Arch Linux

Stunts

Member

From: Portugal

Registered: 2009-03-28

Posts: 339

Website

[Solved] Warcraft 3 - Wine, ati and xinput2: find the culprit.

Hello everyone. Sorry about this long post. It grew larger then what I had foreseen.

First here's some back story:
I have a compal IFL90 which came with an nvidia 8600MGT, which worked very well with warcraft 3 under wine (yes, I still play that old game, as well as Neverwinter Nights 1). However, after 4 years and 3 months of loyal service, the GPU finally died on me. (This is a known issue with this laptop).
Due to the way the video bios is "stitched" to the motherboard bios in this machine, however, I could not replace my 8600MGT with another nvidia card.
I had to go ATI, and thus I got myself a brand new Mobility Radeon HD 3650.
My compal was offline for almost 2 weeks due to the time the card took to arrive.
After I had my new card in, the first thing I had to do was get the ati drivers. Since the drivers were updated (along with mesa) during the time my laptop was offline, it forced me to do a pacman -Syu which also updated wine to 1.4-rc(something) which now uses xinput2.
Everything was going good, I learned how to make the most of my new card (xorg.conf options, enable s3tc, etc...). But now I have a problem with warcraft 3.
I have a surprisingly good frame rate (seems to be as good as it was with nvidia, but I still haven't experimented a large game of footmen frenzy to stress the card), but I have a mouse input problem. When I move the mouse cursor around (both in the menus and ingame) it sometimes "jumps" around the screen for a split second and then returns to the position where it was, which is very annoying (renders minimap navigation useless and causes mouse scrolling and multiple unit selection problems).
I tried rerunning the game in clean wine prefixes, both 32 and 64 bit versions, in all wine versions from 1.3.37 to 1.5.0. I also tried different WMs (I am currently using gnome shell, which I tried in fallback mode, tried switching to icewm and fluxbox and even a plain separate x-server with no wm) and the problem remains. However, during all this testing I have discovered something that makes these issues disappear, making the game fully playable again.
If I have another program running that uses heavy CPU the problem goes away (I am affected by a bug in tracker that causes it to use heavy CPU every once in a while - but that's another story).
This means that running

 stress -c 1

in a terminal and then launching warcraft 3 solves my problem. But it is hardly a solution since it may lead to unnecessary overheating.
Has anyone else experienced this or something similar? Any tips on what may be causing this issue (or even as to why this workaround will work)?
Thank you in advance for any input.

PS - I am currently using all the latest packages available in arch. Nothing related to graphics if from the AUR.

Last edited by Stunts (2012-03-31 11:34:02)

Stunts

Member

From: Portugal

Registered: 2009-03-28

Posts: 339

Website

Re: [Solved] Warcraft 3 - Wine, ati and xinput2: find the culprit.

Culprit was found:
It was a bug in xorg-server.
Thanks to this thread:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=138670
Here's the link to the bug report for good measure:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29100

Installing xorg-server from [testing] solved the problem.