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Open source vs Catalyst for Wine

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  • Open source vs Catalyst for Wine

    I installed 64-bit Mint 14.1 on my PC with a Radeon HD 4670, and decided to try running World of Warcraft on it through Wine. Installed Wine 1.5.5 and copied WoW from a different PC. When I ran WoW at fist I saw a black screen and some digital corruption, so I installed the Catalyst drivers. Now those drivers worked but I see corruption every so often and everything seems to work in past tense. Blaming it on the outdated Catalyst 12.6 legacy drivers, I order a Nvidia Geforce GT 520 cause I heard Nvidia is far better on Linux then AMD is. Yea I know it's a piece of junk of a graphics card but I use this PC exclusively for testing Linux.

    Anyway to prepare the PC for the new graphics card I reverted the drivers back to open source and tried WoW again. For whatever reason it works perfectly. Was getting 19 fps but still not bad. I have no idea why the default drivers didn't work at first. So yea, is it better to have Catalyst for Wine or leave it open source? Also, is there anyway to get the latest open source drivers will all the fancy features turned on, like I see on these Phoronix benchmarks? I'm a Linux noob so please assume I don't know much about what commands I need to type to do this stuff.

  • #2
    I have no idea what ati drivers work better for wine.... I use oss drivers exclusively out of a moral ethic. I just wanted to comment about wine and nvidia.

    The deal with wine and nvidia is that it was written and designed on and for nvidia drivers at a time when only the nvidia drivers were decent. It uses "qwerks" (spelling) that only nvidia drivers exhibit. Its not that the catalyst drivers or the oss drivers work bad or are bad designs. Its that wine was implemented in a way that doesnt work well. My advice is to start your wine games in a terminal and everytime wine complains about something... report it....

    The way to fix wine is to fix wine... not to do work arounds with the drivers...
    Last edited by duby229; 26 December 2012, 10:51 PM.

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    • #3
      Well all I did was switch between open source and proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers even give me issues on desktop, with digital vomit that appears every so often. But again the AMD drivers are legacy 12.6 which is kinda outdated.

      It's not a driver trick just switching between two drivers.

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      • #4
        Get lastest kernel(3.7-3.8) and lastest build of MESA(3.0). If you are on ubuntu/mint, the easiest way to do this, is to use Oibaf PPA and kernel PPA(you will need to install kernel as package manually). MESA+in-kernel drivers(DRM) work together.

        The graphical corruption is probably due to missing texture compression dxtc-s2tc(free) or -s3tc(patented). The first one is freely available as a package, but might not have been installed.

        Also study, f.e. Archlinux wiki on how to finetune the opensource drivers and use PTS to maximize the performance. Thats about one day spent, but its well worth it.

        Regarding drivers, opensource are best - regardless how you take it... except 3D performance. Its not there yet, and there is a TON of improvement, say between current "testing" 3.2 kernel and 3.7/3.8.

        Nvidia with proprietary will run FINE, but you will unavoidably encounter bugs as well.

        duby229's advice is perfect, couldn't say it better.
        Last edited by crazycheese; 27 December 2012, 10:25 AM.

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        • #5
          Thanks crazycheese I did install 3.7 kernel but not MESA. Is MESA separate from the kernel or part of it? I guess when I reinstalled the drivers I accidentally installed texture compression? That's a new one I gotta remember.

          Too bad I got the new video card today. I'm more interested in getting the newest open source drivers now. Guess I gotta find that Archlinux wiki on how to fine tune.

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