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.
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.