Wine-Staging 3.13.1 Released To Fix StarCraft 2

[Venemo]

I've been Playing Starcraft 2 on wine-staging. I don't care about the missing audio in 3.13.0. What I do care about is that late game FPS in big battles drops to some fraction of 1, and the stuttering is so bad I can't tell what's going on on screen. Kernel 4.15, Mesa 18.1.5, RX-480, and an (admittedly slow) AMD FX-8320. All graphics options on lowest, 1920x1080.

My wife's old desktop has an AMD A10-6700 APU and Windows 10, and it runs the game at never less than 15 fps on medium graphics settings on 1920x1080. But my kids use that one to play multiplayer SC2 with me, so that's not an option.

Of course the best option would be for me to tell Blizzard to f-off and skip the whole thing. But this is just about the only PC I still play. Someone on these forums recommended Lutris for the best possible Wine/SC2 gaming experience. Has anyone else tried that? Did it make a difference?

Your system should be able to handle Starcraft 2 much smoother and with hugely better settings than that. Hell, my XPS 13 can run it on medium settings with 60 fps.

[cybertraveler]

I know about 0 A.D. and like it. But when something got you heart eh, you can't do anything :P AoE is the only closed source software I run.

I understand

[Michael_S]

Your system should be able to handle Starcraft 2 much smoother and with hugely better settings than that. Hell, my XPS 13 can run it on medium settings with 60 fps.

I've done additional testing, and even with Gallium Nine (and it's clearly active, because I get the appropriate colored 'DirectX 9 active' notifications in game startup) I can only get adequate fps in late game with graphics on low.

On the other hand, I play the game with one of my kids and we use huge maps with a lot of mods. So late game battles can have hundreds of active units. Are the games you play with your XPS 13 often like that? Or are you a more traditional and skilled SC2 player, and the game usually doesn't last that long?

[Venemo]

I've done additional testing, and even with Gallium Nine (and it's clearly active, because I get the appropriate colored 'DirectX 9 active' notifications in game startup) I can only get adequate fps in late game with graphics on low.

On the other hand, I play the game with one of my kids and we use huge maps with a lot of mods. So late game battles can have hundreds of active units. Are the games you play with your XPS 13 often like that? Or are you a more traditional and skilled SC2 player, and the game usually doesn't last that long?

I usually just play 1v1 games these days. My games can last for up to 30-40 minutes (depending on my opponent). On larger games like 4v4 I too have to dial down the graphics otherwise it stutters a lot. What I see is the performance mostly depends on how many units are on the screen at the same time. It doesn't matter how long the game lasts or how many units there are in total, just the ones that are on the screen at the same time matter. So in case of a large battle it can stutter a bit (but not a lot) even in 1v1 (especially when the units have not been loaded yet).

Here I just have the integrated Intel UHD 620 and I use the wine-pba repo on Fedora 28 with some minor registry tweaks (though most of the online guides are so outdated that most of what they recommend just slows down the game instead of improving it). In your case you probably wouldn't benefit from wine-pba since it just improves the built-in OpenGL solution, whereas your Gallium Nine setup would give you native DirectX 9 performance.

Are you sure that the game is running on your RX 480 and not an integrated GPU (if any)? Anyway, they often say that Starcraft 2 is more CPU bound than GPU bound. So I would guess your CPU might be the bottleneck since this game benefits most from just the single core performance of your CPU. (Remember that dual-core CPUs were just starting to be a thing when this game was released. So it was not designed to scale on multiple cores.) If I were you, I would try to check if your CPU is able to perform optimally (ie. it doesn't overheat or throttle etc). If you can, consider improving your cooling or even getting a CPU that has better single core performance. (In case of my laptop, tweaking the CPU thermal settings by increasing the allowed temperature range did noticable improve the game performance.)

In general the game does a (mostly) good job on telling which setting depends on the CPU and which on the GPU. Try to dial down the settings that depend on the CPU, and maybe you could enable some that only depend on your GPU. If you want to customize the graphics beside what the game settings offer, search google for "hybrid settings" which explain how to tweak some combinations of settings which the gui does not allow.

Hope this helps!

