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

[Veprovina.4876]

7 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

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.

You shouldn't have to mess with wine in order to play GW2.

GW2 should run on Proton.

[DETOX.6098]

5 minutes ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

On X or wayland?

On Wayland but I won't change anything anymore since everything works. Currently on a GE Proton 7_53 and I think it works even better.

[Veprovina.4876]

2 hours ago, DETOX.6098 said:

On Wayland but I won't change anything anymore since everything works. Currently on a GE Proton 7_53 and I think it works even better.

I'm a bit on the fence between GEProton 7_51, 7_53 and 7_43 lol.

But all of that is really just details and "fine tuning", the game works on all 3.

Yesterday i played hours of WvW with a 30ish groups and the FPS didn't go down below 50, which - for my GPU - is amazing lol and that was on the 7_53 proton. 🙂 With the RADV launch options.

Edited March 25, 2023 by Veprovina.4876

[Tanker.9802]

well, here is what happen, in nobara I was getting that error XP services pack thingy, in my daily Debian I re-installed wine and lutris, but everything was crashing, so, I didn't wanto but I went back to Pop-Os(after a year) many things has changed I was like woow! that wasn't there last time... anyways, after install and updates, I install Steam last time not even the launcher opened, but this time it when like hot knife cutting butter! straight-trough, just download, install and run it!... I have been playing for the last two hr on steam, not a single glitch, 40fps open world, peaks of 60-80, and lions arch down to 20-30, meta events the same... very very  surprise there I;m happy with that, the downside I can't use my main account I had to open a new one. :(. Currently installing Lutris, same download and install, so far so good, downloading GW2., let you know what happen. btw, steam with Proton 7, 4/5 stars. XD

[DETOX.6098]

2 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

I can't use my main account I had to open a new one.

What do you mean that you had to use a new account ? Something like that should not happen. If you play on Steam and you have an orginal account you use the command "-provider Portal". Well, unless you got banned from the account.

[Tanker.9802]

@DETOX.6098, well, the launcher didn't show the login part but a creation of an account, didn't know about the "-provider Portal" command

my SSD is only 120., on Lutris it has lots of problems it just wont run, so I have to uninstall and then install on steam(again)... or is there a away to tell steam where the game is located at?...

Thanks.

[DETOX.6098]

12 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Yesterday i played hours of WvW with a 30ish groups and the FPS didn't go down below 50, which - for my GPU - is amazing lol and that was on the 7_53 proton. 🙂 With the RADV launch options.

It seems that Protons with the end 3 are more polished. As I wrote earlier for me as well runs smoother on the 53 compared to the 51.

[DETOX.6098]

2 minutes ago, Tanker.9802 said:

well, the launcher didn't show the login part but a creation of an account, didn't know about the "-provider Portal" command

On Steam you use -provider Portal in Lutris you don't have to.

[DETOX.6098]

6 minutes ago, Tanker.9802 said:

or is there a away to tell steam where the game is located at?...

Yes in Settings / Downloads / STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS / - then window pop up and you have to choose your hard drive (location)

[Veprovina.4876]

8 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

well, the launcher didn't show the login part but a creation of an account, didn't know about the "-provider Portal" command

my SSD is only 120., on Lutris it has lots of problems it just wont run, so I have to uninstall and then install on steam(again)... or is there a away to tell steam where the game is located at?...

Thanks.

If you installed GW2 on steam then yes, go to launch options and put -provider Portal in the launch options field.

Then it will let you log in normally.

 

If you plan on adding other variables such as gamemode, WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1, RADV_PERFTEST=gpl, DXVK_ASYNC=1...

Those need to be separated by spaces, followed by %command% argument. After that you write -provider Portal.

So "system arguments" first, followed by %command%, then "game arguments".

[Tanker.9802]

Well, I did what @DETOX.6098 suggested, that was a yes and no, what I wanted was to tell Steam where my video game is located at a non steam game, so, yes there is a way to tell steam to run non steam games without changing the download drive or adding  but it didn't worked, don't ask why, I wasn't able to find the error log nor in the console even running cli the console didn't show any errors... so I had to download it again with steam and added the -provider arguments, after that I play until 4am last night.

