Linux World of Warcraft tweaks?

After many many years as a Windows user, I really want to get to grips with Linux and make it my primary (and eventually only) OS. As a gamer, I know I'm going to need to run certain things under Wine.

Being as the WoW expansion is about to drop I'm trying to get it working on Linux Mint 18. After a few days of trial and error and lots of Googling, I've actually got WoW working, but the framerate's a bit poo (20 - 25 fps), even in quietish areas.

I'm currently running a Radeon HD 7850 (courtesy of a recommendation from you guys a couple of years ago), however since Ubuntu 16.04 and derivatives came out, there's no official AMD drivers for this card, and while I know there's an overhead using Wine, I assume the open source drivers may be at least partly to blame at their relatively early stage of development.

So, short of having to fork out for a new card (that I'd like to avoid at the moment if possible), do any of you guys have any good tweaks I can try to improve performance?

Have you edited the config file to use OpenGL rendering?

If not, open the /WTF/config.wtf in a text editor and add the following to the end:

SET gxAPI "OpenGL"

Save and try that. Gave me a boost of around 10-20FPS.

Another thing you can try is using the Staging version of wine and enabling CSMT which can also boost fps.

How to install Wine Staging: https://github.com/wine-compholio/wine-staging/wiki/Installation#-ubuntulinux-mint

Once installing open a terminal and type Click the Staging tab and check the Use CSMT box.

Thanks. I've actually tried all of those, however I can't get OpenGL to work as whenever I try setting that in the config file and then launch WoW, I get:


I did Google that when it I originally tried it. I can't find the link now, but I think they were blaming the current open source driver for that.

Which driver are you currently running? Catalyst or RadeonSI?

There is no catalyst driver (fglrx) anymore for Linux Mint 18 (Ubuntu 16.04). Older cards only get the open source RadeonDriver, while the newer cards benefit from AMD's newer AMDGPU-PRO driver (which I assume is probably better ... maybe).

Sadly my card's one of the former.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst-fglrx-driver-16-04

Not sure if this helps, but :

Hm, that's strange. I'm in the same boat as you, currently running a 7950 which isn't supported by AMDGPU. You could try running WoW with Wine Staging but without the OpenGL argument in the WoW config and see if that alone gives any improvement?

OpenGL was updated to 3.1 in patch 7 and your gfx driver probably doesn't support it, right now it runs worse than d3d9 anyway so it's pointless using it. I expect the WINE devs will jump on this though.
I'm running an fx8350 and gtx960, with WINE 1.9.16 staging, I still only get around 40fps in a crowded city, which can drop to 20s if I start moving around and spinning the camera.
If you really want to increase the fps then you need a CPU that can handle the WINE translations a lot faster.

Pretty much exactly how I am running it now. If I stand in a corner facing the wall with graphics set to 4 in WoW's settings, I can get 30 - 40 fps, but it drops significantly (10 or less) if you try doing anything significant (the Legion invasion stuff for example) which is quite depressing.

I guess I'll have to carry on dual booting if I really want to play WoW at the moment.

If it's related to the OpenGL version and you're running the open source radeon drivers you could try wine staging with gallium 9 patches. Gallium 9 is essentially native dx9 for Linux: https://xellink.com/2014/11/20/tutorial-on-wine-gallium-9-possibly-doubling-your-framerate/

Only part of that guide that is outdated is the edit the wine registry part. You can simply run winecfg and there should be an extra setting under Staging the says: Enable Gallium 9 for better D3D9 graphics performance.

Thanks for that. I've had a look, but I'm struggling getting it to work. I can get as far as adding all the PPAs. I already had the wine staging version installed so I skipped installing 1.9, but when I tried installing the mesa-vdpau errors, I was getting dependency errors and it wouldn't let me install from the terminal. I got past that by installing with Synaptic.

I'm kind of stuck there. When I look at Driver Manager, the only option I get is the Intel-microcode driver. There's nothing at all showing for graphics. Obviously following on from that, when I look at winecfg, there is no DX9 option.

I spoke too soon. Just jumped in to WoW and was suddenly getting 90 fps, and down to about 30 on an invasion. So the gallium stuff is obviously doing something, even if that tickbox isn't there in winecfg.

I also found some comments elsewhere mentioning the xorg.conf file (which doesn't appear to exist by default anymore in Mint 18), but I added the following to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/xorg.conf anyway:

Section "Device"
Identifier "radeon"
Driver "radeon"
Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection

Glad to hear you're seeing improvements in WoW. I'm not familiar with the install processon Ubuntu/Mint as I use the AUR package on Arch Linux. As for the settings in the xorg.conf file have a look at this section of the Arch Wiki as it applies to Mint too for addition radeon settings if you feel like doing any additional tinkering

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Performance_tuning

Thanks for the links.

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu today and have run through the gallium setup again. I still get that dependency error that I got on Mint (probably not much of a surprise), and still don't see the tickbox in winecfg, but with all the other tweaks from the links you've given, I'm getting a fairly reasonable framerate now, although I have to wait a minute or so after logging in for WoW to settle down as the screen freezes about every 10 seconds. Once that clears, it all seems pretty good, and I've made plenty of notes just in case

IRC WINE 1.7.44 was the last to use gallium 9.
Using playonlinux to manage wine installs will make every thing a lot easier if you are still new to Linux. You can create and new windows environment for each individual program, then remove it if you need to without it affecting your other wine installs.

Wine 1.9+ is still avaliable with Gallium 9 however it must is gotten from here: https://launchpad.net/~commendsarnex/+archive/ubuntu/winedri3

I did try PlayOnLinux before, but while it's got a decent GUI, it seems like a bit of a faff, especially if you've already got things downloaded/installed where you want them (which isn't necessarily where POL wants them).

POL is really easy, can't see how you find it all a faff.
You just create a new virtual drive, and install the rest as you would without POL.
It allows you to create seperate Wine installs (as virtual hard drives) for each program/game without it affecting another, and trust me when you come across a game that only works with an older version of Wine, you will need it.

you could try a different distro, Manjaro is pretty good out of the box its based on Arch but quite more user friendly

Thanks for all the tips.

stopper: Faff may have been the wrong word. I guess I'm just happier at the command-line and I've had more success getting things working using Wine and winetricks than POL so far.

For my WoW needs, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new graphics card. I've been thinking of going back to Nvidia for a while and as their cards have better driver support at the moment, I picked up an Asus 970 GTX, which was just about within my current budget.

I'm now running WoW in OpenGL, and apart from some artifacts in certain areas I'm getting decent framerates all the time now.

Unfortunately the state of ATI Linux Drivers is abysmal. Apparently they're fixing it for the newer generations but if you really want to play games on linux nvidia is the only real answer at the moment.

Put it this way, a couple of years ago I switched a 5870 for a much older 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was considerably faster in most cases.