Elder Scroll Online in Linux using PROTON or WINE, Standalone or Steam Version

remilafo

ssorgatem wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

ssorgatem wrote: »

Keep in mind that, in case of AMD GPU, you need MESA 18.2 or newer.Ubuntu doesn't ship this yet, but you may be able to get it from some repo.

I'd suggest playing ESO in Arch or Manjaro, which have more up-to-date drivers and software stack.


Also, yeah, launching from an NTFS partition is a bad idea.
Even if it works, it will perform poorly.

Launching from an Ext4 partition will net you better performance than on Windows when it comes to load screens.

And yes, you can just copy your "Zenimax Media" folder and it'll work. It doesn't even have to be inside a wine prefix or anything.
I copied it to ~/ESO

Reinstalled Ubuntu on a bigger SSD, the game is now on an ext4 drive, and I still get the same behavior. I guess it's time to give up and continue playing on windows until either ESO is officially supported by proton, or ZOS releases a native linux client.

You made sure to install the appropiate *Vulkan* drivers, right?
I don't know if Ubuntu installs them by default now, it used not to.

Also... regarding your earlier post... Swap on an SSD is a bad idea (way to kill it)... and also... 32 Gb of swap? Do you really need that much swap?

@ZeroXFF

Yeah i agree with Ssorgatem, it is imperative you ensure you got updated (even beta) level drivers and software. I had to do some work on my build which is ubuntu 18.04 under the hood before ESO would co-operate.

Given the age of ESO at this point you would think wine would have an easier time of it.

ssorgatem

remilafo wrote: »

ssorgatem wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

ssorgatem wrote: »

Keep in mind that, in case of AMD GPU, you need MESA 18.2 or newer.Ubuntu doesn't ship this yet, but you may be able to get it from some repo.

I'd suggest playing ESO in Arch or Manjaro, which have more up-to-date drivers and software stack.


Also, yeah, launching from an NTFS partition is a bad idea.
Even if it works, it will perform poorly.

Launching from an Ext4 partition will net you better performance than on Windows when it comes to load screens.

And yes, you can just copy your "Zenimax Media" folder and it'll work. It doesn't even have to be inside a wine prefix or anything.
I copied it to ~/ESO

Reinstalled Ubuntu on a bigger SSD, the game is now on an ext4 drive, and I still get the same behavior. I guess it's time to give up and continue playing on windows until either ESO is officially supported by proton, or ZOS releases a native linux client.

You made sure to install the appropiate *Vulkan* drivers, right?
I don't know if Ubuntu installs them by default now, it used not to.

Also... regarding your earlier post... Swap on an SSD is a bad idea (way to kill it)... and also... 32 Gb of swap? Do you really need that much swap?

@ZeroXFF

Yeah i agree with Ssorgatem, it is imperative you ensure you got updated (even beta) level drivers and software. I had to do some work on my build which is ubuntu 18.04 under the hood before ESO would co-operate.

Given the age of ESO at this point you would think wine would have an easier time of it.

It worked well on vanilla wine until the Dragon Bones update.
Then, ESO started using more D3D11 shaders per texture than the WineD3D implementation supports, giving some glitchy textures (like no ground).

But fortunately DXVK was already there, and it worked on DXVK.
However, DXVK needs very recent Vulkan drivers to work well.

ZeroXFF

remilafo wrote: »

ssorgatem wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

ssorgatem wrote: »

Keep in mind that, in case of AMD GPU, you need MESA 18.2 or newer.Ubuntu doesn't ship this yet, but you may be able to get it from some repo.

I'd suggest playing ESO in Arch or Manjaro, which have more up-to-date drivers and software stack.


Also, yeah, launching from an NTFS partition is a bad idea.
Even if it works, it will perform poorly.

Launching from an Ext4 partition will net you better performance than on Windows when it comes to load screens.

And yes, you can just copy your "Zenimax Media" folder and it'll work. It doesn't even have to be inside a wine prefix or anything.
I copied it to ~/ESO

Reinstalled Ubuntu on a bigger SSD, the game is now on an ext4 drive, and I still get the same behavior. I guess it's time to give up and continue playing on windows until either ESO is officially supported by proton, or ZOS releases a native linux client.

You made sure to install the appropiate *Vulkan* drivers, right?
I don't know if Ubuntu installs them by default now, it used not to.

