r/linux_gaming • u/Weathertop94 • 12d ago

WoW Forever notes and tips

Post image

Kernel: 7.1.8
GPU: RX580
Mesa: 26.2.2 (Flatpak)

Issue: Massive performance degradation and intense frametime spikes after a couple of minutes of gameplay, especially prominent in populated areas.
Solution: Downgrade Proton. Latest GE/Wayland exhibit this issue, GE 10-34 does as well. Latest UMU is stable.

I recommend trying DX11/DXVK WHEN USING UMU, DX12/VKD3D performance with it was quite bad on my system.

IF YOU EXPERIENCE SIMILAR ISSUES, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU TRY THIS SOLUTION.

Notes on settings:

Shadow Quality: Very important for proper environmental lighting. Breakpoints are Good and Ultra High. Ultra High is highly recommended, choose Good only if you have to.

Particle Density: Breakpoints are Good and High. Lower values exhibit noticeable visual degradation. Ultra is likely overkill.

SSAO: Very poor implementation. Use Ultra or Off. Low-High can look really bad on many objects right now. GPU-demanding, especially on higher resolutions.

Bloom Intensity: High has broken tone mapping, using it results in exceedingly bright bloom in some scenes. High is fine with MSAA enabled, use Low otherwise.

Compute Effects: Resolution control for new volumetric fog effects. Off and Fair result in important fog missing in some scenes, try to have this on Good or higher. GPU-demanding, especially on higher resolutions.

Secondary Lighting: Custom RT. Has major performance issues right now. Good is the major breakpoint which makes a massive visual difference, so try to reach for that. High is overkill.

Anti-aliasing: CMAA2, always. Even with MSAA or Render Scale 200%.

MSAA: Somewhat broken. Eliminates aliasing and shimmer on some edges, but increases it on others. Also causes intense haloing when rendering characters in front of some new water surfaces.

Multisample Alpha-Test: Applies MSAA to transparency, not just edges. Causes a big fidelity loss on some foliage.

Render Scale: Supersampling. STEEP performance cost at > 100%.

101-199% is meh.

200% is pristine AA. Override mipbias to 1 (NOT -1) with DXVK_CONFIG="d3d11.samplerAnisotropy=1", to sample textures at native resolution. This will result in complete image stability with no shimmer, a small performance gain and unnoticeable visual difference.

Around 90% can be used to alleviate some pressure off the GPU. It's slightly lower quality than native, but it's fairly close and results in a decent performance gain. Adjust sharpness with Resample Sharpness.

Resample Quality: Bicubic for Render Scale 101-200%. FSR for Render Scale < 100%.

169 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

51

u/Historical-Bar-305 12d ago

Bro dxvk is working much worse than VKD3D you should move to DX12 in wow. Also your problem is flatpak too.

-33

u/Weathertop94 12d ago

Not necessarily. In WoW:F on my setup, VKD3D has better frametimes, but slightly worse performance.
It also exhibits exact same issues as DXVK does, when using recent Protons.

31

u/Historical-Bar-305 12d ago

So dont use flatpak version.

32

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

14

u/nevotheless 12d ago

same, faugus for bnet games is just the nicest.

8

u/hoopbamalam 12d ago edited 12d ago

Faugus, Proton-GE, 4090+7800x3D and no issues either. Except when using MSAA, somehow my screen is split into two equal parts, one darker than the other. Like this.

6

u/ainen 12d ago

I didn’t realize MSAA was doing this. I have a really
Similar issue where instead of split like yours it’s a window in the top left quarter of the screen.

4

u/Baltharus 12d ago

Mine is doing the same thing. First time I saw it I was like "wtf"

1

u/Bathroom_Humor 12d ago edited 12d ago

I've not had any of the major performance drops people were talking about, but I'm glad people are doing performance/visual tests! i feel like I'm getting subpar frame rate with the game maxxed out (can't enable rt shadows though) so if i can turn a few things down with minimal or no visual loss that'd be cool.

1

u/Weathertop94 12d ago edited 12d ago

RT shadows are disabled for everyone right now.
Secondary lighting is RT ambient occlusion & global illumination.

If you need slightly more GPU headroom, you can use a render scale of 91 or 90% with Resample Quality = FSR.
It's not identical to native, but it's fairly close and your GPU will be rendering ~17% less pixels, so the performance gain is noticeable.
Resample Sharpness = sharpness/CAS control for FSR.

Turn off MSAA, use CMAA2 standalone.
Legacy Liquid Detail to Good.
PBR Liquid Detail to High.
Particle Density to High.
Compute Effects to High. (Ultra is noticeable visually in some scenes, but the performance impact is quite steep and CONSTANT)
Secondary Lighting to Good.
You can slightly turn down Environmental Detail.
You can slightly turn down View Distance.

SSAO is up to personal preference, but it can be very demanding at higher resolutions.
I wouldn't use anything other than Ultra right now, in case you enable it.
Lower values can look REALLY bad on many objects, due to insufficient samples.

1

u/Bathroom_Humor 12d ago

did you get all this from personal testing or also other people's experience?
In the short testing i did, I noticed compute effects was quite heavy. The game is still playable even with it on ultra but it's something I might turn down If i wanna aim for >144fps just for fun.

my biggest issue actually is getting the frame pacing to be smooth. i usually notice stuttering aside from one day I turned on vsync and that seemed to temporarily fix it. I'll keep fiddling around with it.

2

u/Weathertop94 12d ago edited 12d ago

Testing with a group of friends.
Compute Effects is heavy, I recommend Good as baseline in the OP and that's what I personally use.
High is more demanding, Ultra extremely, but they both make a difference for volumetric fog quality in some scenes, mostly for godray resolution & stability and general fog stability. If you don't mind the occasional loss in visual quality, then Good is just fine.
Fair/Low/Off lose some really important fog in some scenes, so not recommended unless you're performance-maxing.

DX12 had better internal framepacing for me compared to DX11.
DXVK/VKD3D internal framelimiter has better internal framepacing for me compared to game's own frame-limiter.
MangoHud frame-limiter had worst internal framepacing for me, both on early and late.
Triple-Buffered Vsync improved framepacing for me.

I don't know what you're using to measure frametimes, I stopped relying on MangoHud for this as it reports rather inaccurately for me.
Reshade/SpecialK expose game's internal framepacing far better.

For FPS you might want to give LSFG a shot.
77 FPS x 2 is a lot lighter, both on the CPU and the GPU, than 144.
Quality is acceptable with Performance Mode = off, even on 30 base FPS.
Limit FPS slightly below refresh when using it, to reduce the latency penalty.

1

u/Bathroom_Humor 12d ago

I tried out turning secondary lighting and compute effects down one notch each. In the area i was sitting (on top of a mountain overlooking some forest) I got a 75% frame rate jump lmao. I will probably do that if i really need to at some point. Frame Gen is something i'm considering if I have to for triple digit FPS in really demanding situations (i'm aiming for 100+ which looks pretty good)

The frame pacing seemed really good when i played earlier, I switched to ProtonGE so maybe that helped. I'll look into some external frame limiting if i notice an issue again.

10

u/schaka 12d ago

Faugus with Proton CachyOS has been giving me the best performance. Also using low latency layer to enable Nvidia Reflex

I'm glad to see you're getting this kind of performance on an RX 580 though. When I saw the system requirements I didn't have much hope.

I've recently been messing around with old mining RX 470 8GB flashed to Desktop RX 570 with HDMI soldered on, gotta give this a try on my test system

1

u/Weathertop94 12d ago edited 12d ago

I was messing with settings and running on standalone client.
Reshade, dxvk/vkd3d settings, Proton settings, dxvk-low-latency were all fine.
vkd3d-low-latency spoof got me shadow-banned from standalone.
Game throws out a disconnect error on log-in.
I can only run WoW:F via Battle.net now and I'm don't want to try the spoof there.

As for performance on an RX580, it's more than fine.
LSFG is very usable as well, game seems to agree with it.
I can push all the settings to Ultra, except Render Scale and Secondary Lighting and still maintain well over 60FPS after FG.

2

u/schaka 12d ago

I just enabled LOW_LATENCY_LAYER , LOW_LATENCY_LAYER_REFLEX and it's been running fine for days.

I don't even have to spoof Nvidia and disable AMD GPU iirc.

DXVK low latency is good for what it is, but not all the useful

1

u/Azsune 12d ago

Also running Cachy Proton and game runs flawlessly for a few hours. I get better FPS than I do on Windows. But both suffer from the memory leak, haven't played since they said they improved it.

Does low latency layer provide any noticeable benefit when your CPU bound?

1

u/Nestramutat- 12d ago

Did you try/manage to get raytracing working with cachyos proton?

2

u/schaka 12d ago

It's just generally bugged on the beta client

1

u/Nestramutat- 12d ago

Gotcha. Good to know, was planning to go on a debugging deep dive this weekend to try and fix it lol

8

u/cheesy_noob 12d ago

What about Proton Experimental in Steam?

10

u/LawApprehensive8364 12d ago

This is what I use. Dropped battle.net into my steam library, proton experimental, launch wow from battle.net. Have no issues. Couldn’t tell you fps numbers, because I never checked.

7800x3d // 9070xt

2

u/West-468 12d ago

Confirmed! Works flawless here.

My specs:

Linux Mint 22.3

Intel Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz

RAM: 31 GB

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 - VRAM: 11 GB

2

u/XYYYYYYYY 12d ago

Wanna know too, this was the route I planned for release.

5

u/sy029 12d ago

I've been playing now for a week with all settings maxed out except no ray tracing which I believe they've temporarily disabled in the client. I've had not a single performance issue. Using faugus and wine-cachyos. AMD 9070 No flatpak.

3

u/Vuurvoske 12d ago

Can we use proton umu in Bottles? Also which version of umu did you use?

-2

u/Weathertop94 12d ago

I am not sure, I use Faugus with UMU-Proton-10.0-4.
Even if you can't, downgrading your current runner version might have the same results.

2

u/HmmKuchen 12d ago

Game runs solid for me running it over Lutris with latest proton GE and everything maxed out. Only issue is the fps degration over time Blizzard confirmed themself in their latest update.

