World of Warcraft Forum

Environment: Ubuntu 14.10 with the Nvidia 343.22 drivers.

I downloaded the 14.0 version of Crossover Trial to see if the framerate would improve in World of Warcraft compared to vanilla Wine.

I can confirm it helps a lot, FPS is much better, so the D3D command stream work really makes a difference.

Unfortunately the Warlords of Draenor 6.0.x WoW patch pretty much needs 64bit support. Running on 32bit reaches the 3GB virtual memory quickly, unless you totally cripple it by lowering all the graphics options, making the game look pretty awful.

So while I wanted to run Crossover, I'm back to vanilla Wine, until Crossover gets 64bit support.

Regards, Robert.

So... what happens with WoW when you hit the limit in your case?

Did you try to run WoW with a 32bit version of Wine? What happens then?

Silviu Cojocaru wrote:

So... what happens with WoW when you hit the limit in your case?

Did you try to run WoW with a 32bit version of Wine? What happens
then?

When the 3GB limit is reached the game throws a fatal error dialog box and then quits.

Crossover and 32bit Wine both hit this problem.

Regard, Robert.

Does that box say anything about it being out of memory? I'm asking this because during beta I saw something similar happen with Starcraft II.

Silviu Cojocaru wrote:

Does that box say anything about it being out of memory? I'm asking
this because during beta I saw something similar happen with
Starcraft II.

I'm watching the output from the top command in another window. Just as the Wow.exe process reaches 3GB virtual size, WoW puts up an error dialog box thats says:
"Not enough memory. Please refer to https://battle.net/support/article/6926 to find out how to reduce your memory usage."

Cheers, Robert.

Crossover is built against and only uses 32-bit libraries and so it's not able to run 64-bit applications yet. http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 has information about compiling Wine to use the 64-bit libraries instead.

Andrew Balfour wrote:

Crossover is built against and only uses 32-bit libraries and so
it's not able to run 64-bit applications yet.
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 has information about compiling Wine
to use the 64-bit libraries instead.

I'm well aware of this. I was however hoping to get the best of both worlds, CrossOver performance and stability and 64bit support. Hopefully you will add this in a future CrossOver release. If you do I will return as a customer.

Cheers, Robert.

Sup,

now this is a bit concerning because we will be trying Draenor tonight.

What graphical settings were you using in WoW when the crash occurred?

Does this behaviour also happen on Windows? I know WoW recommends a 64-bit environment when using the new character models, but shouldn't the game run fine on 32-bit? I mean, Blizzard still supports it, right? If the game is going to need more than 32-bit can deliver, big blue should somehow warn a user when reaching a critical value. A small notification in the graphics options would do the trick (like in GTA 4 for PC).

Another question: How does Wine 64-bit perform, using Ubuntu 64-bit, with WoW 64-bit?

Anyway, I will report about our experience with Draenor tonight.

Cheers,
Alex

Alexander Tornow wrote:

Sup,

now this is a bit concerning because we will be trying Draenor
tonight.

What graphical settings were you using in WoW when the crash
occurred?

Does this behaviour also happen on Windows? I know WoW recommends a
64-bit environment when using the new character models, but
shouldn't the game run fine on 32-bit? I mean, Blizzard still
supports it, right? If the game is going to need more than 32-bit
can deliver, big blue should somehow warn a user when reaching a
critical value. A small notification in the graphics options would
do the trick (like in GTA 4 for PC).

Another question: How does Wine 64-bit perform, using Ubuntu 64-bit,
with WoW 64-bit?

Anyway, I will report about our experience with Draenor tonight.

Cheers,
Alex

If you run with really really low graphics settings then in all likelyhood the crash would come later. It's been a couple years since I ran WoW using 32bit Wine, and even then it crashed sooner or later, typically after hours of play going in and out of different dungeons and raids.

The combination of low grahics settings and a crash after a while in my opinion makes WoW unplayable using 32bit Wine.

My guess is that Blizzard has tweaked and tuned the memory allocation and how the game works in tandem with the major Windows graphics card drivers. They're probably on the border with their 32bit client even there, but manage it barely. Wine and Linux allocates memory differently, the graphics drivers and the interface between Wine and the graphics drivers maybe need more memory. In sum it runs over the 32bit limit.

WoW runs fins using 64bit Wine. Performance is decent, but graphics frames per second is a lot lower then in Windows, especially in large raids and crowded outdoor bossfights. That's why I hoped to use CrossOver as it contains a lot of graphics optimizations that aren't included in standard Wine yet.

Cheers, Robert.

Hello Robert,

true, performance is superior using Crossover vs. vanilla Wine and POL.

It's about 7:00 am in the morning here and my gf stopped playing Draenor about two hours ago. She played about five to six hours of WoW Draenor straight - via Crossover, without a single crash. I'll ask her to make some screenshots of her journey later tonight, but for now I can provide the following feedback:

Ubuntu 14.04.1 64-bit is our primary stable OS (we also have 14.10 around, but that's only for testing as it can be extremly unstable sometimes, LTS is the way to go)
AMD Phenom II X4 @3 GHZ
AMD HD 7850 1GB GDDR5
8 GB GDDR3 Corsair RAM

Settings: 1080p resolution, Vsync OFF, FXAA activated, good/fair details selected in WoW, performance enhanced graphics ON, D3D mode activated, new character models activated.

