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WoW on Ubuntu and poor performance with new pc

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B

bemarh

New Member
Joined
May 12, 2010
Hello, thank you for taking the time to read this post. I am a new linux user, my husband has just recently built me a new computer and put Ubuntu on it for me. He is a long-time linux user, though I am coming from a Mac myself.

We both play World of Warcraft, and we built this computer with WoW in mind. But for some reason, it is not performing as we thought it would. My husband has been pretty busy with work and hasn't had alot of time to help me research it, so I thought I would post on this forum to see if anyone has any advice. The main issue is that the framerates aren't what I think they could be, especially from what others can get on a similar machine to mine. I currently have anywhere from 12-35 fps in game. In Dalaran, where it is always the hardest on computers, I get from 12-24 typically. In other areas I might have 28-35, lowering in instances and such. I still get stuttering/lag on my screen at times as well when I turn around in the game, even in the vanilla content. My latency is 50s-60s average. My settings are maxed for the most part, as we made the computer with the idea that it would handle it. I have turned the shadows down to low and lowered the viewing distance a small amount.

Here are my computer specs as I know its hard to help without them:

Running Ubuntu 10.04
Screen: AOC 21.5in 1920x1080
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2 Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core
8GB DDR3 SDRAM
EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB (updated driver: 195.36.15)
1TB ATA Hitachi Hard drive
MSI 770-C45 AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD motherboard
Antec EarthWatts 650W Powersupply


Any advice, is there something wrong? I mean, this system should be knocking the socks off the game, right? Thanks for any help ahead of time!!
 
The only issue that I can pick is there WoW may be having some compatibility issue with Linux. Mind you that I have never personally run WoW on a Linux system. I know from personal experience that the comp in my sig, that has the same vid card, resolution and less RAM, will give you ~45 FPS in Dal and 55-60 FPS around Northrend. I can't image it being the hardware that is the issue as I ran the same settings that you said that you are running. Keep in mind that it is a Wednesday and if a patch dropped yesterday or if Blizz hotfixed without letting you that could be giving you some issues as well. I didn't see a time frame for your issue. :p If it has been going on for a while (2+ weeks I'd say) please disregard. Other than that all I can think to say is check background processes... which that is only a stab in the dark. If it comes down to it try turning one setting on wow down at a time to see if it makes a difference. Hope this info will spark something for ya!
 
Thanks for your response, to be able to run wow on linux I'm using a program called wine. So it works fine. And this is just new this week, as my computer is brandnew, so no issue with patches or anything.

Its good to have my suspiscions confirmed that it should be running alot better. I've heard that opengl has to be used and I don't know if this could be the problem or not.
 
Unless you did the workaround to get the DirectX binaries installed, you are using OpenGL by default and it will be quite a bit slower. I honestly haven't run WoW in linux for quite some time, so I don't have a lot of experience with it as of late.

There is a thread here you might be interested in and it should increase your performance.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=605456

You have Wine installed, so you can skip down to the "fancy" section. I have not personally tried this myself, but it should allow you to use DirectX. See if that gets yours running a little bit better. I'd love to just switch over to linux as my main OS, but WoW game stability (while raiding) is extremely important. :-/
 
bemarh said:
Thanks for the help so far everyone.



-I'm running the most recent patch of wow, 3.3.3.
-Wine is version 1.2 (using ubuntu 10.04 also)
-Nividia drivers are up-to-date according to my husband. They are: 195.36.15
Click to expand...

Version 1.2 hasn't been released yet, 1.1.44 is the latest. Run winecfg and see what it says in the about tab.
 
You're right, I definitely looked in the wrong place. Its version 1.1.42. So not the latest then, eh?

Coreyoliseffect, thanks for the welcome! This is a great forum. :)
 
bemarh said:
You're right, I definitely looked in the wrong place. Its version 1.1.42. So not the latest then, eh?

Coreyoliseffect, thanks for the welcome! This is a great forum. :)
Click to expand...

First lets update to the latest version,
http://www.winehq.org/download/deb

It's best practice to remove your .wine folder and start fresh. It's no longer required but when we are trying to trouble shoot why not? So before you install the newest wine:
Code: 
rm -rf ~/.wine
(This will remove wow and anything else you have installed in wine!)

After you upgrade to 1.1.44

Then go to install WOW again. Wine will auto setup the ~/.wine folder if it doesn't exist on first install now.

Report back after that and we'll see if things aren't any better, and we'll work on getting things good :).
 
