Luna
Published
Has problems but is still LEAGUES ahead of the native Linux build. Crowbar Collective should be ashamed.
-oldgameui
Text isn't rendered amazingly well (Proton GitHub issue #4545).
- Some fonts are changed (e.g. the font that shows up on the screen for the level title)
- The console font is small and the text box is even worse
- Italicized captions are messed up, either slightly cutoff (but still perfectly readable) or basically impossible to read (not sure why this happens, but it's system-dependent - that is, whatever you see on the first italicized captions is what you get - it won't change partway through the game)
The first time the game was started, it attempted to launch with the new UI at a resolution higher than my monitor supported (leading to a black screen after the Crowbar Collective logo). After switching to old UI and adding -windowed, I was able to set it to the fullscreen resolution I needed (then I removed the -windowed launch arg).
There are some slowdowns here and there which I know didn't happen when I was on Windows 10, but they typically resolve themselves after a few seconds
The native Linux build is bad. Actually, bad isn't the right word to describe it. It's an insult, and I think Valve should ban them from listing it as SteamOS/Linux-compatible because it's so deceptive. Yeah, sure, the game technically runs...but play it for more than ten minutes and you'll be ready to file some bug reports.
Here are some problems present exclusively in the Linux build which do not exist in the Windows build:
- (Seemingly only on AMD GPUs): Horrendous lighting (especially in outdoor areas) that causes flickering bad enough that they should be required to add a strobe warning (I've tried many combinations of graphics settings & console commands...none fix it for more than a minute)
- Numerous areas with captions that fail to render (i.e. the caption box is there, but it has no text) or are just completely uncaptioned
- Lines will just appear on the screen for no discernable reason
- Floor textures randomly glitching out (seems to coincide with lighting issues)
- Character movement microstutters, causing you to jump around while other entities continue to move smoothly
The native Linux build is so bad that I thought my GPU was dying. But no, that's just how the Linux build runs. And what's more, the devs have stated on Discord that they have given up trying to bring the Linux build to feature parity. So running the Windows build via Proton, even though it has its problems, is truly the superior experience. The problems I have experienced in the Windows build are minor by comparison.
I really do love this game, but I have come to hate the developers for not just pulling the Linux build. It's unacceptably bad.
This is what you can expect from running the game via Proton 7.0-2:
- First launch - use launch options
-windowed -oldgameuiand set your resolution and fullscreen settings - Every launch thereafter - use launch options
-oldgameui - Captions are either slightly distorted or outright unreadable (Proton GitHub issue #4545)
- Some FPS drops
- Possibly less stable than running it on Windows
Runs fine, but installing it can be tricky
Brief stutters from time to time, seemingly random
It does have a tendency to lock up (requiring it to be force killed since it continues to hog the mouse input), but whether this is a result of Proton or if the game's just that bad on Windows, I do not know
This is a terrible game, but it runs well. I did experience some lag (seemingly at random) but I can't tell if it's a Proton problem or just another bug with this game.
It can also lock up (can't tell if this is the game being buggy or Proton, either), and you might have to ALT+F4 until your DE prompts you to force kill it when this happens since it will continue to hog mouse input, meaning you can't kill it via Steam.
Installation notes:
When you try to install it, the Store page will say it's in your library, but when you go to install it, you might get this error message:
An error occurred while updating Half-Life: Before (invalid platform)
This is because it has no Linux installation candidate. "No problem," you might think to yourself, "I'll just locate it in my library, go to Properties > Compatibility, and tell it to use Proton from there." That's a logical strategy, but unfortunately, this won't show up in your library if you haven't installed it for some reason, so you have to install it first before you can set a Proton version.
To get around this chicken-and-egg problem, you need to go to Steam settings > Steam Play and check the box for "Enable Steam Play for all other titles." You will have to restart your Steam client after that, but once you do that, it should install without any trouble.
AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV RADV_PERFTEST=rt %command% -novid -vulkan
Character model rendering incorrectly, transparent menu backgrounds, horrendous lighting, portals not rendering
This game would not launch until I added the -vulkan launch parameter, as I would get a D3D9 error and it would exit otherwise.
After adding AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV RADV_PERFTEST=rt, the caption windows stopped getting cut off, but no other graphics issues were addressed.
I tried Proton 7.0-5, Experimental, Hotfix, and GE 7.42, and the problems are all the same: lighting is completely broken, the camera is too far back (so it renders a partial character model that looks incredibly creepy), the menus have no background coloring (making the text near-impossible to read), and portals do not render (i.e. you see the outline, but instead of showing what is on the other side of the portal, it's either incredibly distorted or it's just the wall/floor/surface the portal was placed on).
There is a GitHub issue open for this game: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6367
From what I've read, it seems Nvidia might work ok-ish, but it's an utter dumpsterfire on AMD and Intel GPUs.
-intro:off -gp -d:DirectX -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1600x900x32
I used the Lutris install script for "SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition" (note that when you search in Lutris, you'll see several with similar names - use the one without the colon in the name!). I'm not sure where the installer comes from for the Lutris script, but I own the game on both GOG and Steam (I think it downloads it from GOG).
