Linux extreme stuttering

In Development WoW: Forever Beta Discussion
1

Haven’t seen anyone else with this specific issue on these forums yet, but are any other Linux users getting absolutely unplayable amounts of choppiness? I’m not talking 30-60 fps like others are having, I’m talking 2-3 fps or less when I first load into the world on my level 1 Undead. If I let it sit for a bit, I get back up to normal FPS levels, but as soon as I move my camera or character, it gets choppy again.

Can provide hardware and OS/proton specs if needed, but wanted to get this out there for now.

Edit: Should have mentioned this happens in the menus too, to a lesser degree, but still very noticable.

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2

yep, almost inaccessible to me currently

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Here’s my specs, for the record:

Distro: Fedora 44 KDE Desktop
DE: KDE Plasma 6.7.5
Kernel: 7.2.5-cachyos1.fc44.x86_64
WM: Wayland

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
RAM: 32GiB DDR5
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT

Tried with latest Proton-GE and Proton-CachyOS, same issue between both.
Adjusted all kinds of graphics settings, changed API to DX11, disabled all the optional stuff, graphics quality down to absolute minimum, capped framerate, uncapped framerate, VSync on/off, nothing really helps.

Would appreciate if anyone else comes up with any potential solutions. This seems to be a Linux-specific issue, as nobody on Windows seems to be having this kind of extreme and inconsistent stuttering. Seems like the Mac players aren’t able to play at all, though. :frowning:

5

I’m having the same sorts of problem. And now I can’t even get past the loading screen.. Earlier I could and it was exactly as you described.

Zorin 18 (Ubuntu based)

I7-7700

16gb ram

Nvidia 1650

Tried pretty much all the same stuff OP tried. Different Proton version/everything on low etc

Retail works fine

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6

I cant get past the loading screen after character select.
Distro: Nobara 44
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
GPU: Nvidia GTX 3060

7

im fine

7800x3d, nvidia 4080 super, 32mb ram, proton-ge, faugus launcher, cachyos

also to add:

game args:
–in-process-gpu

commands:

WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

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8

As of Right now, i cant get passed the loading screen as well.
Cachyos
16 gigs of ddr5 ram
5070

Installing faugus now to see if i can get that to work

9

for battle.net make sure hardware acceleration is turned of in battle net settings

10

I was freezing when the loading screen was completed and could hear the sounds in the game then always crashed.

I fixed it by lowering the secondary lighting setting in options to fair and left all other graphics on 2 on the slider. Made this change at the enter world screen for characters.

Been tweaking them up and down and mainly the new lighting/shadows are causing issues right now for me. I have a stable 50/60 fps depending on what i change. I can run both SD and HD models, high shadow, good compute & depth effects, and enabled projected textures, distance/clutter/detail set to 5 on sliders.

I also changed resample quality to bicubic since i wasn’t sure if the fidelity fx one worked properly with nvidia gpu or if it would use cpu.

Running Battle Net through Steam/Proton experimental 11, arch, Ryzen 7800x3D, and Nvidia 1080ti

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[Linux/AMD] Forever Beta - Severe FPS Fluctuations, Hitching, 3+ Min Loads & ERROR #109 Thread Freeze
WoW forever beta stuck at 100% loading on Linux
11

I’ve been using __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia gamemoderun %command% in my launch commands and Proton Experimental in Steam and both classic and Wow Forever beta have been going well for me, aside from the server pings (which is just a beta thing).

12

I also cannot get past loading screen after character select here is my report:

Title: WoW Forever Beta — recurring dispatch_exception assertion failure exception freeze during zone load, reproducible across Proton versions, does not affect Classic Anniversary

Summary:
WoW Forever Beta consistently freezes/hangs during world load (roughly 1/8th through the loading bar), eventually triggering in-game Error #109 (0x8510006d, “A thread has become unresponsive”). Confirmed via Proton logs that a single thread repeatedly hits the same internal Wine exception every ~10 seconds without making progress, for the entire duration of the freeze. This does not occur in WoW Classic Anniversary on the identical machine/environment, isolating the issue to the Forever beta client itself.

Reproduction:

Launch Battle.net → WoW Forever Beta (via Battle.net launcher, not a direct WowB.exe shortcut).
Reach character select (laggy but functional).
Select a character and attempt to load into the world.
Loading bar progresses to roughly 1/8th, then stalls and does not recover.
After ~20 seconds of no progress, the client throws Error #109 (0x8510006d).

Log evidence (from Proton log, PROTON_LOG=1):

2470.617:0a60:0a80:err:seh:dispatch_exception assertion failure exception
2480.627:0a60:0a80:err:seh:dispatch_exception assertion failure exception

This same line repeats on the same thread ID every ~10 seconds for the full duration of the hang, across multiple separate play sessions and after every remediation attempt below. Earlier in the same log, heavy NtGetContextThread polling is visible on suspended threads immediately preceding the freeze, suggesting an anti-cheat/thread-inspection interaction (possibly Warden) that Wine’s exception handling isn’t resolving cleanly.