Also... regarding your earlier post... Swap on an SSD is a bad idea (way to kill it)... and also... 32 Gb of swap? Do you really need that much swap?

@ZeroXFF

Yeah i agree with Ssorgatem, it is imperative you ensure you got updated (even beta) level drivers and software. I had to do some work on my build which is ubuntu 18.04 under the hood before ESO would co-operate.

Given the age of ESO at this point you would think wine would have an easier time of it.

You should read what I wrote in previous messages, I already tried it with the most recent dev build (not even beta, not even alpha, drivers that were built from the mesa dev git just a few hours prior). "Update your drivers" doesn't solve it for me.

PouletRico

Awesome ! Any plan for the Steam version ?

remilafo

@ZeroXFF

This might help...
https://level1techs.com/article/gaming-linux-updated


@PouletRico
Yeah sure thats alot easier. The purpose of this thread was to exploit Proton (a Steam specific software layer) to be used with the NON-Steam aka standalone version of ESO.
For the steam version of ESO in linux, just hit play from your library. And make sure you have the correct launch parameters.

kenjitamura

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Setup: Ubuntu 18.04, AMD R7 1700, AMD HD7850 2GB. Was testing it with Proton version 3.7.3 stable (with the 3.7.5 beta not even the launcher starts).

Any advice?

Sorry to be late to this thread but I think I can point out your problem.

AMD HD7850

Shot in the dark, but have you checked that your system is actually loading a Vulkan driver? On the Open Source drivers I think they default to not using Vulkan on the older GCN cards as support for GCN 1.0/1.1 is supposedly experimental because the cards were released before a finalized Vulkan spec. This might help:

How to get Vulkan support on older AMD GCN cards on Mint 19

SpiderCultist

you sir, are A W E S O M E

I'm going to give it a try soon, thanks

problem I see is that in future updates this method could be no longer valid, keep this thread alive please

remilafo

I wanted to append some information to the OP.. But my edit button is gone

What gives ZOS?

ZeroXFF

kenjitamura wrote: »

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Setup: Ubuntu 18.04, AMD R7 1700, AMD HD7850 2GB. Was testing it with Proton version 3.7.3 stable (with the 3.7.5 beta not even the launcher starts).

Any advice?

Sorry to be late to this thread but I think I can point out your problem.

AMD HD7850

Shot in the dark, but have you checked that your system is actually loading a Vulkan driver? On the Open Source drivers I think they default to not using Vulkan on the older GCN cards as support for GCN 1.0/1.1 is supposedly experimental because the cards were released before a finalized Vulkan spec. This might help:

How to get Vulkan support on older AMD GCN cards on Mint 19

Thank you, this has indeed fixed that problem. I still can't play, but I do get past the point when this error would appear. Now the game hangs at the end of the Bethesda intro video.

kenjitamura

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Thank you, this has indeed fixed that problem. I still can't play, but I do get past the point when this error would appear. Now the game hangs at the end of the Bethesda intro video.

Just to be sure are you using LLVM-7.0 or higher? LLVM 6 has lots of GPU hang problems.

I've heard that for some games there tends to be GPU hangs that freeze the whole system when using RADV and DXVK. The cause has been traced to be a problem with LLVM which compiles the shaders for the game but getting them to fix it has been a tiresome time consuming process for whatever reason. They released workarounds that reduces hangs in DXVK and have already upstreamed them but it hasn't entirely eliminated the problem. If that is the cause of the hang you either have to wait for LLVM to finally patch it and then upgrade to that version or you could try using the proprietary Vulkan driver AMDGPU-pro. The proprietary driver doesn't use LLVM for compiling shaders so it doesn't have that issue.

Is it possible to launch the game from the terminal and pipe the output into a log file to check and see at what point the game freezes?

If you want some better insight into what might be the problem you could try contacting the developer of DXVK. He's being employed full time by Valve to work on DXVK and he'd probably be interested in getting ESO up and running for everyone so that Steam can start touting it as a completely stable game on Proton.

