Guild Wars 2 - Wine GPU usage.

[Chris-WF]

There are some Bug-Threads where people discussing about the CPU Usage of the game and that wine or the Guild Wars 2 Software don't support threads and that this is the reason for the bad fps in the game. That's comprehensible.

But for me its impossible to understand why the gpu-usage is so low that's negligible! Compared to the behaviour while running Guild Wars 2 on Windows my card just idle with wine on Linux while windows use nearly 60% of its performance.

So is the cpu and the missing thread support the bottleneck that keep the computation away from the gpu? Or its just another reason or bug in wine that just compute all the stuff on the cpu? Some Directx9 implementations that run only on the cpu and don't use the resources of the video-card driver?

Myself don't understand how wine works and don't know about the differences in directx support. Or perhaps Guild Wars 2 check the GPU and CPU and compare them and set (because the gpu is unknown or something else) the CPU to compute all the stuff?

My experience Guild Wars 1 use the GPU and Guild Wars 2 not. So why? Just because the its optimized for multi core computing?

[Sworddragon]

Are you using -dx9single? If yes try to run Guild Wars 2 without it and check again. But you shouldn't enter any textfields otherwise Guild Wars 2 could freeze.

[Chris-WF]

Yes i use -dx9single, because the freezings. Yesterday i check it again and my graphic card run during playing with
graphics clock - 324 MHz
Memory clock - 810 MHz

Adaptive Clocking is Enabled and i got no extra frames after switching the preferred mode to maximum. (705 MHz and 3054 MHz).

Just wondering about this behaviour. Guild Wars 2 is CPU bound here and it run not even 100% of my CPU-Capacity. So i speculate and suppose that the Game-Code check your Hardware and after that it run in "safe settings" or something like that.

[J V]

So is the cpu and the missing thread support the bottleneck that keep the computation away from the gpu?

That's the answer to pretty much every question here.

[yayo]

Hi,
I'm thinking about upgrade my graphics card (from nVidia GTS 450 to any cheap GTX, PCI1x or PCI2x) but reading this post and counting with my experience with GW2 via wine I'm not sure about that:

- I've started to play GW2 with very low fps: about 10-15!
- Ok, when I disabled Cool'n Quiet behaviour in the BIOS I got 20-25 fps.
- Later I discovered that if I play GW2 in a OpenBox desktop (agains a KDE desktop with no effects) I won about 5-10 fps more (I don't know why, but maybe for KDE process running in background).
- Finally I overclocked CPU (BIOS option) up to 110% of frecuency and I got about 5-10 fps again.

Now I can play with 30-35fps usually but this value downs drastically in environments with many players (PVP, Lion's...).
With this experiences, and with the post of this thread, I'm starting to think about upgrade my CPU (AMD Athlon II X3 440 to AMD Phenom II X4 965) agains upgrade graphics card, but I'm not sure about that.

Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance.

[Chris-WF]

Hi yayo!

If you have no other game where you "need" a new Card, i would save the money. Cards and CPUs will be cheaper in the future, maybe when someone solve this wine-threading issue.

I bought a new CPU and a new mainboard and all the other stuff to "play" guild wars 2, for me its comfortable to use wine or crossover for this game because with 12 (in LA, up to 35/40) fps its ok for me. Won't you spend much money, you maybe got more if you buy a new disk for Windows and the dual boot will be the best money-performance boost for you. But when you need a new CPU upgrade this instead of the Card.

And a tip for the Hacker's out there: Some of the new Processors come along with a(nother) integrated GPU. I never tested this but there should be a way to bind the card fully to a virtual Guest.

[Chris-WF]

Read anyone here who could compare the mac-client, the wine client and the native Windows Version of Guild Wars 2 for us?

That's the answer to pretty much every question here.

Time passed and i am upset to see that here is no work on the multithreading problem. I will not post at the Bugzilla-Thrad, cause the solutions or hacks or expecting ways to solve this issue are not comparable to Guild Wars 2.

I knew that you, J V had the guess that the source of this problem is that GetLogicalProcessorInformation is not implemented in wine. I'll have to check this.

Read about multithreading or multicore issue in the Bugzilla-Thread and there is a Patch from a user called Rudolf Mayerhofer. It read the System Information in /sys/devices/system/cpu/ to impart that information to the Application.

Did you check out that Patch? I would like to test this next week. Because it could be that the the gw2.exe Program handle inside some optimizations basing on that information, as you suggested month ago.

That Bugzilla-Thred end up that ae seems to implement some opengl tweaks. So if Guild Wars 2 just use directx there is no way to do the same..?

[Chris-WF]

Ok, wine 1.5.17 already read that information and pass the processor information through. Since i read more about that Patch of ae, it benefit by the frame rates is because he create a separate thread to handle the direct3D->opengl calls.

I thought that this solution won't work with guild wars 2 because the lack of an opengl support. Maybe it's possible to handle the direct3D code as well.

Its not helpful to read in patches about two year old posts, but i thought it could be a easy and logically solution.

[Chris-WF]

Guild Wars 2 in Wine-1.5.17 use more Cores now. I got 30-40% cpu-usage on each core.
With LD_PRELOAD="libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1" __GL_THREADED_OPTIMISATIONS=1 the CPU-Usage increase to 60-75%.

Seems that here are no extra fps, still 20-30 fps. :/

[scyeffect]

20 fps is the best performance i can get with 2GB DDR2 RAM, 1MB cache memory, 1,6GHz dual core Intel. I am overclocking my main board. the CPU usage is in range 40%-60%, and close other unuse program. overall i can enjoy the GW2 with this condition.

[TwinBridges]

I thought that this solution won't work with guild wars 2 because the lack of an opengl support. Maybe it's possible to handle the direct3D code as well.

This worked for me.

[Chris-WF]

So.. even if i can't contribute some new testing results i have a good message. In the modestly Land of the Norn i got up to 49 FPS now and that is more then before. Sorry to say that i have no mor time for testing in the next two month because of the holydays.

Its bad that i have made some big changes to this system..

- wine 1.5.17, patched it for the shop.
- nvidia-drivers 310.19
- Install d3dx9 and corefonts with winetricks
- Use __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1
- Set "Windwos Vista" with winecfg.

The game still lags, especially in big towns like LA with 25fps. Outside and in dungeons its awesome!