I play WoW on a private server via Steam and Proton. It’s worked perfectly so far. I haven’t played for about two weeks, and suddenly WoW isn’t working via Steam anymore. It won’t even start. On some compatibility modes, particularly older ones, the game does at least launch, but all i get is a black screen. Not even the intro sequence starts.
Here’s what I’ve already tried:
- Downloaded WoW again and set it up on Steam
- Tried all the compatibility modes available on Steam
- Tried to get WoW to run via Lutris/Wine – again, using all available compatibility modes
- Updated Kubuntu to the latest version
- Tested different graphics drivers
Unfortunately, none of this works. What also puzzles me is that some games (Diablo 3, Warcraft 3) no longer work properly either; with these, I either get stuck at a frozen start screen or (in the case of Warcraft 3) they only run at around 20 FPS.
Other games, such as CS2, on the other hand, work absolutely fine, with high graphics settings and ~250 FPS.
It almost seems as though the other games are somehow being run via the onboard graphics card. That would at least be my attempt to explain why significantly older games like Warcraft 3 run at only 20 FPS, whilst modern games like CS2 have significantly better performance.
I also have a dual-boot system, so I’ve got Windows installed as well. And on Windows, all these games run smoothly with high FPS. I’d therefore tend to rule out a hardware issue.
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Are you by chance on an Nvidia 10-series GPU? Nvidia dropped support for them from a few months ago and several distros are now shipping those drivers by default, so you may need to use your package manager to select 585 versions rather than 595 or whatever the latest is.
580 is the latest Nvidia driver branch that still supports 10-series cards, IIRC.
If Nvidia hadn’t headhunted Nouveau’s main developer to work on the open source drivers for their later cards, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess…
Unfortunately, none of this works. What also puzzles me is that some games (Diablo 3, Warcraft 3) no longer work properly either; with these, I either get stuck at a frozen start screen or (in the case of Warcraft 3) they only run at around 20 FPS.
Other games, such as CS2, on the other hand, work absolutely fine, with high graphics settings and ~250 FPS.
It almost seems as though the other games are somehow being run via the onboard graphics card. That would at least be my attempt to explain why significantly older games like Warcraft 3 run at only 20 FPS, whilst modern games like CS2 have significantly better performance.
Run the game under mangohud and it’ll show you the renderer being used with an onscreen overlay.
Install mangohud, which your distro probably packages (on my Debian trixie system,
sudo apt install mangohud:i386 mangohud:amd64to get both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions), then set the game launch properties in Steam toMANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud %command%.Could be that you’re missing systemwide 3D libraries/drivers for 32 bit binaries and Warcraft 3, which is an elderly game, is a 32-bit binary and it’s falling back to software rendering — I’ve seen that before. If the renderer mangohud lists is something like “llvmpipe”, it’s doing software rendering.
EDIT: For my Debian trixie system, looks like the 32-bit package for my AMD GPU is “amdgpu-lib32”. May differ based on your distro.
EDIT2: Missed that you’re using Kubuntu. That’s Ubuntu-based, which is Debian-family, so the package name may be the same if you’re using an AMD GPU.
EDIT3: if you want a simple test that can examine both the 32-bit and 64-bit paths for both OpenGL and Vulkan, install mesa-utils-bin:i386 and mesa-utils-bin:amd64. That contains glxgears (OpenGL) and vkgears (Vulkan) with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (
vkgears.i386-linux-gnu, etc). WINE/Proton can use either OpenGL or Vulkan backends, depending upon the version and ocnfiguration. These are simple programs that just display spinning gears, used to check whether 3D is working. You can run them under mangohud as above ($ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud vkgears.x86_64-linux-gnu) without futzing with Steam or guessing whether a game’s binary us 32-bit or 64-bit. If mangohud says that any of them are rendering with llvmpipe, you’re falling back to software rendering.EDIT4: Here’s an example on my system showing hardware rendering:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/33e06f12-d2c5-464a-ad69-319c5c14a822.png
And (forced) software rendering, with a red circle around the “llvmpipe” text that I’m talking about:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/170cb0c0-ed3d-4535-9aa8-37bba61da412.png
Time for the usual troubleshooting steps:
- Have you Checked for errors in the log output of…
- Steam?
- Proton?
- The game?
- What changed on your system between the last time WoW worked properly and the first time it didn’t?
- OS update?
- Kernel?
- Drivers?
- Proton update?
- Steam update?
- Game update?
- Battle.net update?
- OS update?
- Are you watching for other people discussing the same problem?
Blizzard has a recurring history of making changes to Games and Battle.net that break in Wine. When this happens, workarounds can sometimes be found (such as reverting to a prior Battle.net version), but a real fix often requires waiting a few weeks or months for Proton to adapt. It happened roughly once per year when I was last playing their games.
Good luck.
- Have you Checked for errors in the log output of…
I think cs2 has a native Linux build available so that would explain why you get better fps there. Unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with wow to be of much use there. If you launch those games thru steam do they still use the blizzard launcher for authentication? I know some of my friends have had success with lutris for wow so you could try that.
A native Linux build doesn’t mean it runs much better, in fact it “could” in some cases run worse than playing over Proton. While Proton has a bit overhead, its minimal and the game runs “native” on your system. So that difference alone cannot explain why Warcraft 3 gets 20 fps and Counter Strike 2 gets 250 fps.
You are right I should’ve used could rather than would. While proton is very good there are very much performance penalties especially for older games due to the adress space nightmare it becomes. I suggested lutris because someone smart probably figured out what the issue is and has created a wine environment that handles it.
And just to add on to this, CS2 has been shown to perform better under Proton than running it natively.
And yes I know before anyone points it out that VAC doesn’t work under Proton, but you can still try it out on a private no VAC server. Or, the way some people were doing it around the time CS2 launched (assuming this still works), installing Steam via Wine and then launching CS2 with Proton worked as well with VAC working.
And another example of using Proton over the native version of a game would be Black Mesa, where it was always advised to run the game with Proton due to less bugs and far better performance.
This is very interesting is this in your own experience or has someone done a nice analysis of this somewhere. I did a quick Google but could only find threads of people complaining about it.
Which bit?
For CS2, especially around launch, this was advice fed to me multiple times on places like the linux gaming subreddit. And then also through my own experience of trying it out and comparing.
Black Mesa, this was also just known within the Half Life and Linux gaming communities. Plus if you tried playing the native you would start to hit your first set of visual bugs within the first 5mins, switching to Proton solved basically every issue lol.
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Use the Lutris download script. That worked fine for me
Thanks for the tip. It actually worked—I was able to at least launch WoW again and log in. But in-game, I’m getting 3 (yes, 3!) FPS :)
Something is not right… 😂