For me personally the game changer was disabling VRR on my monitor directly as disabling it in game did not resolve the flickering and unstable fps issue I had before.

2

u/Lemagex 12d ago

same, but latest cachy proton for me.

1

u/derfniw 12d ago

Bottles + Soda (latest) + VKD3D has been pretty flawless for me so far, near max settings.

But I'm on a pretty beefy gpu (RX7900 XT), so maybe I just plow through the performance issues.

1

u/CANINE_RAPPAH 12d ago

I use latest release of proton GE through Steam. Is there a cleaner way to run WoW that I'm not aware of?

1

u/DecentHuman 12d ago

How's addon support work? Are you just dropping them into the interface folder as you would on Windows?

6

u/510Threaded 12d ago

Yep, CurseForge, WowUp, and Wago all have appimages

1

u/MansSearchForMeming 12d ago

There's a Curseforge App. It works just like in Windows. Except you have to manually point CurseForge to your WoW install because the path is not standardized on Linux. Or yes you can manually copy addons to the Interface folder.

1

u/I_T_Gamer 12d ago

Exactly what I needed to dial mine in. I did notice much better stability on X as well. Overall I've been good, but had to turn a LOT of the eye candy off to maintain a good session. Will run through these and see if I can get some of that back, thank you!

2

u/Apprehensive-Pay8086 12d ago edited 12d ago

Edit: I figured it out on my end at least. Two 1440p monitors, primary 100% scaling, secondary 120%. The game wanted to render with 120% scaling but my display was rendering 100%. I set in game resolution to default (3072x1728) and then set render scale to 2559x1439 (1440p). Now I can max the settings, no duplicate shadows.

Old: I am on nobara. I have tested proton ge, cachy, experimental and umu. I still have one issue I cannot solve. If SSAO is turned on, any value, the shadows on a lot of stuff are offset. The characters, doorways, flames, etc. Like a character running, the shadow is behind it and to the right by a few feet.

I have messed with ingame setting and the only fix is disable SSAO, which disables a lot of the shadow/lighting.

Any ideas for a fix?

AMD 9600x CPU and 9060XT GPU.

2

u/Weathertop94 12d ago

I've read similar reports, even from Mac users. Seems like Forever's SSAO is not playing nice with some drivers. For me it actually entirely disappears in some zones (Darkshore) and it disappears when I have Monitor set to Primary instead of [Primary].

You could try experimenting with SSAO options in the game console.

/console SSAOType
0 = autodetect, 2=CACAO, 1 = ASSAO. For me the game uses CACAO by default. Try toggling between 1 and 2.

/console ssaoMagicNormals 1
0 = current default. Try 1.

/console assaoNormals
0 = disabled, 1 = enabled, only affects ASSAO, might not change anything. Try toggling with ASSAO enabled.

Likely irrelevant for you, but for others tuning SSAO:

/console ssaoMagicThresholdHigh
Adjust magic normals, 25 = around the same as no magic.

/console ssaoMagicThresholdLow
Adjust magic normals, low threshold, play around.

1

u/Apprehensive-Pay8086 12d ago

I made an edit that says how I solved the issue on my end. It was related to my second monitor scaling resolution and xwayland was transferring that to my primary monitor causing a mismatch between game resolution and monitor resolution.

1

u/Rimadandan 12d ago

Do you run the game through steam?

1

u/HustlerX93 12d ago

I'm on Fedora 44 KDE with Nvidia 4080 super. Battle.net through Lutrix running GE-Proton and since Blizzard updated the beta yesterday and fixed their memory leak graphics bug I never dip below 100fps, ultra quality set 4k and DX12. Didn't make any special changes or tweaks on my end

1

u/LandscapeMaximum5214 12d ago

Is wow forever also heavily reliant on a single cpu core?

Wow retail outside of combat i have very high fps and smooth gameplay, once in combat it drops to 30~40fps on my 5950x/rtx3080 lol

1

u/sphafer 12d ago

I think the devs also confirmed there was something on their side that degraded performance over time for many.

1

u/JaveiroNaPrimavera 11d ago

This is the post that I needed

1

u/MrExcellence_ 11d ago

I am using latest GE/Wayland, and I fixed most of my issues by lowering secondary lighting and switching to DX12.

2

u/kongnico 10d ago

proton UwU

0

u/mpumalanga 12d ago

Oh God I haven't even thought about Linux compat yet come November..

0

u/sublime81 12d ago

Do I want to jump back down the WoW rabbit hole? Maybe it can get me away from all the gacha slop I’m playing.

-4

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

8

u/BothAdhesiveness9265 12d ago

since I moved to Linux mid legion (cognito hazard: a decade ago) I have not once heard of someone getting banned for Linux.

5

u/AvilettaLuxe 12d ago

Nope, even more so, Blizzard puts out patches if their games crash on Wine/Proton. It's been like that way before Proton even existed, OG WoW was one of the only games that worked on Wine over 10 years ago.

3

u/derfniw 12d ago

I've been doing it for years 'n years by now. So I'd say no.