AlexanderDeLarge

remilafo wrote: »

I want to point out that ESO looks WAY better on Linux..

the DXVK translator is doing a bunch of things automatically that aren't in ESO by default..

like SSAO and MSAA

Has anyone tried running DXVK through Windows for this reason?

kenjitamura

AlexanderDeLarge wrote: »

remilafo wrote: »

I want to point out that ESO looks WAY better on Linux..

the DXVK translator is doing a bunch of things automatically that aren't in ESO by default..

like SSAO and MSAA

Has anyone tried running DXVK through Windows for this reason?

This is from the DXVK project page:

Driver support
Windows drivers

• Unsupported. Any issues that are exclusive to Windows will be ignored.

remilafo

Apparently some people are managing to get DXVK running in windows. I guess for the fun of it.
imo seems like a good way to inject problems into your life. Some people are getting better performance out of their games with DXVK on windows... but man..

We usually goto linux to get away from the problems we can't solve by using windows and "put up with"/tolerate the issues linux has with gaming. At least we can work towards solving those issues.

Personally my only technical demon is Google but that's at least a demon i can live with..

some people have all sorts of demons.... microsoft, google, apple, facebook, nvidia etc etc..

remilafo

Small update.. Been running eso for a few nights now with only

PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/remi/.proton/

Environment variables, completely stable.

PROTON_NO_ESYNC= putting this to =0 or removing it from my launch parameters eso will crash upon login.

Nvidia 1080ti
i7-4820K

Remilafo

remilafo

Hello All

Written September 7th 2018

So i still can't seem to edit my OP, so the update will happen here.

After more tweeking and research. ESO on linux has improved even more.

Here are some good links to ensure your system is up to date.

Level1tech a good place to start for gaming on linux in general

Steam community Proton testing grounds Check if your game is working

Another community Proton compatibility website

Yet another resource for game compatability - Lutris

Official Steam Proton Minimum Requirements -- IMPORTANT -- Like Seriously!

LLVM package site, not listed on the requirements but it's needed.

How to get Vulkan Support for older AMD cards -- Courtesy of @kenjitamura

The Ubuntu Kernel update utility, Update yourself to the latest stable kernel.

My personal update, ESO is running flawlessly now with no tweeking launch parameters, And my performance is better by about 5% than it was under windows. And the visuals are better as well, see my description in another post about that above.

AlexanderDeLarge

remilafo wrote: »

Hello All

Written September 7th 2018

So i still can't seem to edit my OP, so the update will happen here.

After more tweeking and research. ESO on linux has improved even more.

Here are some good links to ensure your system is up to date.

Level1tech a good place to start for gaming on linux in general

Steam community Proton testing grounds Check if your game is working

Another community Proton compatibility website

Yet another resource for game compatability - Lutris

Official Steam Proton Minimum Requirements -- IMPORTANT -- Like Seriously!

LLVM package site, not listed on the requirements but it's needed.

How to get Vulkan Support for older AMD cards -- Courtesy of @kenjitamura

The Ubuntu Kernel update utility, Update yourself to the latest stable kernel.

My personal update, ESO is running flawlessly now with no tweeking launch parameters, And my performance is better by about 5% than it was under windows. And the visuals are better as well, see my description in another post about that above.

Can you get some screenshots comparing the visual differences between DXVK on Linux and the Windows client? Maybe even a benchmark comparison video? Anything to highlight the awful image quality problems this game has and the benefits of Linux is a really good thing.

I'd do it myself but I can't seem to get it running. Doesn't help that I'm stuck running a 1080Ti until AMD's Navi releases.

remilafo

Can you get some screenshots comparing the visual differences between DXVK on Linux and the Windows client? Maybe even a benchmark comparison video? Anything to highlight the awful image quality problems this game has and the benefits of Linux is a really good thing.

I'd do it myself but I can't seem to get it running. Doesn't help that I'm stuck running a 1080Ti until AMD's Navi releases.

Look i took two screen shots of the light source from spindle-clutch where i find the differences most obvious.

You have to understand, i didn't move to linux for eso because i thought it was going to be better, I assumed my gaming experience was infact going to be worse. So i don't have a comparative screenshot for you cause i wasn't expecting this to happen. And a benchmark video! are you kidding?

Anyways hopefully the screenshots give you somekind of idea.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nxetNCv9q6uW8W-B-b5yBKc26ENDKZNq

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d3zBScWUHUHL6olrhLcm9OntOP16f6of

EDIT1: UGH, those screenshots lost alot of quality in the JPEG compression, sorry it's the only way to make the files sizes reasonable.

