A Hat in Time

What works

The game is in conjunction with WineD3D on older hardware like an iMac12,2 which contains a Radeon HD 6770M GPU only with low quality settings somehow playable. With standard settings, the game stutters and lags.

Furthermore when WineD3D is used, some UI elements / graphical effects are missing. This is true for all quality settings, for more information see the CLI output below.

In my case, to run the game smooth and with all effects, I had to use Gallium Nine, see Extra comments for more information.

Note, the game "A Hat in Time" can be regarded as one of the most modern and one of the most resource hungry Direct X9.0c based games ever produced. ;-)

What does not

With WineD3D I get at the CLI the following message:

0110:fixme:d3d:debug_d3dformat Unrecognized 0x34324644 (as fourcc: DF24) WINED3DFORMAT!

0110:fixme:d3d:wined3d_get_format Can't find format unrecognized (0x34324644) in the format lookup table.

0110:fixme:d3d9:D3DPERF_SetOptions (0x1) : stub

018c:fixme:d3d:state_linepattern_w Setting line patterns is not supported in OpenGL core contexts.

Note, this does not occur when Gallium Nine is installed. Unfortunately the loading time of a level is becoming really super slow.

As mentioned, this maybe less a problem for systems with 16GB of RAM memory and which includes a fast SSD.

Workarounds

As mentioned on weaker hardware it is necessary to install Gallium Nine.

On Debian based systems install first the Mesa stuff:

sudo apt install libd3dadapter9-mesa

sudo apt install libd3dadapter9-mesa:i386

Then the winetricks part:

winetricks galliumnine

There exist also the recommendation to disable the "Dynamic Lights" effect in the game. But at least for me with later Mesa 22.x installed this doesn't have shown any big impact. Changing the anti-aliasing to a lower level or disabling it had more effect.

What was not tested

The add-ons were not tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

The game is except for the long loading-time of a game-level fine playable with standard (or lower) quality profiles when Gallium Nine is installed. Newer systems with more RAM and an SSD do not suffer from this problem.

As a further alternative, also DXVK could be used on Vulkan based systems. This is especially true for all non-standard Wine forks like Lutris, Proton and so on which are NOT compatible with Gallium Nine.