Can WoW run using the OSS ATI drivers?

[Extreme Coder]

I know this is a pretty low chance, but I've been wondering, has anyone managed to get WoW working using the radeon driver for R500?

Either Wine or Cedega is OK.

And what would be stopping the drivers from running them? Incomplete 3D implementation?

[TechMage89]

I don't know if it works or not, but if it does not, it would have to be for one of three reasons.

1.) WoW needs some features that are only available in OpenGL 1.4+, which are not yet available.

2.) WoW (or Wine) makes some assumption about how OpenGL works which is not valid for this particular case.

3.) There is an actual bug in the driver.

Unless one of these cases holds true, WoW should work with the open-source drivers (albeit, probably not as fast as the proprietary drivers at present.)

[RealNC]

It wont run. At least not "out of the box". Even if someone manages to make Wine run it, it would run at speeds that resemble a slideshow.

[Extreme Coder]

Not an optimistic one, are you?
Ok, here's what I got so far, with my ATI Xpress 1100 in my laptop:
- Tried WoW directly after installing from disc, OpenGL mode would get me a pink screen, while D3D mode would work slowly. (Title screen only, need to install rest of patches)
- Tried it after patching to 2.4, OpenGL mode worked, while D3D mode didn't. Was about to go past the title screen, then I found out I have to download a 3 GB patch.

I have a crappy internet connection, so it may take me some time until I may be done with downloading that patch.

[dkasak]

I'd say your chances are pretty good, and improving. There was some discussion in the mesa mailing list back in July along the lines of 'WOW started working again, but with a texturing bug in some circumstances'.

This was on r300 hardware. I'm not sure how you'd be with r500. I've also seen people discussing playing WOW with 'vanilla' wine, so you probably don't need cedega for this, but it may help.

Have you tried mesa-7.2? Or git latest?

[Zhick]

I just tried it and... it's running pretty well .
There are some minor annoyances (some icons are weird, as you can see in the screenshot, but I remember reading about a workaround for this; and there's the same minimap-problem as when using fglrx), but I'd say it's still very playable. Performace is ok, on ~medium details and 800x600 (windowed) it was pretty smooth (only tried around Crossroads). When I maxed out everything it became pretty sluggish though.

[psycho_driver]

Not very helpful, but I've been running Guild Wars in linux for a couple of years now. These days its practically perfect, using nVidia anyway.

[Zhick]

Ok, the messed up icons can be fixed by adding SET UIFaster "0" to your WTF/Config.wtf.
For the minimap there's no fix afaik, but there's a plugin that automatically hides the minimap as soon as you go indoors, which works around the problem. I read this might not work on WoW >= 3.0 anymore though. I tested with 2.4.3.8606.
@psych_driver: This thread is about the FOSS ati-driver. I'd say it's already pretty well known that nVidia works quite well with wine.

[Eragon]

I don?t play WOW, but it?s nice to see the ATI open source drivers support it decently, quite franly I hadn?t expected it to start

[elanthis]

One would hope that a 5 year old application wouldn't pose _too_ much of a problem for recent drivers.

I wonder if the OSS driver developers should do the same thing the WINE developers do: throw a bloodly fit and go on a bug-fixing-rampage the second WOW breaks. $deity knows that that game is the sole reason to own a computer for half the people I know...