After installing it, I added my GPU to the recognized cards list. Specifically, this is what I added:
- Graphics Rules.sgr:
partialRule "Fast card" -any ... stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI*Radeon RX 5500*" stringMatch cardIdentity "AMD*" ... - Video Cards.sgr:
vendor "ATI" 0x1002 ... card 0x7340 "Radeon RX 5500" ...
On Windows, I can run this game with the software renderer just fine (more stable than hardware), but on Linux, the game is so slow as to be completely unplayable with the software renderer. Hardware rendering is usable, although it is still noticably slower than the software renderer on Windows, and is so slow as to be unplayable on large cities with lots of mods.
Back in 2012, I ran this game under Wine on Ubuntu 12.04 just fine. It was slower than Windows, but not by much. I was amazed.
Yet somehow, I could not get this game working when I went to install it on Linux Mint 20.2 (Ubuntu 20.04). I tried every Proton version available via Steam, tried installing the GOG version via Wine, Play on Linux, CrossOver, tried all the tips on here... Sometimes I could get it to the region view, but it would either hang while trying to load a city (even tiles that weren't even cities yet) or crash.
I had given up until I found Lutris. It installs and it runs, but it's slow. Really slow. And that's after I switched to hardware rendering, which I had always avoided on Windows due to the stability problems it tended to create.
But still, it works. And in cities with a population of <200k, it's bearable. But in my 300k population city that has a lot of custom lots, NAM tiles, etc (that I was so proud of the last time I played it on Windows), it's...every time I scroll the map, adjust the zoom level, etc, I have to wait for at least 10 seconds for the next screen draw to complete.
Almost makes me want to run a Windows thin client just for this game.
I'm not sure why it's so slow for me. Other people with similar hardware aren't having such struggles, so I have to wonder if it's a specific hardware combination making things awful or something else. Even before I symlinked the Lutris game folder to my Dropbox to access all my mods, maps, etc, it was slow.
Runs great for the most part; some teething issues but overall Uplay is the bigger annoyance
Sometimes it starts minimized and you have to manually switch to the game window.
On the second launch (the first successful launch), the game started in fullscreen and correctly detected my monitor as 1920x1080, but the game was squished to 4:3. Alt-tabbing out and back in fixed this.
If you accidentally alt-tab out when playing in fullscreen, you may get a black screen when you alt-tab back in. Alt-tabbing out and back again also fixes this.
Mouse sometimes does not work, or is so laggy that it feels like it's being polled once a second.
Fix: restart the game. (This can be done without the mouse, thankfully.)
Uplay seems to take 15 seconds to load, before the game can even begin loading. (And this is on an NVMe SSD.)
Steam will not mark the game as closed until you kill Uplay, and Uplay does not automatically close when the game closes.
Right-clicking on the taskbar icon for Uplay has a "quit" option, but most of the time clicking it does nothing, so I have to open Uplay Settings and quit Uplay from there.
Once in a blue moon, Uplay will lock up and the GUI stops responding. This is quite rare, but when it occurs, the easiest way to deal with it is as follows:
$ ps aux | grep 'ubi\|uplay\|steep' # Enumerate the processes, make sure everything looks good
$ # If all processes are as expected (i.e. only Ubisoft processes are present):
$ kill -9 `pgrep 'ubi|uplay|steep'`
$ # Otherwise, 'kill -9' each relevant PID manually
I've also had Steep lock up before in such a way that I had to drop to a TTY (CTRL+ALT+F3), kill Steep and Ubisoft processes, and then return to the graphical session (CTRL+ALT+F7). This has only happened once, and it was on first launch.
AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV DXVK_ASYNC=1 RADV_PERFTEST=rt VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_1 %command% --launcher-skip
Ray tracing is completely broken; enabling it causes crashes which leads to amdgpu module corruption
I did not experience any stuttering or lag with all graphics settings (besides ray tracing) on medium or high, except in some fights where the frame rate briefly tanked (which also happens on Windows, for the record).
Ray tracing caused a crash as soon as the intro cutscene ended that left a black screen on my monitor until I dropped to TTY and did kill -9 on the process, and then restarted Cinnamon (my DE). But even after that, the amdgpu kernel module was in such a sorry state I had to restart my computer due to severe artifacting that made the system virtually unusable.
Lesson learned: do not attempt to use ray tracing in Witcher 3.
Some people said that having Nvidia HairWorks enabled resulted in hair being removed from the game. However, it works fine for me, and I have HairWorks enabled for all characters, with AA set to 2 and the preset set to High. (That said, HairWorks is quite taxing for relatively little payoff - you're probably better off bumping other graphics settings before you enable HairWorks.)
With ray tracing disabled, I played this game for 8 hours in a single sitting without a single crash. I am running the next-gen update (4.0). I did not test DX12 mode, only DX11 since that was what people were recommending. I'll report back if I test DX12 in the future.
