mesa, then i'll download another proton, above 43, and try it.

[zistenz.1945]

4 hours ago, zistenz.1945 said:

But I now also have some unknown issue that I couldn't change compatibility mode  on GW2 anymore. The switch is on but there's no selection dropbox below that. Checked other games and there's no problem, they work as intented. So I can't switch to 7.51 to try out the game without DXVK_ASYNC for now. I'll look on it again tomorrow.

Restarted Steam and it works now.

So...

GE-Proton 7.50, the two RADV settings, no DXVK_ASYNC: Not good. Frame drops here and there, small stutters, choppy camera turning, 40-60 fps. I heard DXVK2 has to rebuild its shader cache, so I went a gathering run from the Lily over the western parts of the Oasis, up to the pyramids, then jumped to Ministers Waypoint again. The place was full of players as usual, a lot of effects everywhere -and fps drops even under 30 too. Ran around a bit, then restarted the game, with the same results.

Back to the good ol' 7.43 and DXVK_ASYNC added back: Everything is smooth again, 50-65 fps, sometimes over 70. I think I'll stay here for now...

Edited March 21, 2023 by zistenz.1945

[DETOX.6098]

1 hour ago, zistenz.1945 said:

Back to the good ol' 7.43

Fighting with a large number of mobs in the desert around 180-210 fps. In the city on Oasis about 85 fps. WvW around 90 - 125fps. If my fps drops I don't feel any microstutters. It is strange how on different distributions everything can work differently.

[Veprovina.4876]

Well, that didn't take long lol. It's out on Arch! 

 

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/mesa/

 

But it's one in the morning, I'll test this out tomorrow. 🙂

[Veprovina.4876]

Well, i updated, used GE-Proton7-51, used gamemoderun WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 RADV_PERFTEST=gpl %command% -provider Portal launch options aaaaaand....

 

The game works, but i'm not seeing any groundbreaking stuff...

There might be some slightly more stable framerate though, but the microstutter (or rather slowdown, the game slows down for a split second) still happens. This was tested on KDE Wayland. Supposedly GNOME has better Wayland implementation so it might be better there but well, it's GNOME...

 

And Heroic Games Launcher no longer launches any games now lol...

Yaay bleeding edge updates! 😄

 

 

But anyway, i'll have to play more to see how it works, but so far so good. Nothing GW2 related broke or got worse with the update, so that's ok.

[garpu.6210]

Is this mesa 23? There's been a bunch of problems with it, nouveau, and X on slackware-current.  Doesn't surprise me that some other things are buggy with it. (You've got an AMD card?)

[zistenz.1945]

17 hours ago, DETOX.6098 said:

Fighting with a large number of mobs in the desert around 180-210 fps. In the city on Oasis about 85 fps. WvW around 90 - 125fps. If my fps drops I don't feel any microstutters. It is strange how on different distributions everything can work differently.

That's impossible, the engine is unable to push out that much frames per second even on a 4090. We have a similar setup. What graphics options do you use? How much fps the game shows on its Options page?

[Veprovina.4876]

2 hours ago, garpu.6210 said:

Is this mesa 23? There's been a bunch of problems with it, nouveau, and X on slackware-current.  Doesn't surprise me that some other things are buggy with it. (You've got an AMD card?)

Yes, mesa 23, i updated this morning.

I think Heroic broke, it's not that the games don't work, Heroic just isn't launching them. Steam games work (the few i tried).

 

I'm not on X, i'm on Wayland. X started behaving weird so i switched. Wayland isn't perfect either, but at least games work better without having to disable the compositor.

 

Anway... I'm using an AMD Ryzen 5 5600g APU and that's my only GPU. There's another one in the system, but it's not being used by linux, it's being loaded with a virtio driver at boot. So it's not a factor.

 

32 GB 3200, CL22 DDR4 and an nvme drive where GW2 is installed.

 

In non crowded areas, the FPS stays around 75 now (vsync on) and in more crowded ones, it dips as low as 40, but the FPS isn't varying a lot like it used to, at leas so far i've seen. I've only done some WvW a bit today, so i didn't exactly test this too much.

 

But i did test Overlord II which was struggling with going 60 FPS on 720p previously, and with added launch options, and that RADV thing it's now at a stable enough 75 FPS at 900p. Vampire survivors probably aren't relevant haha, but hey, it works too. 😛

 

The only linux native game i have installed is Shadow Warrior and that one works too.

So idk, the mesa update looks fine, some games work as they did, some games a bit better and Heroic no longer works at all lol.

But that might be something else related, still investigating.

[DETOX.6098]

54 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

vsync on

With wayland it can be turned off should not tear the image. I think they will tweak it further over time. I personally stick with wayland. Today again I have some big update on SuSE about 2222 packages 🙂

[Veprovina.4876]

1 hour ago, DETOX.6098 said:

With wayland it can be turned off should not tear the image. I think they will tweak it further over time. I personally stick with wayland. Today again I have some big update on SuSE about 2222 packages 🙂

It's not about screen tearing, it's about the super inconsistent game behaviour when the FPS goes above, and then dips below. 😛

On X, both X itself and turning Vsync in the game caused frame skipping at such a massive degree that it was unplayable with compositing turned on. On wayland it's fine, but it behaves weird when the FPS isn't at the monitor refresh rate.