Here is a copy/paste from my description before

im not sure a screenshot would help, the difference in general is very subtle. But i think i can describe it well enough.
What got me noticing initially is how the light sources (torches, glowing crystals etc.) were producing far more realistic light and their bloom/bleed had a nice spread. Compared to when i was in windows there are certain light sources like a particular corner in Spindleclutch dungeon and another glowing crystal in imperial city prison that were STUNNINGLY bright like there is a 10000watt light bulb in there. On linux there intensity is majorly tuned down and in my opinion it looks better.

In addition to this the specularity (shiny/glossy effect) on wet stone, metalic armors and surfaces that are reflecting light look better. On windows the armors looked more like plastic and the stones seemed quite mate in their reflective quality.

Generally speaking, i would say that whatever about vulkan is responsible for rendering light and how it blooms and bleeds and how it reflects is doing it better than directx

SpiderCultist

Ok, already tested this for the same cpu+gpu+mem triplet (i5-6600+1050 ti+2400 ddr4; different moba), settings (high), addons (fresh installation), etc. and I got the following results:

• Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) + latest nvidia driver (396? iirc) + vulkan + proton = around 60 FPS fluently and constantly
• Windows 10 + dx11 + latest nvidia driver (non-developer) = maintained 90 FPS in Deshaan, surrounded by people (at the same day hour for both tests)

that's like 1/3 loss in terms of raw graphical throughput or in other words Windows runs a 66% better than Linux (w/ Vulkan + proton) at this moment for this setup

I do have to say the game looks much cooler on Linux with proton as stated by OP and it shockingly runs well (in spite of the performance loss) on Linux...

remilafo

SpiderCultist wrote: »

Ok, already tested this for the same cpu+gpu+mem triplet (i5-6600+1050 ti+2400 ddr4; different moba), settings (high), addons (fresh installation), etc. and I got the following results:

• Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) + latest nvidia driver (396? iirc) + vulkan + proton = around 60 FPS fluently and constantly
• Windows 10 + dx11 + latest nvidia driver (non-developer) = maintained 90 FPS in Deshaan, surrounded by people (at the same day hour for both tests)

that's like 1/3 loss in terms of raw graphical throughput or in other words Windows runs a 66% better than Linux (w/ Vulkan + proton) at this moment for this setup

I do have to say the game looks much cooler on Linux with proton as stated by OP and it shockingly runs well (in spite of the performance loss) on Linux...

Good comparison. That's a heavy difference in performance.. Let me ask..

- did you get version 7 of the LLVM?
- did you increase your file directives up from 4096, so that you can turn off no_esync?
- Are you running the latest proton beta?
- is your ESO on a NTFS filesystem volume?
- running a more modern kernel?

etc etc.. from the list i made a few posts back.

im asking because before i fixed these things, my performance was down as well.

SpiderCultist

remilafo wrote: »

SpiderCultist wrote: »

Ok, already tested this for the same cpu+gpu+mem triplet (i5-6600+1050 ti+2400 ddr4; different moba), settings (high), addons (fresh installation), etc. and I got the following results:

• Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) + latest nvidia driver (396? iirc) + vulkan + proton = around 60 FPS fluently and constantly
• Windows 10 + dx11 + latest nvidia driver (non-developer) = maintained 90 FPS in Deshaan, surrounded by people (at the same day hour for both tests)

that's like 1/3 loss in terms of raw graphical throughput or in other words Windows runs a 66% better than Linux (w/ Vulkan + proton) at this moment for this setup

I do have to say the game looks much cooler on Linux with proton as stated by OP and it shockingly runs well (in spite of the performance loss) on Linux...

Good comparison. That's a heavy difference in performance.. Let me ask..

- did you get version 7 of the LLVM?
- did you increase your file directives up from 4096, so that you can turn off no_esync?
- Are you running the latest proton beta?
- is your ESO on a NTFS filesystem volume?
- running a more modern kernel?

etc etc.. from the list i made a few posts back.

im asking because before i fixed these things, my performance was down as well.

It is, but I surprisingly could run ESO on Linux smoothly and beautiful looking.

