Oblivion under Ubuntu with Wine

[nalmeth]

This is crazy!

I had completely written off Oblivion without Cedega.

Thanks so much dude, can you write me a guide for getting a capable video card for dirt cheap? I'd buy you a six-pack

[Mongoose]

I've gone back and tested for the slow down briefly, and it appears you can crank down everything you can think of graphically and still be hit by it at times. I also tried turning off AI and a few minor tests like that. I hope it's not some stupid error condition slowing everything down, but it could be. I got it to happen at night for the first time even with grass off too. This doesn't explain the reason for the huge range in the same area from day to night or sunny to rainy. I guess this means if you get 2fps use the console to make it rain, and you should be good to go. The place I got 2fps at night I had it rain and I got 30+fps. I hope it's not something stupid like the skydome -- since I didn't test turning that off and started playing for a bit. =)

If you figure it out before I have time to play/test again post here.

UPDATE:

It was the water! I couldn't even see water anywhere, but wireframe showed it was rendering. I disabled the 'water system' in the console and jumped to 50fps. If you find any more 2fps slow downs this doesn't fix post, so we can figure them together.

In the console type: tws

UPDATE 2:

I dropped this HOWTO on the UESP wiki with details on how to fix 'purple water' and disable the water shader completely, so you don't have to toggle it off everytime you switch areas.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Linux

[Xenophoribic]

One last question, hoping it's a no. Are you using Oldblivion and assuming we would be and left it out for that reason, or are you using default Oblivion?

[Mongoose]

If you read the HOWTO it has no steps for Oldblivion at all. You just need to turn off the shaders I've mentioned to get good performance. I was turning off projected shadows for speedtree, but after disabling the water shader I found I can enable that and double my draw distance and still have a nice 25-70fps in combat outdoors with the particle systems on. The 6800 GS isn't a monster card, but you really need to have that or above imho to play smooth even with the setup I've tried to peice together.

My goal with this is to make it possible to follow a guide and run Oblivion. There is no guess work, and I'm giving you all the steps I use myself. I may provide an ini at some point for people using the same hardware I have. The only thing remotely special I do is enable more threads for the game, and frankly that doesn't help FPS very much. I do crank my gamma up via the ini a little too, but that's just b/c Oblivion is so dark with HDR off. I assume you know to turn off HDR, since Wine can't support it correctly right now. =)

I thought I'd also mention since disabling the watershader I play with Beryl on AIGLX and run in 800x600. The main thing bothering me is sometimes I get static sound fx hissing in the background, but I've been told that doesn't happen for most people. If you run into an issue or a fix post here, so we can figure out workarounds. I will warn you on Beryl + Oblivion in that it makes my GPU run hotter than if I disable Beryl.

[Xenophoribic]

I've followed your guide to the T, and I feel I'm having problems, as well as a friend of mine. He has a 7900GS, I have a 7950GT, and yet we're getting low FPS (20 on average). Along with that, there's static throughout the audio, except when talking directly to an NPC. I edited my Oblivion.ini and managed to raise my FPS slightly, but I think I'm missing something.

[Mongoose]

Did you turn off the water shader? That was the biggest bang for the buck I found. Also I've been tinkering with the GIT (0.9.30+) builds lately, and it's only a few shader fixes away from being able to play with all light passes now. The only time I get down to 20FPS is when I have everything turned on except for water shader, which is brokem. You might want to turn off grass / refraction shader / shadows / music / window envmaps as well. I also play with full draw distance personally. I always turn off music, since I assume directshow is broken. I've had others tell me there audio is fine, so I didn't mention that in the HOWTO.

