On-demand shader compiling makes some games unpalyable

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Storm Engineer
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On-demand shader compiling makes some games unpalyable

Post by Storm Engineer »

So Overwatch itself works almost flawlessly with Wine now, but there is an issue that makes it unplayable for a large chunk of my gaming.

Whenever either Wine, the nvidia drivers or Overwatch has an update, for the next few dozen matches I'll have insane lag whenever an ability is used or an affect is appearing the first time. This lag is often so severe that my game become unresponsive for a whopping 5-10 seconds in the middle of a fight. Even if I spend half an hour just to take every hero to the training grounds and use every single ability, there will still be lot of lag for the first 5-15 matches.

And lately Overwatch updates every 1-3 days with minor patches so every time when the game would finally get playable, it starts all over.

I have read somewhere that this is because Wine has to re-compile shaders, and it does so on-demand, that is, when it first appears on screen.


So... is there anything that can be done about this? Shouldn't this be considered an issue that Wine has to fix (IMHO it should because it makes games unplayable. It also affects other games, eg. Guild Wars 2.)? Is there a workaround? Is there a way to force it to recompile every shader in a certain game all at once?

I want to play this game. :( So any help would be greatly appreciated.

Arch Linux 64 bit + Wine staging
jkfloris
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Re: On-demand shader compiling makes some games unpalyable

Post by jkfloris »

This sounds like this bug.
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Re: On-demand shader compiling makes some games unpalyable

Post by Storm Engineer »

jkfloris wrote:This sounds like this bug.
Ah, you are right! I have completely forgotten that I've seen that ticket and even commented... O-o

So, I wonder if there is anything we can do about it? I doN't know anything about Wine internals OR working with graphics so the technical details in that ticket are alien to me.

Do I understand correctly that if I delete the shader cache then all shaders are rebuilt when I start Overwatch, as opposed to rebuilt only when appearing in game?
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Bob Wya
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Re: On-demand shader compiling makes some games unpalyable

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