It is worth mentioning that I did not install anything fancy like the gamemode thingy(I saw on youtube), just download, install, play it, it all went very smooth using steam., Pop_OS 22.04 LTS + steam that was it, keep in mind that my rig is 11+ YO so any new hardware should run even better.

Currently on my daily Debian just did a clean up, removed wine, lutris, playonlinux, just install steam which did ask for a few new libraries for 32bit architecture (weird, but ok), also removed my lutris GW2 installation and is now downloading it with steam.

I think Steam + Proton 7 do something else than any other like wine or lutris by them self, I saw a window pop-up the first time I ran GW2 on steam something about "Preparing shaders" which took about 3 long minutes, was that a compilation of some sort?, idk, that was just the very first time, after that never showed up again.

 

[Veprovina.4876]

1 hour ago, Tanker.9802 said:

Preparing shaders

It does that occasionally so that it doesn't have to load shaders in-game, which would cause stutters and slowdowns.

DXVK_ASYNC=1 and RADV_PREFTEST=gpl do something similar.

 

It's nothing to be concerned about. It might show up again, but every additional time should be shorter.

Edited March 26, 2023 by Veprovina.4876

[Tanker.9802]

Well, after 3 days testing, on lutris, wine, playonlinux, debian, pop_os and nobara, I can say that debian and Pop_Os make great distros for gaming with Steam.

Last night I was able to play for 3hr no problems on Pop_os, and today after cleaning my debian I was able to play for 4hr no problems although the LTP was kind of "laggy" when open, other than all good.

Thank you  @Veprovina.4876 and @DETOX.6098 for your comments. 

 

 

[DETOX.6098]

1 hour ago, Tanker.9802 said:

Last night I was able to play for 3hr no problems on Pop_os,

I think Pop OS is more optimized for using the system as a desktop (for gaming) without user integration. In fact, that would even be my suggestion for anyone starting out with the idea of gaming on Linux to start with Pop OS. As for Steam and other disk locations I have read that sometimes there can be a problem if you are using a game that is on an NTFS (windows) disk I don't know why. You can also copy a game from windows to a steam location on Linux. You need to use the shortcut Ctrl + H to see hidden files in the manager. The path to the location of the games in steam (home/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Guild Wars 2. This is where you copy all the games from some large drive so you don't download them every time. If you don't already have a location after a new installation just download some small game to have steam create the files. My GW2 launch path ( RADV_PERFTEST=gpl RADV_PERFTEST=nggc DXVK_ASYNC=1 gamemoderun %command% -provider Portal ). I am using proton GE 7_53 on wayland. Proton GE_7_43 also works well on older hardware. RADV_PERFTEST=nggc - applies to RX 6000 up cards. My hardware is not very powerful but GW2 runs great for me Ryzen 5600x and RX 6600 - no complaints.

Here's a link to an interesting video about Pop OS:

 

Edited March 27, 2023 by DETOX.6098

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

I'm just throwing this out there but anyone who hasn't needs to boot their kernel with "preempt=full". By default its voluntary, which is Linux tradition as it was mostly meant for servers.

 

Desktops need lower latency and higher response times. In fact, if possible you should just be outright using the realtime kernel if it doesn't freeze up or make your system unstable (its very hardware- and driver-dependant). With video games you generally don't want higher throughput, you want lower latency.

 

This game is one of the worst in even the slightest graphics or input latency messing up your gameplay.

 

You should also set up ZRAM (with "zstd" compression and 90% memory capacity limit), and disable disk swap. Not only is disk swap bad for SSDs, its also extremely slow and a security risk.

 

After setting up ZRAM, use the following settings in sysctl:
 

Quote

 

vm.dirty_background_bytes = 10485760

vm.dirty_bytes = 104857600

vm.swappiness = 100

vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 1

vm.page-cluster = 0

 

 

Edited March 27, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[garpu.6210]

12 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

I'm just throwing this out there but anyone who hasn't needs to boot their kernel with "preempt=full". By default its voluntary, which is Linux tradition as it was mostly meant for servers.

