City of Heroes

What works

* Ultra mode graphics
* Old-style graphics
* Antialiasing
* Vertical sync
* Sound

What does not

* The official (NCSoft) installer/updater.  See below for workaround.

* Multithreaded rendering.  City of Heroes hangs at "Loading message stores...Done" if not run with "-renderthread 0" command-line option (bug 10081).  This results in reduced performance when using CPU-heavy graphics options (water effects, shadows, and environmental reflections). A sufficiently powerful CPU can compensate for this.

* Running from NFS has very poor performance.  When moving around outdoors, CoH makes frequent uncached writes to C:\users\\Local Settings\Application Data\NCSoft\CoX\VisitedMaps, which kills the game's framerate.

Workarounds

What was not tested

* Hardware PhysX.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The official NCSoft launcher does not work under Wine. An unofficial installer/updater/launcher is available from http://www.carnildo.com/cohlaunch/index.html Tested with ATI graphics using the closed-source 11.3, 11.7, 11.9, 11.11, 12.2, and 12.4 drivers on a Radeon HD5770 card. I had the best experience with the 11.3 drivers, but they're not compatible with Xorg newer than 1.9.5 or kernels newer than 2.6.38. The 12.2 drivers also work reasonably well. See other reports for NVidia graphics and the open-source drivers. Certain Rikti Chief Mentalist powers can, under "High" shader quality, cause the game to crash. The crash message and the reputation of the closed-source ATI drivers makes me think this is a driver bug rather than a Wine bug; it may be present in Windows as well. Many driver problems can be compensated for by running City of Heroes in safe mode (the "-usetexenvcombine" command-line option), at the cost of low-quality graphics.

Information courtesy of Dan.

"There seems to be an issue currently with the ingame resolution options. If you change them, then click apply, it will reset the resolution back to before you changed it and tell you to restart. When you restart, the resolution won't have changed. To get it to change you have to set it to the correct resolution, apply, set it again, and then quit the game with the options menu still open."