Guild Wars 2

What works

While playing it, I didn't notice any issues or parts of the game that was not working related to wine. Also the addon Heart of Thrones was working well. Even roaming with bigger groups of player was working (ignoring a suboptimal performance) quite fine.

What does not

With version 1.9.6 the CSMT feature was disabled and thus the performance was rather low compared to other Wine 1.9.x versions. While having in crowded areas normally ~35 FPS, it dropped down to 16 FPS with the new version. As no positive effects was noticed with 1.9.6, I suggest staying on 1.9.5 with activated CSMT when playing this game.

Workarounds

What was not tested

PvP

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK110B [GeForce GTX 780 Ti] (rev a1) Intel i7-2700 32bit version Using -dx9single as program argument.

• To avoid graphical problems:
• Install the latest GPU drivers
• If you have an integrated graphic chipset + a dedicated GPU, make sure that you launch GuildWars 2 with the GPU. To do this you can install programs like bumblebee (and then launch gw2 with the optirun command)
• Performance when there are a lot of entities/players: The overall peformance of the game is acceptable, but when there are a lot of entities/players it's still more laggy than on windows. You could try wine-staging with CSMT if you have performance problems.
• The game crashes after 1-4 hours when it tries to allocate more RAM than it is allowed to. There is currently no work-around for this besides restarting the game.
• This issue is particularly troublesome in World Bosses and WvW with lots of players.
• Using a 64-bit Wine profile appears to have no impact on this issue, it still crashes when it tries to allocate more than 3GB of RAM.
  

PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac users can ignore this entire note - PlayOn* already does all of this for you!

At this point, you have installed Wine and you're ready to install the game.

First, let's figure out how to manage wine prefixes.

Wine Prefix Setup

You really should get used to wine prefixes.  If you're installing everything to the default prefix (~/.wine) you're missing out on the ability to use optimal settings (and wine versions) for each game you own. PlayOnLinux/PlayOnMac asks you if you want to create a new prefix when you install something, it's so simple that I'll not explain how to do it.

If you're on linux Q4Wine is a great application which offers a GUI for wine. You can of course manage prefixes but also do a lot of other cool things.

Here is how to create a new prefix with q4wine:

Once you're more familiar with the interface, follow these steps to set up a prefix for GW2:

1. Open the "Prefixes" tab.
2. Click on the wand icon to create a new prefix.
3. In the general tab, set:
   
1. Name: Guild Wars 2
2. Prefix Path: where you want the prefix to be. You should let the default path (if there is one).
3. Architecture: choose what you want: default, win32 or win64. GuildWars2 support both 32 and 64 bits wine prefixes. Note than 64 bits prefix is only available if you have a 64 bits system (obviously).
4. In the Wine settings tab, don't change anything.
5. In the Advanced tab, if you use bumblebee, set:
1. Predefined: select optirun
   

Here's several things you can do to get better performance/correct problems:

• Install the latest proprietary GPU drivers
• If you use SLI, disable it.
  
• Specify how much memory your GPU has:
• Open the regedit program. In q4wine it is in the "Pograms" tab in the "system" folder (blue icon below your prefix).
• Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Wine
• Create the "Direct3D" key if needed
• Open the Direct3D key you've just created
• Create a new String value (right click>"new string value") with the name "VideoMemorySize".
• Set its value to the amount of memory that your GPU has, in MB.
  
• Install wine-staging and use it instead of regular wine, and enable CSMT.

Out-of-memory errors are more common on the 32-bit version of the Guild Wars 2 client. It is highly recommended to use the 64-bit client if possible.

You can fully download all of the game data and any future updates required for Guild Wars 2 by appending -image as a command-line argument to the Guild Wars 2 executable (Gw2-64.exe or Gw2.exe). An example can be found below:

WINEPREFIX=~/'Wine Prefixes/Guild Wars 2' wine 'Gw2.exe' -image

You can also check the integrity of the game data archive by appending -repair as a command-line argument (this can take longer than 5-10 minutes to complete):

WINEPREFIX=~/'Wine Prefixes/Guild Wars 2' wine 'Gw2-64.exe' -repair

For quick guidelines:

• For initial installations, -image is recommended so you don't have to worry about streaming data during gameplay
• If you've had your Gw2.dat for a while, it's a good idea to run -repair on it every now and then after updates
• If you've had to hard-shutdown your computer while GW2 was running, running -repair is highly recommended