The game runs decently with relatively high framerates @ 30-100 fps /depending on the situation etc. but we limit it to 40 fps in order to avoide headaches. I haven't tested 25man raiding yet though, but I am looking forward to that in the next 72 hours. Anyway, there were no major issues whatsoever, only a single but extreme framerate dip to 5 fps, which stayed like that for about half a minute when she was in a group of five doing the Blackrock dungeon. After a few seconds, fps-rates were up to normal again.

Usually we'd be using the Open Source Radeon drivers that Ubuntu provides at default, but this time around we were forced to use the proprietary default AMD Catalyst drivers provided by Ubuntu. Performance with the Open Source drivers is good and much more stable, system integration with Unity is superior and smoother too, but there is a bug with them in Ubuntu 14.04.1 64-bit. The bug is caused by a buggy LLVM and Mesa driver combination, which has yet to be fixed on this release of Ubuntu. This issue causes a lot of games to crash when using a specific combination of graphic-settings in games powered by Wine/Crossover and it also happens in games played natively - including WoW. This issue has been adressed + fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit, which ships with a new graphics stack + Mesa drivers, but performance took a major hit. I'll provide more details on this later.

I have yet to experience an OOM error. If you could tell me where your char was when the error occured, I'd be willing to test it later. :)

Cheers,
Alex

My Crossover trial license has expired now so I'm unable to retest at the moment.

I didn't need to do anything really to trigger the out-of-memory, all it took was to stand still in a highly populated area in a city and watch people walk by. After 5 mins or so it went OOM.

I really doubt the Ubuntu 14.04 vs 14.10 difference is important. What is important though is that I'm using Nvidia graphics card with the Nvidia proprietary drivers. Could it be that these are much more memory-hungry than Catalyst?

Cheers, Robert.

The game crashes after 1-2 hours gaming due to 3 GB memory limit. My standard 64-bit Wine prefix don't have this issue, everything works normally. Either fix this bug or make 64bit version of Crossover. 32bit is the last century.

Sup guys,

well we finally got our new MSI Nvidia GTX 650 TI OC, which we are using with Ubuntu 14.04.1 64-bit and the proprietary drivers provided and tested by Ubuntu/Canonical version 331.38. We are using the high graphics setting and we also have the new character models activated. So far, after several hours of gameplay, no crashes related to OOM. Performance has gone way up too, but we have yet to test the big 25 man raids you guys mentioned earlier. Up to this point, small raids haven't been an issue though. Running around in crowded cities isn't an issue either. I'm sure we will be able to test the big raids next week (my gf just reached lvl 100 and will start raiding soon... mwuahaha).

Say, are you guys running on anything higher than "high settings" and do you have the new character models activated? I mean, when you hover with your mouse over the checkbox that activates the new models, WoW actually recommends 64-bit for it. Maybe the crashes are related to that?

@Robert: Try asking Codeweavers if they would be nice enough to extend your trial period, so you can continue to help out by providing important feedback. I'm sure they'd be willing to help you help them lol.

Anyway, I do think it would be awesome if Crossover could add 64-bit support for certain apps and games, such as WoW. It would be cool if it could be implemented as a feature that can be switched on/off for a bottle, just like the "performance enhanced graphics" feature. Oh and how does WoW 64-bit run on 64-bit Wine? Are there any major issues?

Cheers,
Alex

I play WoW both at home and at my work. I have both vanilla Wine, PlayOnLinux and Crossover installed on both computers. My video card is NVidia GTX 770 on home computer and NVidia GTX 660 on work computer. Gentoo Linux x86_64 is installed on both computers. I have both 64bit prefixes in vanilla Wine and PlayOnLinux on both computers. I didn't see any crashes due to memory issues on vanilla Wine and PlayOnLinux prefixes. WoW crashes only in Crossover on both computers! It's good idea to support Wine project by buying Crossover (because they backport 90% of code to original Wine project, I consider it as donate), but WoW support in Crossover is worse than in original Wine. 😥 I still hope, that Crossover developers will fix this bug.

Sup guys,

well we were finally able to test some 25 and 40 man raids and I can confirm the fps-drop. It wasn't too bad when playing 25 man raids, fps would drop down to 30-40 fps on medium-high settings, but playing the 40 man raids (like Molten Core) pushed our fps-rate down to about 20-25 fps. Using the new graphics-tab for raids and lowering the graphics all the way down to low did help improve the situation, but not as much as we would have hoped for (only about 5-10 fps improvement).

After several hours of testing, we didn't experience any freezes or crashes per se, but our connection was a bit unstable and we did disconnect from the game pretty often during boss fights. Not sure if this was related to Crossover in any way though.

@Codeweavers: What's the official stand on this issue and on the 32-bit OOM problem some ppl seem to be experiencing?

Cheers,
Alex

Alexander Tornow wrote:

@Codeweavers: What's the official stand on this issue and on the
32-bit OOM problem some ppl seem to be experiencing?

This issue is a pain. There are a few differences in memory management between Windows and Linux that hurt us a lot in this regard. We have to block some memory areas because windows apps never expect data to show up there, so it reduces the amount of address space available. On the other hand Linux GL drivers expect that they can map whatever they want into the client application's address space. On Windows, a lot of d3d resources are managed in the kernel.

So it's a big pain, and I'm not sure we can fundamentally fix it. Some improvements are maybe possible, but in the long run 64 bit is the only option.

Hi,

Although I plan to continue purchasing Crossover for various reasons, I think I'm going to try a 64bit wine implementation to run World of Warcraft on. I was going to use the link below for info on doing it:

http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64

Are there any additional caveats or gotchas to look out for here? I'm pretty sure I can setup an install process in Crossover and make sure any additional requirements of Warcraft are met. I'm using Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics.