11 replies to this topic

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Hello everyone. I was able to get MWO running on Linux (Arch Linux) and want to share some info for everyone who is interested.

I'm using wine-gaming-nine 1.9.4.1 from the AUR repository. https://aur.archlinu...ne-gaming-nine/ I compiled it, downloaded the installer from the mwomercs website, executed it and it did set up the basic file tree on whatever folder I wished to install to.

After that, I just went into the folder and copied over my entire windows version of the game over to the linux folder (naming two folders: "MechWarrior Online" and "MWOUpdate")

After copy&paste, I run the repair-tool once from inside the folder. It did not find any errors, but it cleans up stuff and sets up a user folder in the wine environment, which you need.

After that, I went directly into the bin32 folder, right-clicked on "MechWarriorOnline.exe" to run in Wine and the game started.

Only issues: The CryEngine does not recognize my GPU (Radeon HD 7970), but it doesn't seem to have any impact.

Now, thats something everyone can do. Game is installed, runs, seems to be fine.
But the game still only runs at ~22 FPS, which is a dealbreaker. But fear not, there is a solution with >60 FPS incoming.

This video ( ) shows off that with gallium-nine you can have a pretty smooth gameplay under Linux (only DX9 for now) with the latest experimental drivers and packages. The issue on this one is, that you might not want to have packages in alpha stage on your computer, but anyhow - in maybe 2-3 months, those packages will be around official release and you can play MWO under Linux with ~60 FPS.

This is esp. interesting for AMD GPU users, as AMD cards have a rather poor support in terms of performance compared to NVidia cards on Linux... until now.

TL;DR: You can have a smooth MWO running on Linux now with experimental packages or you wait for ~2 months and have it too.

Have fun testing, breaking, running, stomping!

[Revis Volek]

Was that 6 or 7fps i saw in the second run?

Thats not very good, FPS games are unplayable at those speeds unfortunately.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Revis Volek, on 01 March 2016 - 02:26 AM, said:

Was that 6 or 7fps i saw in the second run?

Thats not very good, FPS games are unplayable at those speeds unfortunately.

Its a comparison about gallium-nine and native wine. If you want ~60fps, you want to have gallium-nine running. Thats why I compiled wine with gallium-nine support.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Okay, I've compiled the mesa-git (both 64 and 32 bit) on version 11.2 (32 bit) and 11.3 (64) bit and it runs on ~120 FPS under "wine-gaming-nine" from the Aur (Arch Linux).

There are some texture flickers, but all in all, it runs and I don't see any kind of major error.

My details are on "high" btw.

Reference:
Arch Linux
MWO Client (64 bit)
DirectX 9
Intel Core I7 4930k @4.2 GHz
Radeon HD 7970 (stock)
wine-gaming-nine 1.9.4.1
11.3.0_devel.76676.1be9537-1 (for the 64 bit application)

I'm feeling like the hamster in the wheel right now.

[John McHobo]

Cool, maybe I can get a friend into the game now who is a Linux enthusiast.

[Pinscher]

Have you tried vulkan yet?

http://upport.amd.co...ease-Notes.aspx

I've used mint before and i know its core is unbuntu, Not a clue what the base for arch linux is.

EDIT: ok i see my link is busted..anyway. Im going to assume you know what Vulkan is.

Wine does have Vulkan support in their latest version 1.9.6.x.

Vulkan by its nature is opengl. I was just curious if you have tried the vulkan package and gotten the same performance as standard opengl games. Vulkan will be just like a new version of directx. Games will not run better untill they are coded for it. Once coded, their performance will explode.

Now in terms of MWO. Using wine with vulkan.( yes vulkan is already windows compatable) turn on vulkan and turn off d3d. what is the performance difference at this early stage.(Vulkan versus Wines limit of dx9)

Edited by Pinscher, 21 May 2016 - 07:24 AM.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Vulkan needs a backend-support in the engine, if not, its just another layer on-top which can only perform worse than what you already have.
As long as the CryEngine (and PGI) don't add Vulkan support for their game, MWO will not run in Vulkan native. And you only get those major benefits, if its native. (Same with DX12 btw)

IF (and this is a big if) Vulkan is capable of translating the DX9 shader command directly, then it would use a very similar approach as gallium-nine and it should work with a massive FPS improvement - but this would be highly experimental. You might have to write your own patches to get it working and thats nothing for the faint hearted guys who "just want to play".

Granted, the gallium-nine variant is also not just "install & play", but with a little under 30 minutes of time investement, you can run MWO on Linux with >120 fps. I'd say, that is "okay" for a gamer.

