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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    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:amd64 to get both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions), then set the game launch properties in Steam to MANGOHUD_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

    • Markie84@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Thank you for the detailed reply. As I’m still a beginner when it comes to Linux – I’ve only been using it since February this year – it took me a while to put your suggestions into practice.

      It didn’t work out in the end, though. I was able to install mangohud and it did appear in the game settings in Lutris, but it was greyed out so I couldn’t activate it.

      In general, there seem to be further issues with my system.

      Every time I start up, the KDE Password Manager launches. And until I’ve entered my kernel password there, neither the Wi-Fi nor the browser works. That wasn’t the case until recently either.

      If I try to view additional drivers under ‘Software & Additional Drivers’, the page just keeps loading and loading, and even after 20 minutes nothing is displayed. Only when I go via ‘System – Drivers’ do I get to these additional drivers.

      Hardly any packages can be installed via Discover. I get the meaningless error ‘Faulty operation’ there.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        It didn’t work out in the end, though. I was able to install mangohud and it did appear in the game settings in Lutris, but it was greyed out so I couldn’t activate it.

        So, I don’t use Lutris, so I can’t help much there, just Steam — sorry. I don’t know how it detects whether mangohud is present. There, it isn’t a checkbox, but a text field where one can specify options to be passed to the program run.

        I don’t have Steam on the machine I’m on right now, so I can’t take a screenshot of that, unfortunately. I believe that that field is in the same place on Windows and Linux, though — not something Linux-specific.

        searches

        Here’s Steam’s help for setting the text:

        https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/7D01-D2DD-D75E-2955

        That being said, rather than trying to first run the game under Steam or Lutris, I’d try to run vkgears and glxgears from a virtual terminal program, whatever KDE uses — like, there’ll be some KDE terminal app. searches Looks like it’s called “Konsole”. That’ll cut out Lutris and Steam from the equation. If you can’t run 32-bit or 64-bit OpenGL or Vulkan stuff with hardware acceleration, then that’s a good candidate for being the cause. But if you can, then no sense in digging further down that path. Like, I’d just run, in Konsole:

        $ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud  vkgears.x86_64-linux-gnu
$ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud  vkgears.i386-linux-gnu
$ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud  glxgears.x86_64-linux-gnu
$ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud  glxgears.i386-linux-gnu

        All of those should show a window with spinning gears, and none of them should say “llvmpipe”. If they have “llvmpipe”, that path is using software rendering, very probably because you lack 3D drivers for that path.

        Uh…and just to clarify, so, Windows has a 3D API called DirectX. Linux doesn’t natively have this. Most Windows games are written to use DirectX. So when WINE or Proton (Proton being Steam’s version of WINE) run, they map DirectX calls to OpenGL or Vulkan, which are native to Linux. IIRC, different versions of DirectX have emulation targeting either OpenGL or Vulkan.

        I think that Kubuntu has the same packages as regular Ubuntu, if I understand aright how that works — it’s a flavor of Ubuntu rather than a distro derived from Ubuntu.

        So, assuming that to be the case, this should be a list of Kubuntu packages.

        https://packages.ubuntu.com/

        I don’t see lib32-amdgpu. Hmm.

        looks further

        Oh, I’m sorry. I was running a newer version of AMD’s drivers than what they ship with the distro on that system. I’m afraid I misinformed you. Apologies. There is no lib32-amdgpu — they renamed it to that in a newer version of the drivers, I guess.

        checks on another system

        Here’s a vanilla Debian trixie system. And…yeah.

        $ sudo apt install libdrm-amdgpu1:amd64 libdrm-amdgpu1:i386

        I believe that those will pull in both 32-bit and 64-bit 3D drivers for OpenGL, if you’re using an AMD GPU. Those are in Ubuntu (Ubuntu Resolute, version 26.04).

        https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/libdrm-amdgpu1

        And for Vulkan…

        $ sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:amd64

        And they’re present in Ubuntu Resolute as well:

        https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/mesa-vulkan-drivers

        That’s mesa-vulkan-drivers package isn’t specific to AMD GPUs, but it looks like it should pull them in.

        If you’re using an NVidia GPU, I’m afraid that I don’t have a system handy to check on.

        Every time I start up, the KDE Password Manager launches. And until I’ve entered my kernel password there, neither the Wi-Fi nor the browser works. That wasn’t the case until recently either.

        I also don’t use KDE, sorry, so I can’t add much there.

        It’s possible that KDE has some sort of keychain manager that it stores your Wi-Fi passwords in, in which case it probably encrypts the passwords using your keychain password. I think that they call their keychain manager KWallet. If you’re not online, that’d explain your browser not working.

        searches

        This is ten years old, so the KDE UI might have changed, but:

        https://askubuntu.com/questions/284770/how-to-disable-kde-wallet-and-have-remember-password-working

        I solved this issue by going into the network manager settings by clicking the wifi/network icon in the taskbar > Settings icon, and then from the networks screen that appears, I right-clicked my connection, clicked edit, and then under the “General configuration” tab, ticked the “All users may connect to this network” check box. When I restarted my computer, I wasn’t asked to enter the kwallet password and connected to my network automatically.

        Works for me BUT I also need to specify “Store password for all users (not encrypted)” in the “Wi-Fi Security” tab otherwise it doesn’t work.

        https://discuss.kde.org/t/kwallet-blocking-wi-fi-setup-is-pushing-new-users-away-from-kde-plasma/41854

        Recently, both my father and my wife tried using Linux with KDE. When they attempted to connect to a Wi-Fi network, a KWallet prompt appeared asking them to create a password. Neither of them understood what this was, or why a “wallet” was required just to connect to the internet. They got stuck, couldn’t finish what they were doing, and eventually gave up and went back to Windows.

        That’s recent, so it sounds like, at least on some systems, it defaults to using the KDE keychain manager to encrypt the passwords.

        If I try to view additional drivers under ‘Software & Additional Drivers’, the page just keeps loading and loading, and even after 20 minutes nothing is displayed. Only when I go via ‘System – Drivers’ do I get to these additional drivers.

        Yeah, same problem — I’m afraid that I don’t use KDE, so I can’t provide much help there.

        If nobody answers here, you might also try !linux4noobs@programming.dev on the WiFi thing and maybe the KDE package installation thing, since it’s not really a gaming question.

        • Markie84@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          1·
          12 hours ago

          Wow, thank you so much for the comprehensive reply and the detailed help.

          I’ve tried a few more things, but I’m afraid I’ll have no choice but to reinstall Kubuntu. At some point.

          Something is definitely not right. Today, Steam suddenly wouldn’t start at all. Even though the last thing I did yesterday was play CS. I turned on my PC today and Steam isn’t working anymore. Not at all. No error message or anything…

          I must admit that I’m losing some of my enthusiasm for Linux. After over 30 years of Windows, I was actually glad that I finally plucked up the courage to try Linux at the start of the year. After all, there are more and more reasons to avoid Windows these days. But if, every time I restart Linux, I have to worry that some programme will suddenly stop working, it’s really demotivating.

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            12 hours ago

            Today, Steam suddenly wouldn’t start at all. Even though the last thing I did yesterday was play CS. I turned on my PC today and Steam isn’t working anymore.

            You can run the Steam client from a terminal like Konsole, and it’ll print a bunch of information about what it’s doing.

            Can also have it write that information to a logfile, like:

            $ steam 2>steamlog.txt