Left 4 Dead 2

What works

Playing the game Joining / Creating a server ( Single or Multi )

What does not

Sound cuts out after a while of playing, no idea why. Install 53 error without the patch.

Workarounds

What was not tested

The levels other than Dead Center.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Poor performance without the SGRB patch. Audio cutting out + frequent crashing gives this game a bronze. Also, when the game happens to crash, the Client.dll seems to bite the dust and remove itself. Very annoying if you do not have a backup copy of it. The only way I've found to re-download it is to spend 5 minutes re-validating the game. I was using the following graphic settings -- 1440 x 900 Windowed Anisotropic 2x Filtering Double Buffered v-Sync Multicore Rendering enabled Shader Detail - Very High Effect Detail - Low Model Texture - High Paged Pool Mem - Low Overall, this gives me about 60 FPS, which is pretty decent.

- To get past the "Incomplete Installation" error:

Use Wine-1.1.35 or later

- To get past crashing at the MOTD display when joining a multiplayer game:

Either: Use native urlmon.dll (can be limited to just left4dead2.exe),
Or: Use wine-1.1.27 or earlier.

- To improve the performance

1. Enable multicore rendering.  This increases performance by 10-15 fps in most places for me.
2. Use the following patch:
http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=24812
   This increases performance by 50-60 fps in most places for me.  Note that you may need to minimise/restore or otherwise lose and regain focus of the game to fix the flashlight and some textures if using this patch.
   The performance is so much better in wine-1.1.33 that this doesn't seem to be needed any more.  The framerate with this in wine-1.1.32 was still higher than the framerate without this in wine-1.1.33 though.

- To get past the crashing/restarting/broken game files which occurs every few minutes during gameplay

Add -lv to the launch options in Steam.  This enables low gore mode, which for some reason fixes the problem.  Low gore mode doesn't look as great, but it's worth it for the stability.