[DETOX.6098]

18 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

On wayland it's fine, but it behaves weird when the FPS isn't at the monitor refresh rate.

Thanks for the explanation. The only strange thing is that for me everything works as expected when I have Vsync turned off.  I'll try to turn it on and play a bit for a change.

[Veprovina.4876]

1 hour ago, DETOX.6098 said:

Thanks for the explanation. The only strange thing is that for me everything works as expected when I have Vsync turned off.  I'll try to turn it on and play a bit for a change.

Might be because of my underpowered GPU, or the fact that it's integrated... So not only is it sharing memory with the rest of the system, the memory it shares is dynammic, and maybe the FPS drops/gains affect the game more. So locking it seems like a good idea.

[Tanker.9802]

Hello @Veprovina.4876  o/, 
So, are using Nobara?, I wanna give it a try, I try POP-Os didn't like it, I have a very old rig(11+yo)MSI MS-7693, CPU AMD FX-6300, the only thing "new" is the nVidia 1050Ti, is running Debian 11 no problems.

As for the gaming, I have been able to run FallOut, BioTech, Skyrim, ESO and GW2 until most recent update, the last GW2 update crashes on welcome screen, I have try almost all versions of GE-Proton, lutris-hack, none seems to fix the problem.

So, on Nobara the desktop UI matter? if so, should I go for, KDE, Gnome... I just don't wanna install windows.

 

[Veprovina.4876]

6 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

So, are using Nobara?, I wanna give it a try, I try POP-Os didn't like it

No i'm using Arch Linux with KDE (though, recently KDE has started bugging me a bit so i'm trying GNOME).

I also didn't like POP_OS, but for different reasons.

 

If you didn't like POP, try something Arch based or RHEL based.

Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Fedora, Nobara... They'll have most up to date packages. Maybe not EndeavourOS because it expects you to use a terminal a lot.

 

But you have an nVidia card, those are from what i can tell, not always super idk, "supported" on linux.

So comparing your system to any AMD system is a hit or miss since they don't use the same drivers or anything like that.

You're not using the latest "mesa" driver we were talking about, so the same things don't apply to you.

 

As for the "desktop UI" as you put it, doesn't really matter, it's just how you interact with your system. Any desktop environment should be fine. I'm currently on GNOME. Some protocols might work better or worse on like KDE vs GNOME but for most people, they won't see the difference. It's just a workflow preference.

[Tanker.9802]

@Veprovina.4876, KDE is my fav, I have try XFCE with MX distro it looked very nice, I liked it, but it was a bit buggy at the time, I just finished installing nobara, downloading GW2, will let you guys know how it goes...
Thank you.

[Tanker.9802]

I keep getting this error: Below min spec: Failed WinXP SP2 or greater check. 5 version 0 service pack reported.

I ran the winecfg and set it to windows 10 for some reason I keep getting that error.

[DETOX.6098]

16 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

So, are using Nobara?

I used Nobara 36 before and had a similar situation. One of the updates broke GW2, it stopped launching. In Nobara's package manager you need to downgrade the Vulkan version. After this procedure GW2 worked again. I hope this helps you if you want to go back to Noabra. Personally I use Open SuSE Tumbleweed, I will try Debian once they release Bookworm. My graphics card did not like the previous Debian release RX 6600.

[DETOX.6098]

On 3/22/2023 at 8:21 PM, Veprovina.4876 said:

On X, both X itself and turning Vsync in the game caused frame skipping at such a massive degree that it was unplayable with compositing turned on.

I tested and when I have Vsync on, the game somehow slows down strangely for me as if everything mumbling on the screen. It's a very strange feeling, as if I have two images stacked on top of each other.

[Veprovina.4876]

6 hours ago, DETOX.6098 said:

I tested and when I have Vsync on, the game somehow slows down strangely for me as if everything mumbling on the screen. It's a very strange feeling, as if I have two images stacked on top of each other.

On X or wayland?

 

On X, with desktop compositing on, the game shows FPS 75 (for instance), but looks like it's running at 30, it's as if it's skipping frames. If i add Vsync on top of that - it doubles the frame skipping and looks choppy and unplayable, but the FPS counter never drops below the FPS it had. It's as if it's rendering those frames, but they never make it to the screen.

 

On wayland, this doesn't happen.

 

Weird. I used to get around this by disabling desktop compositor on X, but you can't do that on wayland. Luckily, i don't have to so... Works ok on Wayland. Any minor slowdowns and lag can be fixed by throwing money at the problem, so if i had a decent GPU, i probably wouldn't experience anything out of the ordinary.