The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

What works

WINEARCH=win32 Obviously running and installing.  Launcher menu.  Changing settings.  Intro videos and main menu.  Builtin DX9 works marvelously.  Patching and installing DLCs and simple mods.  Winetricks wasn't necessary.

What does not

However, once the game starts: it starts grabbing/leaking memory until it hits around 842Mb.  Then the game hangs up, frozen.  Also once patched, the main menu loses music and Wine complains about MIDI.  Minor issue was the graphics chip being properly detected.

Workarounds

Nothing seemed to alleviate the memory/hang issue...

  Winetricks -> .NET + native DX9 + native D3Dcompiler4.7 = nope

  Regedit values were useless.

The music issue *might* be solved with native Directmusic or WMP.  Wasn't my biggest concern.
Use a much earlier version of Wine for this game.

Maybe buy Crossover for additional support/influence.

What was not tested

The unplayable part of the game, which was most of it.  Also did not exhaust all my debugging options, I simply don't have time to do a lot of debugging these days.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Other
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Started with Gentoo's packages: wine-vanilla 5.22, wine-mono 5.1.1, wine-gecko 2.47.1

Options on wine-vanilla: "X dos fontconfig gecko jpeg lcms mono mp3 ncurses nls opengl osmesa perl png pulseaudio

       realtime run-exes ssl threads truetype udev udisks unwind v4l xcomposite xinerama xml"

Used the above with linux-5.9.10-gentoo (hardened profile) under KDE Plasma 5.20.3
I thought is might be some system config error, being just an Athlon64x2, 2Gb RAM, Nvidia 8400GS/nouveau.

...so I swapped drives with my gaming rig (Ryzen5 6-core, 8Gb RAM, RX570/amdgpu): problems reproduced.

Also tried a Macbook (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4Gb RAM, GeForce9400M) with PlayOnMac... problems reproduced on Wine 5.22 _and_ 5.0.3.  Wine 3.20 works just fine.

Standard WINEDEBUG wasn't helpful, there was a _lot_ of:

fixme:d3dx:D3DXLoadSurfaceFromMemory Unhandled filter 0x5

Again, I don't have time for Bugzilla.  If someone else wants to take this up, thank you.

d3dx9_27.dll seems to be needed for playing Oblivion. Thus, you need it. I’m not sure if it affects to battle where the king where murdered, but I set this to native only and cleared it. Though, same time I waited ending of the battle behind the corner.

(1.1.0) Wine implementation of quartz is buggy and seems to cause random crashes. Disabling it removes in-game musics but seems to help with both crashes and battle performance.

ATTENTION!

When you paste the comment about game graphic lag or other issue, please write your system information within the comment text!

For example, under GNU/Linux you can use following commands:

$ uname -a

$ wine --version

$ lspci | grep -i vga

And paste the output with system hardware info to the comment text. Nobody can help you without this essential information!