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  • ati wine world of warcraft catalyst 8.9 graphics fix

    i'm running ubuntu hardy 64, wine 1.1.4 (from winehq repo), and catalyst 8.9, on a 780g motherboard with on-board video (aka radeon 3200). wow suffers from video corruption (missing polygons, etc) in opengl mode. i don't know whether this problem is GPU specific. i have heard of similar symptoms occurring with GPUs from other manufacturers, but i don't know whether these are related in any way. i solved my problem by disabling 2 rendering extensions via the wine registry editor. the creation of the registry key is described here.

    in addition to disabling GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object, i needed to disable GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_program. the "DisabledExtensions" key seems to be a semi-colon delimited list. presumably we could disable other rendering functions this way; find some with glxinfo and try it, if you feel lucky. anyhow, the string value of the registry key that fixed wow on my system was "Gl_ARB_vertex_buffer_object;GL_ARB_vertex_program ". disabling both extensions is suggested in a wow guide in the excellent gentoo docs, but sadly, the guide's link to this procedure seems to be broken.

    i found it necessary to create a Config.wtf:

    SET gxApi "opengl"
    SET ffxGlow "0"

    add these options to the file "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Config.wtf". you may notice that the WTF/ subdirectory contains an automatically updated copy of the same file; don't bother editing this one, your changes will be clobbered when you run the game. i deleted both Config.wtf's and created my own. the changes you see here are the _only_ changes i made. i didn't do anything special with xorg.conf, add other lines to Config.wtf, or do any other weird stuff. if they don't work for you, then perhaps you have a different problem.

    it took some experimentation to find this solution, so i hope it saves folks some time and grumping.

    cheers


    P.S.

    the bad news is even in opengl mode, i get 12 fps in wow. i got a 780g motherboard because i wanted to try the newer ati graphics drivers without committing to an expensive card. so far i'm very pleased (low power, fast, cheap, s3 suspend works fine, as does audio and all ports). compiz work well, but the onboard video seems a bit slow for gaming on linux. i have read that windows users get about 20-25 fps in wow at moderate resolutions with this board, so it seems that the linux drivers suffer a performance penalty of about %50. i have seen benchmarks here at phoronix and elsewhere that seem to bear this out for most cards (nvidia as well) on many apps, including non-wine apps. i'm very curious to know what sort of wow frame rates other users of radeon 3000 and 4000 series card have experienced. i'm especially interested the 4670, if any of you try one with linux, and especially wow, i'd love to know how it works out.

    also, i was able to (sort of) run in d3d mode by using:

    SET gxApi "direct3d"
    SET M2UseShaders "0"

    the direct3d rendering mode option is, of course, mutually exclusive of opengl mode. graphical corruption in direct3d mode is somewhat ameliorated by setting M2UseShaders as false, but at 5 frames per second, this can only be recommended as a novelty.

  • #2
    About the OGL Speed. The OGL Driver vom ATIs Linux Driver is the same as The Windows version. If i run WoW in OGL on windows i have the same FPS as on Linux.
    Last edited by Nille; 22 October 2008, 01:42 PM.

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    • #3
      update:

      disabling Gl_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_vertex_program extensions resolved similar corruption issues on my intel gma950 equipped laptop. in addition, it was necessary to disable M2UseShaders (set to "0" in Config.wtf), and to resolve a crash at game startup by adding the following lines to the Device stanza of xorg.conf:

      Section "Device"
      (...)
      Option "Capabilities" "0x00000800"
      Option "UseFastTLS" "off"
      Option "KernelModuleParm" "locked-userpages=0"
      EndSection

      wow is very slow on the laptop as well, about 5-8 fps in opengl, on linux. in windows on opengl i get about 10 fps, and about 20 fps in d3d mode (resolution and settings seem to make no difference in frame rate for any tested OS/API). the game exhibits similar graphical corruption in windows/opengl. i this was resolved by setting M2UseShaders "0".

      i mention intel driver results for perspective. i wonder whether wow is generally slow in opengl, or the intel gma950 (or it's drivers) are to blame. i would test this on ati/windows but i don't run windows on my desktop machine.

      thanks nille, good to know. which ati card did you use, and what were the framerates? how do the d3d/opengl frame rates compare in windows?

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      • #4
        There is a typo in first post: "Gl_ARB_vertex_buffer_object" should be "GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object". I was surprised when glitches didn't go after I copypasted registry string from Gentoo wiki Wiki entry is fixed now
        As for me I have terrible performance on Ubuntu x64 + Radeon 3850 with all drivers after 8.5 version in WoW. 8.9 was not an exception It looks like AMD broke something in R600 code in favor of R700...

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        • #5
          I have the exakt same problems with a Radeon 4670. Spent 3 days installing and uninstalling, browsing forums, it's starting to get really frustrating. Still haven't tried to go back as far as 8.5. I'm gonna try to install 8.5 drivers today to see if this works for me.
          Framerates are in the 10-20 range with horrible tearing.
          Strange thing is everybody are reporting better frame rates running opengl compared to D3d.
          I have better framerates running D3d, 20-40 range.
          I'l repport back with my results.

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          • #6
            sorry about the typo, would edit if i could figure out how it seems that the ati drivers have improved, but are still not quite "there" yet. after a week of daily use, i have had more problems: mythtv frontend is graphically corrupted and crashes, nexuiz crashes before i can play, and as mentioned previously wow is too slow to play (however, i have had lots of fun playing extreme penguin racer). i presume that opengl performance is generally poor, but i don't care enough to find out; i ordered a 9600 gso. maybe i'll try the ati drivers again in another year or two

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            • #7
              It's sad that AMD doesn't check their drivers with Wine 3D applications and games. This performance regression since Catalyst 8.6 prevents many Radeon card owners from playing OpenGL games in Wine
              After Radeon 4670 review on Phoronix I decided to get one as a second card for my multiseat PC, but I doubt it will work with Catalyst 8.5. There is also an incoming problem of upgrading to xserver 1.5 included in Ubuntu 8.10 :/ As you probably know even Catalyst 8.9 still has no support for it. For now 3580 + 4670 + Wine = too slow to use.

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              • #8
                Well thats why a clever Linux user would only buy Nvidia cards

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                • #9
                  Well I installed the 8.5 drivers to see if they would work any better with WoW and ati 4670, they didn't...
                  To be specifik, i can't even boot on the 8.5 drivers. Ubuntu reverts back to VESA and that's it. Not too surprising considering the 4670 didn't even exist when the 8.5 was released.
                  I'm going back to XP until ATI has fixed this. I need my WoW fix... with decent framerates, not 10fps slide show.

                  really disappointed with ati right now.

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                  • #10
                    Are you guys sure that you don't get the ati GLlib error? This is a known problem with every 3d game in wine and will cause wine to revert to software render. More on that in this bug: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13335#c56

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