If you're using 0.9.29 and have edited your ini you should be doing fine. Did you use a more recent version I updated here or at the wiki? Also use tdt and make sure it's really low fps and not just audio sample loading or AI slowing you down. You'd be surprised. Also make sure you have the environment variable set every time you play, or you'll be wasting a lot of cycles just printing trace/fixme/warnings. If you're still having problems load up 0.9.30 and in the console use 'slp 1010'. That command basically turns off diffuse and specular lighting, so the meshes won't be jacked up, but it turns off a majority of lighting as well. You can toggle it back on and off as needed while you play with 'slp 1111'. That won't look very nice, but it'll run very fast and fixes most of the audio mixing issues for sound effects. This is the reason I suggested using 0.9.29. Tell me if this helps any. I only have one set of hardware to test my ini settings on here. If all this fails disable SM30 in your ini, since your card may provide more EXT than mine causing issues on a codepath I never hit. =)

Edit:
I updated the shell script in this forum to disable all debug spew -- just like the HOWTO on the wiki. Also you can turn down you sound effects slider to 25%. You'll still hear combat and ambient effects fine, but the 'snow' will be low enough you can ignore it. It might help to play with sample rate as well, but I still assume it's mostly the software mixing to blame.

[bastiegast]

I've followed your guide to the T, and I feel I'm having problems, as well as a friend of mine. He has a 7900GS, I have a 7950GT, and yet we're getting low FPS (20 on average). Along with that, there's static throughout the audio, except when talking directly to an NPC. I edited my Oblivion.ini and managed to raise my FPS slightly, but I think I'm missing something.

Almost exactly my problems, inside I do get reasonable fps, but outside it dropped to 2 or something, well this is mainly fixed by turning of the water shader as you said. But still the audio is only good when directly talking to somebody. Lately I figured out that the noise/static whatever it is called can be shut off by turning the effects volume down, however this makes the game less fun. I have yet to try your suggestions about th slp command.
I noticed in your screenshot you've hit tab (inventory screen) and you can still see the background around your character. If I hit either tab or esc I can see the menu or inventory screen but the background is gray/green, any idea what is causing this?
By the way, how can you check your fps? Is there a command to turn some display on?

If I not already said so, I love you howto, I might be starting to play oblivion in Linux because of this.

[Mongoose]

You're using a bad ini then, or you copied the old ini off the wine application db. The background in the menu is on by default. The old ini on wine appdb was made before the forced SM1.0 option was widely reported to be the cause of the menu crashing. The reason I post all this info is because I had to figure it out myself mostly, and I don't think most people have the time or patience to do the same.

If your card has less memory or some other handicap you should start disabling features. Also you might want to run in 1024x768 or 800x600 resolutions. I would suggest starting with a default ini the game makes, which is what I presented in the HOWTO.

<pre>
; Default menu background
bStaticMenuBackground=0

; Some basic threading options for dual core users, search for all options like:
;bUseThreaded*
;eg
bUseThreadedBlood=1

; You can also wnable/increase havoc, speedtree, and openmp threads
iNumHavokThreads=2

bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1

bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1


; Try these for performance
bEquippedTorchesCastShadows=0

bReportBadTangentSpace=0
iMultiSample=0

bDoTallGrassEffect=0

bForceMultiPass=0

bDrawShadows=0
bUseRefractionShader=0
iShadowFilter=0
bShadowsOnGrass=0

bDoStaticAndArchShadows=0

bDoActorShadows=0

; If you have a SM3.0 supported card use it
bAllow30Shaders=1


; Bump up brightness, lower brighter
fGamma=0.8900
</pre>

[Xenophoribic]

I've gotten my FPS fairly consistent, 30-50 in general, occasional dip into 20's. The audio problem is still there, and for some reason, NPC's are black. Details are just barely recognizable, it's as if a heavy shadow is over the textures.

[Mongoose]

Black? Either you have HDR on or you're turning off light passes. I suggest 0.9.29, but if you must play in 0.9.30 you'll either have to give up diffuse lighting ( ouch ) or look at improperly animated meshes.

You can turn HDR off in the game UI.

You can test if it's just shadows by using this ini setting:

bDrawShadows=0

To test light passes type this command in the console:

slp 1111