I noticed that laggy mouse suddenly lately. I don’t have it anymore now. I think that it had to do with me setting “reduce buffering”. I disabled that again. I don’t think this setting translates correctly to Linux.
Personally I think Nvidia’s “FullCompositionPipeline” actually does something similar, namely syncing the buildup of frames to the refresh rate of your screen. It is a 1 time shift of your framebuilding, that doesn’t introduce input lag. (Note: this isn’t vsync, that holds on to buffers till the screen refresh starts, introducing lag.)
Now, if your problem is something else: Remember that Overwatch uses raw input from your mouse, but since you are on Linux, this actually can be influenced by your settings outside of the game. I found this out when I first started playing OW on linux ages ago. I have a roccat mouse where I could set a lot of stuff in the open source driver. And also had DE (gnome 3) settings messing up my mouse, then it turned out, I had some sort of mouse acceleration from X. Read up about it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration
The screen resolution is correct (1920x1080), and the issue when moving the mouse also happens when using the touchpad. I set mouse acceleration to the minimum but still the same, seems unrelated.
I’ve tried with FullCompositionPipeline on and off and Reduce buffering on and off also and is the same.
Finally found the culprit of the mouse pointer being shaky: it was due to the wine processes Battle.net.exe and Agent.exe which keep running in the background after you launch the game, Overwatch.exe. They generate a wine window and system tray icon which may capture the mouse for some reason, so that interferes with the mouse cursor during ingame. Executing the commands that @Dox provided fixes the issue: killall Battle.net.exe Agent.exe:
The game run almost the same with both runners wine-staging-2.18-x86_64 and wine-staging-2.21-x86. Visually the graphics are perfect on wine, like on Windows, however the performance is a different story. Here is the comparison
Overwatch native on Windows 10:
Operating system screen settings: 1920x1080@120Hz
Graphics settings for game quality: ULTRA (the highest)
Maximum video setting inside the game: 1920x1080@120Hz
Actual game framerate: 130+ FPS
Smoothness and gameplay experience: 10/10: outstanding
Graphics driver: nvidia proprietary driver
Overwwatch on Linux with Lutris and wine-staging:
Operating system screen settings: 1920x1080@120Hz
Graphics settings for game quality: LOW (the lowest)
Maximum video setting inside the game: 1920x1080@51Hz
Actual game framerate: 50 FPS, with slowdown to 20-30 FPS, and intermittent gameplay freezing for 1-2 seconds until resumes
Smoothness and gameplay experience: 6/10: not satisfactory
Graphics driver: nvidia proprietary driver
On the video from the first post, you can see the gameplay freezing when the soldier runs up the stairs. It’s not a glitch of the screen capture software, it’s the game itself.
Conclusion:
For whatever reason it is, the Overwatch performance on wine is way way worse than on Microsoft Windows. Not only I have to decrease graphics settings to the lowest, but also the framerate is half or less, probably because wine can’t work properly at 120Hz and the game detects 51Hz maximum.
Also, the intermittent gameplay freezing makes it barely playable for recreational use, much less for competitive. For me, no way I’ll play it with wine.
Alternatively, I may try to get the game working in a different way: using GPU passthrough to a KVM virtual machine, which seems to be a trending topic in the last months. That way Overwwatch will run at bare metal performance on the guest machine, it remains to be seen if the framerate is preserved.
To get rid of the tray icon window run OW in virtual desktop mode. I think the reason it’s not showing up in your icon tray is it has something to do with Electron or whatever. Look into what add-on KDE has that offers support for those. Or try installing libappindicator-gtk3.
@cxf after installing libappindicator-gtk3 the Battle.net icon does show on the system tray icon:
However, the mouse issue persists unless I do killall Battle.net.exe Agent.exe again. No real difference.
About the DirectX, Overwatch doesn’t work with DX9 so no possible workaround yet:
Overwatch is compatible with video cards that support DirectX version 10.1 or above. If your video card only supports DirectX 10 or below, the game will not launch.
Also note that using the nvidia drivers provided by the linux distro make Battle.net crash at startup and shows an error core, you have to use the official .run installer from nvidia. The Blizzard forums are plagued with several errors from Wine.
Also you have to install several packages for your linux distribution to get Battle.net properly working, like samba, dhclient, dhcp, mpg123, lib32-mpg123, etc. Wine does not suggest you that.