Replying to your questions:

I got LLVM7 and I turned off proton_no_esync following this thread.
As for Proton I didn't use the beta I'm afraid, just proton 3.7.
I did use ext4 as filesystem.
Regarding the kernel I didn't touch it and I'm now realizing THAT could have been part of the problem. I'm planning to get rid of W10 and testing it this weekend on Manjaro with a more modern kernel.

What other advices would you give me to test it again? maybe kernel 4.18? or 4.19? I have unbusy that machine so I could make any test for the sake of testing. From my own experience Manjaro (w/ XFCE) is not a heavy-consuming CPU distro so I might see a performance improvement at some extent. I'll let you know.

ZoS not gonna like I download the game so many times but hey, I'm subscriber.

Vicarra

Oh dang....no more work will be done on my beefy linux work machine

SpiderCultist

@remilafo I made a test and recorded it so you could see it

The game runs well, maintained 40-70FPS and cooler than the regular wine-staging + vulkan.

FPS counter is at bottom left and it's been recorded under Ubuntu, this time with Proton beta, I have yet to test it with a newer kernel.

https://youtu.be/GUMD4f7MfQE

For those who are not familiar with Linux Gaming (like me) it is refreshing to see the game running on it. You won't actually see any difference from those who run it on Windows until the end.

Notes for newcomers:
Having at least 1 proton-compatible game in your library so you can actually use proton.
Install x86 fonts (sudo apt install libfreetype6:i386) for the launcher.

remilafo

@SpiderCultist

Regarding Kernel.
Not 4.19 - thats still a development kernel.

4.18.5 worked really well for me..
But i got even better results with 4.17.19

Bear in mind what kernel works best for you is VERY hardware dependant. Specifically your Chipset and CPU .. for example mine is x79 with 4820k

Also try Proton beta under your steam settings, value recently upgrade to 3.7-6 and it's quite good. Im currently enjoying Senua Sacrifice: Hellblade via proton.

SpiderCultist

Ok, couldn't wait.

I've won ~15FPS with manjaro 17.11 (xfce) and kernel 4.17.19.

remilafo

SpiderCultist wrote: »

Ok, couldn't wait.

I've won ~15FPS with manjaro 17.11 (xfce) and kernel 4.17.19.

sounds like you are happy with that result. so YAY

Karius_Imalthar

I would kick Windows to the curb in a heartbeat if I could get my games to work in something else. Thank you for this.

remilafo

Karius_Imalthar wrote: »

I would kick Windows to the curb in a heartbeat if I could get my games to work in something else. Thank you for this.

I/We can probably help.. All the games i play work in linux without virtualization. Which includes some very windows only titles like ESO (obviously), Senua Sacrifice: Hellblade , Legend of grimrock 2, redout and some other tiny indy titles.

Generally speaking gaming on linux these days is near parity to gaming on windows, the only time games really fail to work like AT ALL is when there is a DRM middle man injected.

any particular titles you are concerned about?

Quiet_One

AlexanderDeLarge wrote: »

Has anyone tried running DXVK through Windows for this reason?

I have, not all builds work but some of the later Haagch ones do. I recently started thinking how to help the game performance and that made me try DXVK, to give me a little hope for the future, currently it sadly runs a maximum of 20% worse for me at certain places. Graphics wise the differences are very minor from screenshot comparisons I've done, mostly lightning that's noticeable.

ssorgatem

Latest PTS build has switched the Mac client from OpenGL to Vulkan.

If the Windows client switched to Vulkan too, we wouldn't need DXVK and its performance penalty, which would give us increased performance, probably at least on par with current Windows performance.

Since they already have a Vulkan renderer... it shouldn't be much work at all to enable it on Windows too.
Also, they clearly made it with more than Mac platform in mind; otherwise they would have used Metal directly.

Let's hope for the best.

Quiet_One

ssorgatem wrote: »

Latest PTS build has switched the Mac client from OpenGL to Vulkan.

If the Windows client switched to Vulkan too, we wouldn't need DXVK and its performance penalty, which would give us increased performance, probably at least on par with current Windows performance.

Since they already have a Vulkan renderer... it shouldn't be much work at all to enable it on Windows too.
Also, they clearly made it with more than Mac platform in mind; otherwise they would have used Metal directly.

Let's hope for the best.

This is awesome news! If it indeed happened, it would be great for everyone!