Game:

World of WarCraft (2004)

Duration: 7:52

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Playing windows games on Linux using Wine :
World Of Warcraft : Warlords Of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is the fifth expansion to World of Warcraft. Garrosh Hellscream travelled to the past on Draenor and changed the past. Now in an alternate timeline, players will have to face up to Garrosh and the Iron Horde.

New features :
- A new continent to explore
- Grind up to level 100
- Build and upgrade your own garrison
- New dungeons, raid, monsters
- New 3D Characters models

--- === Performance Tweaking === ---

A) Wow Options :
Wow is mostly a cpu bound game, anyway, some video options can have a huge impact on performances :
- Shadow, settings this as "fair" should have a minimum impact on performance; settings this to "good" or above can lead to a 4-8 fps reduction.
- Liquid Detail, should have a minimal impact in most game zone, but near water, "ultra" may have a bad impact on framerate; set this to "good" or below.
- Particle Density; when playing alone or in small group,dungeons... setting this to "high" or "ultra" won't be a problem. But when raiding, I usually turn this down to "fair"
- View Distance, this is probably one of the most demanding option; Turn this down if you got fps issues, but try to keep it at "good" or "fair"
- Environment Detail, a pretty high demanding option too, usually I keep it at "Low"

Most other options should have a low impact on performance ( apart from projected texture; but you should always keep this on "enabled" : otherwise you won't see some area of effect damage )

B) Command Line Option :
When not searching for issue or bug, you should always add "WINEDEBUG=-all" to your launch commandline.
For nvidia binary driver users, you may also turn on the nvidia threaded rendering : LD_PRELOAD="libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1" __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1

C) Cpu & Scalling governor :
Performances in WoW seems to be highly cpu based (at least using wine).
First, have a look up in the Config.wtf file ( /WoW/WTF/Config.wtf ) and search for a 'SET processAffinityMask' line.
For 2 core cpu :
SET processAffinityMask "3"
3 core cpu :
SET processAffinityMask "7"
Quad core :
SET processAffinityMask "15"
For 8 core cpu, you may try "255", but you'll get about the same performance, but some weird framerate fluctuation ( try for yourself, processAffinityMask "15" should be smoother )

Secondly, you may have a look at cpu governor using cpupower tool :
sudo cpupower frequency-info
"current policy: frequency should be within 1.40 GHz and 3.60 GHz. The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use within this range."
Wich means the system will adjust cpu core frequencies based on workload ( wich is a good thing : less heat, less power consumption ... ) But with some games, you may try to tell the system to stay at full frequency :
sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

( don't forget to turn frequency scaling on after playing : sudo cpupower frequency-set -g ondemand )

D) Wine experimental worker thread :
Another way to gain some performance on Linux, is using wine experimental worker thread patch set.
Some Linux distrib have allready available some wine-csmt patched packages.
Or you may search in playonlinux
Or you may build it yourself : http://youtu.be/YLHuVCbESo0


--- === Hardware & Software spec === ---
Cpu : AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core ( 8 Core 3.60 Ghz )
GPU : GeForce GTX 770
OS : Archlinux rolling release ( http://www.archlinux.org )
Wine : 1.7.24 + csmt patch ( www.winehq.org )
Capture : SimpleScreenRecorder 0.3.0 ( http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/ )

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