 

 

Funny you should mention this...I do a lot of music-related things on my computer, so it's set up to do that with a fully preemptible kernel (because reducing latency is key for that, especially if you're doing anything with realtime synthesis.)  Normally I reboot into the regular kernel when I want to game. Slackware-current switched to having preempt_dynamic being a thing, so out of curiosity I booted with preempt=full to check it out. I forgot, and loaded up GW2, only to find out that I wasn't just horrifically bad at jumping puzzles--the preemptible kernel was reducing my input lag. 🙂

[Tanker.9802]

Hello o/ again, just notice something odd, this may not be related 100% to linux but, I notice that with some mouse it gets laggy, FPS go down to 1 or 0 depending on how fast the pointer is moved...

Now, that only happen with my razer basilisk v2 but if I use one the generic 10 dollar mouse everything is fine, why is that?

[DETOX.6098]

5 hours ago, Tanker.9802 said:

razer basilisk v2

Here's a link to the open driver page. Maybe it will help.

https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer

[Davixxa.4763]

Hi! I'm having trouble getting the game to work on my fresh Arch Linux (as in, literally installed last night) setup.

 

I've tried both using the Steam version (using the -provier Portal argument) and on Lutris (without any arguments) - my account predates the Steam version, so I know I'm using the right arguments (or lack thereof) in that regard. If I run the game without -ignorecoherentgpucrash, I get a Coherent GPU Crash immediately upon launching the Launcher. If I use -ignorecoherentgpucrash, the launcher is nigh on uninteractable with, and doesn't let me log in. It's as if the launcher window actually exists, and is centered, but is displayed off to the side. It is also rapidly flashing, almost like 2 3D models overlapping would.

 

I've tried the following and Wine versions, but nothing seems to work.

Lutris 7.2

Proton-GE 7.43 (as well as 7.55 and 7.49)

 

Any help would be appreciated. The launcher is interactible with through the keyboard.

[Veprovina.4876]

15 hours ago, Davixxa.4763 said:

It is also rapidly flashing, almost like 2 3D models overlapping would.

I got this behavior on X11 in KDE, though, after the launcher did it's thing, the game launched.

But switching to Wayland helped with both game stability and other issues.

 

It introduced its own problems in KDE though, so i switched to Gnome, but that's a different issue, nothing game related.

I'm also on Arch (btw). 🙂

[Zyian.9168]

Looks like now with CEF back in place, everything works now except being able to buy or sell things on the TP. When you hit the buy/sell button, the game just crashes.

Short snippet:

Quote

*--> Crash <--*
Exception: c0000005
Memory at address 00000001`41033790 could not be written
App: Gw2-64.exe
Pid: 276
BaseAddr: 0000000140000000
ProgramId: 101
Build: 144417
When: 2023-04-18T16:26:52Z 2023-04-18T10:26:52-06:00
Uptime:   0 days  0:01:02
Flags: 0
DumpFile: Crash.dmp

Tried using the latest:

Proton-GE (7.55)
Proton 8.01

Tried with and without some dll overrides (to get addons working or no addons at all)

[garpu.6210]

Looking at the bug report forum, I don't think it's just a linux issue...

[Nemecyst.5437]

4 hours ago, Zyian.9168 said:

Looks like now with CEF back in place, everything works now except being able to buy or sell things on the TP. When you hit the buy/sell button, the game just crashes.

Short snippet:

Tried using the latest:

Proton-GE (7.55)
Proton 8.01

Tried with and without some dll overrides (to get addons working or no addons at all)

I'm on ArchLinux playing with Lutris and Wine-GE-Proton7-43. I bought 250 Incandescent Dust and the buy order went through just fine with no crashes.

[ElessarD.2690]

I'm on Archlinux. i have downloaded the client through steam and i'm using proton 4.11-13. All was ok until the last update that occurred this afternoon. logged out to update and the client stucked on "Initializing...". i have uninstalled the game and totally deleted the compdata folder inside my home.... issue still present.

 

Any others are experiencing the same problem? Any chance that some developer will read this?

 

In case i can provide some logs

[garpu.6210]

40 minutes ago, ElessarD.2690 said:

I'm on Archlinux. i have downloaded the client through steam and i'm using proton 4.11-13. All was ok until the last update that occurred this afternoon. logged out to update and the client stucked on "Initializing...". i have uninstalled the game and totally deleted the compdata folder inside my home.... issue still present.

 

 

Have you tried with a more recent proton version?