What was tested (no change in behavior for any of these):

GE-Proton (latest) — issue present
Proton Experimental — issue present
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 — issue present
Forcing D3D11 via SET_GAME_CLIENT_DX_VERSION=11 (confirmed active, ruling out a DX12/vkd3d-specific pipeline bug) — issue present
Full motherboard BIOS/AGESA update (Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2, F16d → F21c, spanning ~6 AGESA revisions including several AMD CPU-compatibility fixes) — issue present
Cleared NVIDIA shader cache (~/.nv/, ~/.cache/nvidia/), Mesa shader cache, and vkd3d-proton pipeline cache — issue present
Reinstalled/verified game files — no change

Control test: WoW Classic Anniversary, same machine, same Proton build, same prefix-adjacent environment, launches and plays with no freezing or assertion errors.

System:

OS: Bazzite Linux (SteamOS-like, Fedora-based)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-Core Processor, Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2 rev 1.1, BIOS F21c (AGESA ComboV2 1.2.0.12)
GPU: NVIDIA, driver 615.71.09
Launch method: Battle.net launcher via Steam non-Steam-game shortcut

Notes: Given the identical error signature persists across two different Proton builds, multiple DX/sync configurations, a fully updated BIOS, and cleared caches — while Anniversary is unaffected on the same system — this points to a Forever-beta-specific incompatibility with Wine’s exception/thread-context handling rather than a local system, driver, or hardware issue.

13

I got that same error about the thread freezing for 20 seconds and 109. You posted some proton log errors so I may have to see if mine is similar to that since I only looked in the wow ones.

I do agree that the issue is probably wine/proton incompatibility. The Secondary Lighting setting is new for Forever correct? Also did you have an error description for the wow log files?

The error description in my classic beta error txt files:

<ErrorDescription> Unable to determine locality for BGDL. FileData ID 7018189 with CAS error not found

It was very similar error descriptions to the ones posted here about the mac https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/macos-client-crashes-entire-pc-wowforever-beta/629297/17

A couple of posts in that thread have tried lowering graphics https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/macos-client-crashes-entire-pc-wowforever-beta/629297/36

Secondary Lighting set to fair fixed it for me and have gotten past loading screen and in game now. I am no longer getting that error 109 for a frozen thread. Every time i enable that setting i do and crash.

14

I set all my graphics to low and i still had the issue.

15

Same issue, same error, but found a way in anyway after reading a bunch of the issues that Mac users were facing.

I played earlier and got to level 8, couldn’t login anymore and crashed as soon as loading bar fills up after character select. I’m running CachyOS, Laptop, Optimus with integrated GPU and Nvidia RTX5050 Laptop GPU, Proton version is Proton GE Latest.

BUT

Mac Users who also are crashing after character select said if you drop your graphics to minimum at the Character Select screen (Menu at the top-center of the screen, then Options). I dropped graphics Base Game Quality to 1 (lowest), and I can login, no crash after character load. After login, I raise the graphics back to 8 which is what I usually use.

Have to do this every time I login though otherwise the same crash happens.

16

Originally i didnt have any issue as above, but last log in I did. Closed battlenet and deleted cache directory fixed issue. I did notice if i logged in to the new elf area not an issue but undead are caused problems so maybe localized area.

17

Originally i didnt have any issue as above, but last log in I did. Closed battlenet and deleted cache directory fixed issue. I did notice if i logged in to the new elf area not an issue but undead are caused problems so maybe localized area.

This was the same for me. But what I suspect happened is. I went in the first time. Changed graphic settings. When I logged back in this morning it tried with the higher settings and caused the crash. Setting to low and then increasing once the game loads seems to be the workaround.

Now, I know Blizzard don’t “support” Linux. But it would be nice if they could work out why it fails only during loading and fixed it. But we can workaround it for now.

18

how do i play this on gannoo slash linucks
i have a steam machine. no i cannot use terminal and my main machine is a mac. thanx in advance

19

You should be able to run the installer within steam (adding an external compatibility app). Then when it installs, add the launcher as an external compatibility app.

I’m using Lutris on a normal PC. But, in theory it should work fine from steam using proton too.

20

Turn off PROTON_LOG by either setting it to 0 or removing it from your environment. The game sends millions of trace logs every second which is causing a massive amount of I/O syscalls.

[Linux/AMD] Forever Beta - Severe FPS Fluctuations, Hitching, 3+ Min Loads & ERROR #109 Thread Freeze
21

Looks like there was a client patch this morning. I also turned off the logging in Faugus Launcher, since I guess I enabled it at some point. One of these two things must have worked, because now the game is running buttery smooth for me. I’ll take it!

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