[gbudny]

I know about 0 A.D. and like it. But when something got you heart eh, you can't do anything :P AoE is the only closed source software I run.

Did you try to run openage on your computer?

[Michael_S]

Venemo

The number of units on screen is definitely the big performance factor for me. My kid and I do the cheap and easy "pick a map with key land choke points, defend the choke points to our base, build to 200 supply, and then send a giant mass of death across the map and giggle while it annihilates everything in the way". And once our massive army is in combat, his machine keeps trucking along and mine slows to a crawl.

I might get a faster CPU, but I've got an AMD FX-8320 so anything more than a joke upgrade requires a new motherboard and a jump to DDR4 too. I was hoping to postpone that for a few more years. I'm running an antique box but aside from SC2 I don't do anything that needs fast speed with it.

[Venemo]

Michael_S

I see. Looks like your CPU uses the older AM3+ socket so indeed you would need a new motherboard and RAM for any meaningful upgrade. However taking a closer look at it, it shouldn't be such a bad CPU at all. My brother uses a Core i5 4460 with an AMD R9 270X. So a slightly faster CPU and a vastly slower GPU, and he is able to run SC2 on high settings, so I suspect that there is some other factor responsible for the slowness. Maybe it's worth to try to upgrade just the CPU cooling (or at least trying to repaste or something).

On the software side you could take a look at the WineHQ appdb entry for SC2 and maybe try some of the registry tweaks, winetricks etc. Also, do you run the 64-bit client? Is CSMT on? These are all worth checking.

[Michael_S]

Michael_S

I see. Looks like your CPU uses the older AM3+ socket so indeed you would need a new motherboard and RAM for any meaningful upgrade. However taking a closer look at it, it shouldn't be such a bad CPU at all. My brother uses a Core i5 4460 with an AMD R9 270X. So a slightly faster CPU and a vastly slower GPU, and he is able to run SC2 on high settings, so I suspect that there is some other factor responsible for the slowness. Maybe it's worth to try to upgrade just the CPU cooling (or at least trying to repaste or something).

On the software side you could take a look at the WineHQ appdb entry for SC2 and maybe try some of the registry tweaks, winetricks etc. Also, do you run the 64-bit client? Is CSMT on? These are all worth checking.

I've been playing with all of those settings for a while, nothing seems to work. Gallium Nine is the only thing that improved the situation, and it's still no silver bullet.

I will play around with the suggestions you made. To wit:
1. I could disable AMD's hyperthreading and see if that makes a difference.
2. I'll ssh in from another machine and run something to monitor CPU MHz to see what it's running at while the game is on.

But one thing I'll note is that even though the i5-4460 and the FX-8320 came out around the same time, the Intel part was substantially faster in single-threaded performance. So that might explain a good chunk of the difference. I found this thread in the SC2 forums https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/17611253242 and one of the people has an FX-8350, presumably on Windows, and has terrible FPS too.

[Venemo]

I've been playing with all of those settings for a while, nothing seems to work. Gallium Nine is the only thing that improved the situation, and it's still no silver bullet.

I will play around with the suggestions you made. To wit:
1. I could disable AMD's hyperthreading and see if that makes a difference.
2. I'll ssh in from another machine and run something to monitor CPU MHz to see what it's running at while the game is on.

But one thing I'll note is that even though the i5-4460 and the FX-8320 came out around the same time, the Intel part was substantially faster in single-threaded performance. So that might explain a good chunk of the difference. I found this thread in the SC2 forums https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/17611253242 and one of the people has an FX-8350, presumably on Windows, and has terrible FPS too.

The difference between the i5-4460 and the FX-8320 is about 30% according to userbenchmark. So the difference should definitely be a LOT less noticable. Just asked my brother, he plays on extra settings (above ultra, he says). His machine has 8 GB of DDR3 RAM (single stick, so not even dual channel) and a cheap Kingston SSD.

I would definitely suggest to monitor your CPU temperatures and check if you can improve the cooling.

[Michael_S]

I'm running a video re-encode from H.264 to H.265 (and no, I don't do that while I'm playing SC2), top reports CPU usage around 750% by ffmpeg, and these commands all report the same CPU performance at 3500 MHz:
inxi
dmidecode
sudo watch -n1 cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq