Performance Question Performance Question

Zoranthus · 2006-11-22 14:55:19

Hi

I'm quite new to Linux, just installed my first Distro (Ubuntu) a month or so ago and I'm totally blown away and would have gotten rid of Windows weeks ago already if it wasn't for World of Warcraft..

I'm a quite passionate player of WoW and the performance with Wine under Ubuntu is horrible. In Windows I never drop below 20 FPS with all Details maxed, with Wine I constantly drop below 10 with under 50% viewing distance.

I tried pretty much anything I could think of - every relevant tweak of the xorg.conf I could find, enabling Fast Writes and SBA, running WoW on a dedicated X server.. nothing helped. The game runs at like half speed compared to windows and it seems to have little to do with the graphic card and everything with the CPU (since I get the about the same low performance in high polygon-areas with a gforce ti4200 as with the 7600gs). It's not the RAM (1 Gig), nor the Hard Disk (little loading times) either.. it has to be the CPU.

Of course it's possible that I did make some major configration error somewhere.. but I don't have any idea where that might be. Performance of everything else is great. CPU doesn't get too hot either. It's just that extreme difference between WoW und Windows and under Wine.

Now I'm just wondering if it might run faster with Arch Linux. I read that it is a very fast distro with many packages optimized for i686-processors.. sounds good.
The problem is just that I'm too much of a noob to predict, if switching to Arch Linux will help at all with my problem. It is pretty advanced and will require alot of time for me to get everything working (starting with my very unlucky partitioning situation..) so I thought I'd ask you: How are the chances that WoW will run faster then under Ubuntu (Edgy Eft)?

test1000 · 2006-11-22 19:26:32

I'd rather post this to the wine ml/search it and/or check out the wine appdb to see if someone have tackled this problem already...

arch is not hard however(well it depends :roll eyes:)but this sounds more like a limitation of wine or like some tweak is necessary to it/wow meaning a system compiled for i686 won't help significanlty.

Ofc i could be wrong but even then you might want to use i686 builds of linux and wine(they must exist??) atleast... before spending time switching to archlinux.

That's ofc if those are the only reason for the switch, because arch is ofc .. great.

Lone_Wolf · 2006-11-22 19:56:17

Do you need 100% boost to your FPS ?
Then apply the same DisabledExtensions registry key as described above. This works for ATI & Nvidia plus
others but only in opengl mode, not D3D.
11/Nov/06 NL

See Wine app DB WoW 1.12 for the entire text

Zoranthus · 2006-11-22 20:32:57

Lone_Wolf wrote:

See Wine app DB WoW 1.12 for the entire text

Thanks, but I'm already using this tweak as well as pretty much every other way to boost my FPS I could find anywhere.

test1000 wrote:

arch is not hard however(well it depends :roll eyes:)but this sounds more like a limitation of wine or like some tweak is necessary to it/wow meaning a system compiled for i686 won't help significanlty.

Ofc i could be wrong but even then you might want to use i686 builds of linux and wine(they must exist??) atleast... before spending time switching to archlinux.
That's ofc if those are the only reason for the switch, because arch is ofc .. great.

Thank you for this estimation!
The i686-Kernel seems to be standard with ubuntu 6.10.. at least upgrading to 686 ist labelled as unneccesary. All that kernel and more advanced stuff is something I'd like to play arond on my running system before diving right into something like Arch. But I have no doubt that I will do just that one day.

lucke · 2006-11-22 21:51:42

You can always try cedega - although it isn't available for free.

noriko · 2006-11-23 00:10:38

there is an aur pkgbuild here http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?d … s=0&SeB=nd

it's seems specific to running wow under wine so i'd assuem it gets better performance than the standard wine distro..

Zoranthus · 2006-11-23 08:00:07

lucke wrote:

You can always try cedega - although it isn't available for free.

I did that already and realized that it didn't run WoW as well as wine.. neither in d3d mode (where it did run faster then with wine in d3d but not as fast as wine in opengl) nor in opengl (where it didn't run as well as wine with the opengl-tweak Lone_wolf mentioned).

noriko wrote:

there is an aur pkgbuild here http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?d … s=0&SeB=nd
it's seems specific to running wow under wine so i'd assuem it gets better performance than the standard wine distro..

There was a patch for a flicker problem NVIDIA-card-owners had indoors that had to be applied before building wine for the versions 0.9.22 to 0.9.24. And then there's there's that registry tweak.

Besides that there is nothing to find on winehq that would qualify as a "patch".. an I doubt that whoever compiled the aur package knew of some way to improve wine's performance it's makers didn't. Do you think that the pragrams used to build that package might have had an impact on the it's performance though?

Lone_Wolf · 2006-11-23 21:41:55

Arch packages are build to run exclusively on i686 (or higher) systems.
Many i686 packages from other distros run on any x86 and only use optimizations from i686.

I'd say the easiest way to test if arch runs WoW better than ubuntu is to set up a partition/hdd for arch and install it as 2nd /3rd/4th (whatever is correct) distro.

To test WoW/wine a basic install with X11 , nvidia drivers, and any WM/DE you like should be enough and up and running in a few hours.

Acid7711 · 2006-11-23 21:47:30

I've gatta say when I played Wow back in the day, I ran it under Cedega and under Gentoo. It ran noticeably better in Linux than it did in Windows.

Zoranthus · 2006-11-24 15:59:59

Ok it's not faster. But everything else is and Arch still kicks ass of course.

I'm glad I tried it and Ill definitely stick with it now. Even found a nice way to improve the way it's performing (hard to describe) by renaming GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object to GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object2. Just wanted to "comment it out" liek that at first and suddenly realized something had changed. *g*

Arch Linux

#1 2006-11-22 14:55:19

Performance Question Performance Question

#2 2006-11-22 19:26:32

Re: Performance Question Performance Question

#3 2006-11-22 19:56:17

Re: Performance Question Performance Question

#4 2006-11-22 20:32:57

Re: Performance Question Performance Question

#5 2006-11-22 21:51:42

Re: Performance Question Performance Question

#6 2006-11-23 00:10:38

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#7 2006-11-23 08:00:07

Re: Performance Question Performance Question

#8 2006-11-23 21:41:55

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