I’m a newb with wine but I installed WoW out of order and I configured wine partially (via the Lutris install) before installing my nvidia driver and getting off nouveau. The game ended up being installed okay but there is some choppiness and I’m not sure if the choppiness is just from running through the wine layer or because of a config issue I may have caused. What are some of the things I can verify to make sure wine is setup properly? I saw some errors in the lutris logs about missing interfaces. Thanks!
EDIT: I ended up solving this by using the ‘staging’ version of wine in the Lutris launcher instead of the latest. I’m not really sure why it worked but now my FPS is basically pegged at 100 so I’m happy . The info @LeXofLeviafan gave was also very valuable - it helped me look deeper and verify a lot of stuff with my driver.
If you’re new to Linux, you may want to start with checking if your system has correct 3D acceleration setup.
First off, run glxgears -info (in terminal shell; if it’s not installed it’s usually in a package named mesa-utils or mesa-progs). It shows a window with three OpenGL-rendered gears, and every 5 seconds FPS is printed (but it’s not particularly useful as it’s usually capped to 60); and in terminal it also prints out which OpenGL version and driver it’s using (ensure it’s an NVidia one and not Intel, if your machine has both). To get a better feel of actual rendering speed you can try glxspheres (or glxspheres64; if neither are present, try installing virtualgl package).
You can also run a proper benchmark; for example GpuTest. This one is kind of old, so GUI may not actually work (it uses Python2 with Tk package to run), but you don’t actually need it to run the benchmarks themselves, and there’s several example one-liner scripts included that can be used easily (for example FurMark test usually showed at least 50 FPS when I used it with an NVidia card, while on Intel it drops to 25 or even 15 FPS depending on window size).
Finally, a recent thing called Vulkan (a performant alternative to OpenGL) has appeared in recent years; to check if it works with your card, run vulkaninfo (it should be in a similarly-named package if it’s not installed yet; if you install it then Vulkan libraries will also be installed). The output is lengthy so you may want to use it with a reader (vulkan | less) or redirect to a file (vulkaninfo > vulkaninfo.log) so that you can check if your NVidia card is detected by it. DXVK (which you can enable in Lutris) is Vulkan-based implementation of DirectX API for Wine, BTW.
There’s also a few things you may need to tweak in the driver settings; one of them is enabling modesetting – in my case it was done by creating a /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-drm.conf file with respective boot parameter for the driver:
options nvidia_drm modeset=1
…Additionally, there’s a number of problems that may occur with NVidia drivers in some cases (if you’re unlucky) due to their lack of proper Linux support; can’t say if those are actually fixable. Oh, and make sure you disabled nouveau correctly (it’s somewhat persistant, so I had to use several ways of disabling it for it to actually stop overriding the proprietary driver).
. The info @LeXofLeviafan gave was also very valuable - it helped me look deeper and verify a lot of stuff with my driver.