I play WoW on a private server via Steam and Proton. It’s worked perfectly so far. I haven’t played for about two weeks, and suddenly WoW isn’t working via Steam anymore. It won’t even start. On some compatibility modes, particularly older ones, the game does at least launch, but all i get is a black screen. Not even the intro sequence starts.
Here’s what I’ve already tried:
- Downloaded WoW again and set it up on Steam
- Tried all the compatibility modes available on Steam
- Tried to get WoW to run via Lutris/Wine – again, using all available compatibility modes
- Updated Kubuntu to the latest version
- Tested different graphics drivers
Unfortunately, none of this works. What also puzzles me is that some games (Diablo 3, Warcraft 3) no longer work properly either; with these, I either get stuck at a frozen start screen or (in the case of Warcraft 3) they only run at around 20 FPS.
Other games, such as CS2, on the other hand, work absolutely fine, with high graphics settings and ~250 FPS.
It almost seems as though the other games are somehow being run via the onboard graphics card. That would at least be my attempt to explain why significantly older games like Warcraft 3 run at only 20 FPS, whilst modern games like CS2 have significantly better performance.
I also have a dual-boot system, so I’ve got Windows installed as well. And on Windows, all these games run smoothly with high FPS. I’d therefore tend to rule out a hardware issue.
Sorry to bring this up again, but I’d really like to get it working again.
I noticed today that the CPU usage jumps to ~98% as soon as I start WoW. Even just in the main menu. I had previously started CS as a test to see how it behaves there. In CS, the CPU load stays around 25% even when playing against bots (so not just in the main menu) and with significantly higher graphics settings. So it seems there might be some kind of problem with the CPU?! That said, I’m even less sure how to influence the CPU’s performance and why it suddenly seems to be reaching its limits when running much older games.
I’ve attached a graph showing the CPU usage over time, including the values when launching CS, while on the desktop, and when launching WOW.
It’s probably not anything physically wrong with the CPU. It just means that the WoW binary is trying to do something in a loop and not getting anywhere (at least not quickly). It’s consistent with falling back to software rendering, which is what I guessed the problem might be, but other things could also cause that.
For Counterstrike, assuming that that’s what you mean by “CS”, I’d guess that the game’s engine probably uses about four threads, and it looks like you have 16 cores.
If you haven’t done the vkgears/glxgears stuff that I mentioned above to make sure that you can render using hardware acceleration using Vulkan and OpenGL, I’d do that. Given that you’ve said that you also get slow rendering performance with some other games, I’d be suspicious that that’s your problem, since that’s the behavior I’d expect to show up if you were falling back to software rendering — very slow rendering performance.
pokes around
It sounds like World of Warcraft switched to a 64-bit binary some time back, so probably no need to check that hardware rendering works for 32-bit binaries — just 64-bit, both Vulkan and OpenGL.
If you’ve already done the vkgears and glxgears stuff that I mentioned above and those work using hardware rendering without issues, then the underlying Linux 3D rendering stuff should be okay. That means that whatever’s at issue is probably in Proton or World of Warcraft. If you’re wanting to troubleshoot further, I’d probably try launching Steam from a virtual terminal (like, probably Konsole in your case) and then launching WoW and seeing if WoW prints anything there.
If nothing comes up there and you just get a black screen…well, let’s see. All of the important state should be on the WoW servers, so you could try uninstalling it and reinstalling WoW and see if that resolves whatever’s the issue. Take some time to download the game, but it’s not human time, so…shrugs it’d probably be the next thing I’d try.
But I wouldn’t recommend doing any of that until I’d done the vkgears/glxgears test I mentioned and confirmed that you’re rendering using your 3D hardware.