Alright, everything's done. My husband updated and redid things, and tried a few tweaks with the graphics card. We also found a post on wow forums saying to shut off the cool and quiet feature on our cpu. With all that, the performance is really not that much better, maybe 5 fps more in Dalaran, I'm getting 18 avg now I think, with 30s-40s in other areas. But even in areas without people, like in Scholazar Basin, there's alot of screen stutter when I turn my character around looking at the scenery, even when at 35. I don't get it, its just not smooth for some reason. And we looked up info on opengl, it is running it and as of patch 3.3.2, they've implemented a different graphics engine according to wow forums so that it is used automatically and you don't have to edit the config.wtf folder.

Any other ideas? I just don't understand why its not working better! Thanks.
 
Can you try setting the -opengl flag? Also in the settings do you have options between switching between dx or opengl? We can see if one might be the problem.
 
This is taken directly from the WineDB for the latest Gold rated wow
Stuttering while walking

This is caused by a bug in the latest Xserver release. This should be fixed by the next round of distribution releases this fall. In the mean time, you can disable key repeat by going to System/Preferences/Keyboard in Gnome.

Mouse cursor slow

This is because Blizzard has not implemented OpenGL hardware cursor functionality in the Windows version. However, there is a patch here that simulates a real hardware cursor.

Graphic corruption

Scroll down and try the registry tweak, if that does not work, reinstall the driver.

Corruption when doing "Maintaining the Sunwell Portal" and WOTLK 'flashback' Quests:

Add this to your config.wtf file:

SET ffxNetherWorld "0" ~ thanks to Adys



Note that this used to be a tweak needed to boost FPS, but is apparently not needed anymore for non-ATI users.

1. Open the registry editor and navigate to the following key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\
2. Highlight the wine folder in the left hand pane by clicking left on it. The icon should change to an open folder
3. Right-click on the wine folder and select [NEW] then [KEY]
4. Replace the text New Key #1 with OpenGL
5. Right-click in the right hand pane and select [NEW] then [String Value]
6. Replace New Value #1 with DisabledExtensions (Notice it's case sensitive!)
7. Then double click anywhere on the line, a dialog box will open.
8. In the value field type GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object

Please note that after using this tweak, the icon pictures may misplace themselves. For example, the icon for "gold" will look like and icon for an orb.

NVIDIA issues

GLXBadDrawable

Make sure triple-buffering is turned off. ~ Thanks to DRH


FPS stutter

Set farclip (the view distance slider) to 777 (about midway on the slider) ~ Thanks to Andrew

Bad FPS in general:

Please make sure that you are not suffering from high latency, as this will cause some FPS problems. If the small 'computer' icon shows you more than 600ms, or if it is red, then you are having high latency. Please check with your ISP.

Mouse cursor jumps

"If I show the hide buttons on my Gnome panel and hide the panel before I start the game, then the mouse behaves normally. The hide button isn't visible in-game." ~ Thanks to NV

Please note that the mouse will not be perfectly smooth in OpenGL mode because Blizzard Entertainment does not support Hardware Cursor in OpenGL with the Windows version of the game. However, there is a patch available here

Hard Drive Thrashing

There is no solution yet. It seems it is a windows problem too when you are using more then 4GB RAM.

Lags/Stuttering

"Tried the setting "Reduce input lag" and that helped incredibly much for me and the same for the first person I told to try it. Definetly not a placebo." ~ Thanks to Anders Aa.

Low FPS

Disable screen glow effect and the lighting effect. ~ Thanks to Ram

Try to run the game with the -opengl argument in the terminal. ~ Thanks to Fluffles

Ati Users: Make sure you have the latest drivers!

Bad graphical corruption in certain areas

* Find the following registry entry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D\

* Add a new key (type String) and name it 'OffscreenRenderingMode'

* Double click the new key and add the value 'pbuffer'

Dalaran and/or other areas cause crashes

This is due to WoW running 32-bit (there is no 64-bit client) and trying to allocate more than roughly 4GB of memory for advanced textures. This is a bug in Wine, since wine, by default, reserves 4096MB (the maximum for 32bit systems) of virtual memory to mimic the win32 memory layout. WoW allocates progressively more memory for textures and this forces the display drivers (which are loaded in the same section of memory) to quit with an GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY error.

Dalaran is a good example of this. Dragonblight and Icecrown may also suffer from this bug.

A possible workaround includes trying is to force Linux to use less memory than what you have, or to make it think it has less memory (eg, limit it to 3GB). The preferred way to do this is to add the mem=3G (for 3GB) or mem=2G (For 2GB) flag to your kernel boot parameters.

How to do this can be found in your particular distro's documentation.

Some people have reported it to work, whilst for others it has not. You may need to sacrifice the advanced textures if you try this.
Click to expand...
 
