Dungeons & Dragons NeverWinter

What works

Patch Level: NW.3.20130529g.33

Installation, launch screen, patching, character generation and login in, as well as game play (story and Foundry quests).  Purchasing/selling items with in-game currency and Astral Diamonds. Played as Trickster Rogue to level 12.  See comments below.

Nividia GPU with proprietary drivers.

What does not

Everything works (see below).

Workarounds

What was not tested

Zen market (buying and using Zen), as well as some of the other, various misc. currencies.

AMD GPU.  

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

In the laucher options you may want to uncheck "Disable on demand patching." It works, but the preformance hit is considerable. Reducing the render distances helps. Wine compiles as 32-bit only (did not test 64-bit). Game settings optimized for fps, eye candy, etc on MSWin 7 64-bit. With the same settings, on the same hardware Neverwinter takes an approximate 50% hit to in-game frame rates (i.e turn down the eye, candy). Unfortunately, reducing resolution, render scales, etc gives only slight fps improvments in most areas. As always, YMMV. Some observations: 1. Installation You will need ie8 to log in and start the game: winetricks ie8 2. Neverwinter tries to autodetect hardware at each startup. Since Wine does not report the GPU hardware this can lead to very long waits or locks ups at the "Loading..." screen Also, too long a wait will time-out your earlier log-in. Add this to the registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D "VideoMemorySize"="1024" "VideoPciDeviceID"=dword:00000de1 "VideoPciVendorID"=dword:000010de Adjust as needed for your system. For my system: # lspci -n |grep 0300 01:00.0 0300: 10de:0de1 (rev a1) 3. Very Poor fps. Use winecfg to set game to run as WinXP (not Win7!) and under Graphics tab, deselect "Allow the window manager to decorate the windows" "Allow the window manager to control the windows" Select "Emulate a virtual desktop" and set the desktop size to match your in-game fullscreen resolution. This gave me 5-10 fps boost, depending on the area. Neverwinter is extemely CPU intensive. Since the GPU is not detected, NW seems to revert to software rendering (unconfirmed). On my AMD64 X2 2.4GHz, by the time I get to 25-20 fps, my cores are >98% and postively roasting while the GT430 just sits there. Possible solution are: winetricks d3dx9 (no idea which lib override might be needed) Next, find the configuration file "$HOME/.wine-nw/drive_c/Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Neverwinter/Live/localdata/gameprefs.pref" (Note: all lower case) in your WINEPREFIX. Look for PrefEntry GfxSettings.VideoCardDeviceID 0 PrefEntry GfxSettings.VideoCardVendorID 0 and change to the appropriate values in decimal (use echo $((0xNNNN)) to convert. this does not "stick" past game launch. You "might" see frame rates increase as CPU utilization decreases and GPU utlization increase. 4. Because the GPU is not detected (see #3 above), there are missing configuration options. These can be accessed via the console: /d3d9 1|0 - Use the Direct3D 9 renderer device type /d3d11 1|0 - Use the Direct3D 11 renderer device type /deviceType Direct3D9|Direct3D11 - Use the specified renderer device type Although I have a DX11 GPU, setting to d3d9 improved game play a bit.

Because of bug 33495 Neverwinter needs ie8 installed, which currently can only be installed in a 32 bit prefix.
(Alter the prefix path as needed)

WINEPREFIX=/wineprefixes/Neverwinter WINEARCH=win32 winetricks ie8 

Install and launch the game with the same prefix as before. WINEARCH isn't required after this point.

In the options panel of the launcher, it seems to help to check "Disable on-demand patching" and put "-enablerawinputsupport 0" in the "Advanced command line" editbox.

Per discussions below, some people experience a crash running in windowed mode. It seems full screen is more stable with some computer setups.
Only ie8 is needed for this game to install and run now. Previously it was required to install the following:
WINEPREFIX=/wineprefixes/Neverwinter winetricks corefonts, d3dx9, msls31, winhttp, wininet, ie8
(Left here in case someone should need them)