wine users - Apr 2008 - World of Warcraft freezes and stutters periodically

Hi,

When I load World of Warcraft the CPU jumps from an average of 10-15% up to 100%
and stays there pretty constantly whilst playing. This doesn't seem to
affect gameplay most of the time (and I understand it may be relatively normal
behaviour for running games under Wine),  but occasionally I get a complete lock
up of the game for about 3 seconds. The game screen freezes completely and the
sound stutters during this time.

These stutters very often follow a mouse-click (for instance when selecting
items, or speaking to NPCs), but not exclusively - the game also sometimes locks
up while just running around.  Also no difference between left or right click
for the frequency of the problem.

My frame rate is fine, maybe 50-70fps on average, and my network lag is also
fine, about 40-60ms.

I'm running 32 bit Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on an AMD 64 3500+ with 2GB RAM, using
an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS.

I have disabled all my Addons to see if that helps, and it doesn't. I have
also added the Wine registry edits and config.wtf amendments suggested elsewhere
(particularly in the WoW Wine Wiki).

Any ideas?  Or any other info I can provide?

Many thanks in advance.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for the suggestions - the video card was new at Christmas (I treated
myself!), and the problem existed before the latest patch.

I've been playing around a bit with video settings and so far the problem
only seems to occur when I run the game in Windowed Mode.  If I run it
full-screen, the lock-ups seem to go away (so far) - but then I lose sound when
I alt-tab out of the game and back into it.  I have read other reports of that
problem with sound so will investigate, but I'd prefer to run in Windowed
mode, obviously without the lock-ups.

I can't think of an obvious reason why running it in a window would cause
this problem - I do use Compiz though, so maybe I'll try disabling that and
see how I get on.

Thanks for the suggestions.
I added UseFastTls 2, didn't help the stuttering/lock ups

Setting the option to play sound in the background did help with the sound
disappearing, but now I have another couple of problems.

When running WoW in full screen mode, I can alt-tab back to my browser,email
etc. just fine.  But when I switch back to WoW, it doesn't go full screen,
instead it fills the screen between the top and bottom panels (i.e. I can still
see the panels).  Not a huge problem, but as I think running the game full
screen has sorted out the lock ups, I'd like it to switch back to full
screen when I alt-tab back to it.

If I use rotate desktop cube (ctrl-alt-left/right arrow), I can switch out of
Warcraft to the next desktop, but when I try and switch back, the game has
disappeared!  I can still hear the sounds in the background so I know it's
running somewhere, but it's not on any of the desktops.



I'm tempted to just wait for the next Ubuntu release, sometime in June I
believe, to see if that will help.  I will probably be rebuilding from scratch
as my install choices of disks/partitions etc. were not ideal initially.

But I wouldn't mind getting to the bottom of this problem in the meantime.

Thanks.

If you haven't yet, try the game in crossover games.  I wasn't going to
buy it but it's really a great product.  As far as I can tell, the bulk of
what it offers is all the default regedit settings and .ini tweaking, etc, for
supported games is done for you (which honestly, if you assume you have to spend
1 hour per game finding a wiki listing all the tweaks, times X games you play,
it adds up pretty quick.  One hour is being generous).  So if there is some
tweak you have to do to eliminate that, it may already be there for you (since I
think warcraft 3 is supported).  It's free for 7 days.

you may wish to run wow fullscreen in its own instance of X, I usually gain
a good 10fps doing so, but this may not fix the problem you are having.
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It may not be WINE itself.

What about background processes? tracker? updatedb running randomly?
WoW is very CPU intensive, I'd assume that the other processes get cut
on CPU when WoW is running and that's why it stutters.

Try cleaning your system up, kill any extra processes and stop any
extra services before you run WoW in a separate X instance. Try
killing GDM (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) in a terminal (ctrl+alt+f1-f6)
and running WoW in its own X instance.

See if it helps :).

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:30 AM, potatan <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I load World of Warcraft the CPU jumps from an average of 10-15% up to
100% and stays there pretty constantly whilst playing. This doesn't seem to
affect gameplay most of the time (and I understand it may be relatively normal
behaviour for running games under Wine),  but occasionally I get a complete lock
up of the game for about 3 seconds. The game screen freezes completely and the
sound stutters during this time.
>
> These stutters very often follow a mouse-click (for instance when selecting
items, or speaking to NPCs), but not exclusively - the game also sometimes locks
up while just running around.  Also no difference between left or right click
for the frequency of the problem.
>
> My frame rate is fine, maybe 50-70fps on average, and my network lag is
also fine, about 40-60ms.
>
> I'm running 32 bit Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on an AMD 64 3500+ with 2GB RAM,
using an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS.
>
> I have disabled all my Addons to see if that helps, and it doesn't. I
have also added the Wine registry edits and config.wtf amendments suggested
elsewhere (particularly in the WoW Wine Wiki).
>
> Any ideas?  Or any other info I can provide?
>
> Many thanks in advance.
>
>
>
>
>
>