[Bongo TauKat]

Off topic, I never realized that battlemechs could do a super hero landing. Can we have that for an animation when dropping in game?

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Litte update:

If you are new to Linux, here some very basic info if you want to have Linux as your primary gaming platform:

Most important notes: GPU drivers, as there are several different driver packages out there for Linux. You can pretty much enable any driver on every distribution and there are wikis out there that give you a step-by-step instruction if you want to do so. But back to the drivers:

NVidia:
There are only two drivers out there:
1.) Closed Source from NVidia itself: Fast, stable, good.
2.) Open Source: Slow, not all features available but: Open Source - this driver is more for the people who want everything Open Source, but its not up to the standards of todays gaming performance (yet)

AMD:
3 Drivers. I own one and I'm more happy to have one with every day, as the support for AMD cards is really ramping up and is already pretty close to NVidias driver performance. Lets say ~10% less, but thats VERY good. 1 year ago, the difference was ~70% less performance. They might even be faster than NVidia in the future, if this goes on...

1.) Closed Source driver from AMD directly - (catalyst) - is becoming a legacy thing pretty fast in the last couple of months. AMD shifted their focus from their closed source dev to the Open Source dev and left their catalyst drivers lying dormant for quite some time now.
2.) Open Source driver: En par with Catalyst and starts merging with the newest child of the driver family, AMDGPU. This is a solid, stable choice and is reasonably fast.
3.) AMDGPU: This is the shining new vanguard for AMD card users. Newer cards have a pretty good support and it already has entries for the upcoming polaris architecture. This is a little more experimental and mostly for the newer cards (Radeon HD 8000 - RX300 including Fury and Nano (GCN 1.1+), but support for GCN 1.0 cards is added too (Radeon 7000 series)

You can use the Arch Linux wiki to find out more if interested for both AMD and Nvidia.
Once I'm back from my holidays, I'll do another run with the latest drivers and will post the results.

Another point:
If we have an enthusiast in the forums roaming around with an NVIDIA card (something newer if possible... GTX 970+ maybe?), it would be nice to fill the whole Linux topic with the green team too. I don't care about AMD vs. NVidia and just want to get people to have a nicer gameplay away from the hassle of Windows shinanigans (input lag, spyware, massive overhead, borked network drivers etc)

[Rhaythe]

I'm conflicted about WINE. I was *that guy* in college. I showed up to a LAN party with my RedHat box thinking "I can run anything you guys do in Windows" (keeping in mind, this was during the Counterstrike and Starcraft 1 days). And yeah, spent most of the time configuring and rebooting and wishing I just duel-booted my box.

Native Linux gaming is a great thing. Linux gaming under Windows Emulation... I dunno. Even if it works, it offers companies no incentive to actually develop for the Linux platform. So in effect, WINE is shooting itself in the foot. It always plays catch-up. And even if you get "good enough" performance, OpenGL will always lose some performance emulating DirectX (when it can even do so).

I mean, if you like it, great. But I still believe WINE and all of its forks do more harm to Linux gaming than good.

[Mechteric]

Hopefully the Steam OS and Steambox movement will gain some ground over the next years and we'll see more native linux games. I look forward to the day when I no longer feel compelled to pay the Windows fee

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Rhaythe, on 23 May 2016 - 04:57 AM, said:

I'm conflicted about WINE. I was *that guy* in college. I showed up to a LAN party with my RedHat box thinking "I can run anything you guys do in Windows" (keeping in mind, this was during the Counterstrike and Starcraft 1 days). And yeah, spent most of the time configuring and rebooting and wishing I just duel-booted my box.

Native Linux gaming is a great thing. Linux gaming under Windows Emulation... I dunno. Even if it works, it offers companies no incentive to actually develop for the Linux platform. So in effect, WINE is shooting itself in the foot. It always plays catch-up. And even if you get "good enough" performance, OpenGL will always lose some performance emulating DirectX (when it can even do so).

I mean, if you like it, great. But I still believe WINE and all of its forks do more harm to Linux gaming than good.

Projects that have a properly funding and the right amount of Devs can and do native Linux versions of popular games, esp. in the indie-area of games. But you will likely never find a Linux version from games created by EA/Ubisoft. And this is, where Wine shines.

For everything else in the future, we have Vulkan and a lot of companies are already doing a good chunk of dev in that field. For MWO, we can only hope, that Crytek will do some sort of Vulkan API backend that only has to be enabled per button by PGI (with the help of some middleware), but until then, there is only wine.

Thing is: The performance under Linux is better than under Windows, which is at least for me a reason to switch, as Windows is only present on my PC because it runs MWO. Once that stone is out of the way (which wine does) I have not a single reason to stay on Windows anymore.