Linux World of Warcraft tweaks?

Infidelus · 11 Aug 2016 at 16:03

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?

Infidelus · 11 Aug 2016 at 19:09

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:

Code:

World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration

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.

Infidelus · 11 Aug 2016 at 20:47

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 :

Code:

lspci -nn | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Pitcairn PRO [Radeon HD 7850 / R7 265 / R9 270 1024SP] [1002:6819]

Infidelus · 12 Aug 2016 at 09:52

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.

Infidelus · 12 Aug 2016 at 14:19

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.

Infidelus · 12 Aug 2016 at 14:41

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

Infidelus · 13 Aug 2016 at 19:32

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

Infidelus · 14 Aug 2016 at 19:15

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).

Infidelus · 25 Aug 2016 at 09:55

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.