Shelnutt2 - Ok, we are using the flag now I believe. Good news is, last night we messed around more with it, and my husband did more with the opengl and flag. We also came across this thread on the nvidia forums: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=164046 , specifically the one by Sray. My husband wondered if the gpu and cpu weren't running in sync causing the poor quality, and if the gpu was going to fast. So he messed with the drivers, not sure exactly what he did, but it worked. I'm now getting average of 30 fps in Dalaran and 50-80 everywhere else. But the important part is, its smooth!!!

Stratus_ss - Thanks for all that info, we are checking that out, I will wait for my husband to help me with all that. This might also help, especially as sometimes the mouse is a bit laggy in dalaran. This info you've given might address this issue.

Thank you everyone for the help, glad the computer is finally working well. Let me know if you'd like more technical speak on why it is finally working, I can have my husband explain it when he is home from work tomorrow. Maybe this will help someone else.
 
Glad to hear that you got it up and running. Sounds like your system performance is right where mine was. By the way just to throw something out there. I know that addons cause lag, not that you don't have the RAM to handle it... but a great addon that you can get through www.curse.com is Addon Control Panel (ACP). It is very easy to setup and use. It allows you to create sets of addons that you can load in game. This means that you never have to log out, only reload. :clap: So you never have to stop playing. MUAHAHAH!!! I used a lot of addons so this helped me a lot. Happy raiding and hop that your tier tokens drop. :salute:
 
Sorry to bring up an old thread, but my situation is very similar to this and I neither wanted critique for "not searching the forum before posting" and wanted advice before I tried the same.

My system:

Running Ubuntu 10.04 32bit
Screen: HP2207 22" wide 1650x1050 (prefers 60Hz refresh rate)
AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Quad-Core
2.5GB DDR2 RAM @667
GeForce 9800GT 512MB (most recent driver)
320 GB Hitachi HD
ASUS M4A785-M AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 785G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
650W PSU

I feel like this setup should be running WoW very fast, but I'm getting 2-6fps (40-60ms) on ICC25 boss fights at almost bare minimum graphics settings!

Another oddity that I encountered was when going into the in-game Video settings and noticing that the "refresh rate" was blank, with the only other options being 82 and 86Hz (if I remember correctly). However, in the Config.wtf it has gxRefresh at 53Hz.

I'm running through Wine (latest version, 1.2), though I've been poking around forums and heard about a more gaming-specific version of a not-windows-emulator called Cedega, not sure if it would make a significant difference.

Enabling opengl increases fps only very slightly and also causes a tiny bit of mouse cursor delay as expected (without the fix, of course). Also, sometimes when opengl is enabled WoW crashes upon login.

I'm worried about overclocking because I've never done so before and my memory isn't that great. I've also read reviews stating that the stock fan on the CPU is meh.

I'd really prefer not to go back to Windows, so any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Last edited:
Well first not to nit pick but I am going to anyways :p

your wine version is not necerrily 1.2

if you type
Code: 
wine --version
will give you your true version.

Wine 1.2 is simply the name just as wine once was.

I am running Debian Testing 32 Bit with latest wine repos

I run WoW on Ultra with approx 130 fps

different hardware but to show that Wine can do it just fine.

I am on a core i7 with 6 gigs of ram (with bigmem kernel).

I would check your absolute wine version before we continue debugging
 
Nit picking is fine with me, as often these "small" details make a big difference.

Unfortunately I'm not at home right now, but I can tell you that I used the directions on this page yesterday (9/16/2010). Since adding the repository didn't seem to actually install the software at that time (did I do something wrong here?), I then used "sudo apt-get install wine" and it showed up.

I'll get back to you on the true version ASAP.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that on System Monitor, my CPU usage from Wow.exe rises to around 120% while playing, while all four cores seem to be around 50% load! I also play in maximized Windowed mode so I can alt+tab/change workspaces without Wine dying on me.
 
Last edited:
an_oasis said:
Since adding the repository didn't seem to actually install the software at that time (did I do something wrong here?)
Click to expand...
Adding a repository never installs anything. It just adds an extra list of packages to the package manager.

If you can afford to spend $40 on CrossOver Games, WoW is one of the games for which they directly try to improve compatibility. After installing COG, you click "Install Windows Software", select "World of Warcraft", and it will then install it along with all pre-requisites (DirectX, etc). They offer a week-long demo, so you can try it before buying. They are, AFAIK, one of the main corporate sponsors behind Wine, so your money isn't going to some piggy-back-off-FOSS-for-profit bunch of losers like Transgaming.
 
vid@vid-desktop:~$ wine --version
wine-1.2
Click to expand...
so 1.2 actually is the true version

If it comes down to it, I guess I could drop the $40, but if there's a solution that involves me not having to pay for pretty much the same result, especially when it will probably increase my understanding of linux, I'd rather take that solution first. It's good to know that there are other alternatives out there that i can take though, thank you :thup:
 
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