Experimenting with wine-pba

[Gabriel Ivăncescu]

On 6/12/19 11:37 AM, Matteo Bruni wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 5:59 PM Gabriel Ivăncescu
> <gabrielopcode at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/7/19 6:15 PM, Henri Verbeet wrote:
>>> On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 19:24, Józef Kucia <joseph.kucia at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 4:24 PM Gabriel Ivăncescu
>>>> <gabrielopcode at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I'm interested in comparing the performance between it and DXVK on some
>>>>> games I'm testing, especially those where DXVK seems to provide almost
>>>>> no benefit (or sometimes even worse performance!) over wined3d, which is
>>>>> a bit odd. I've seen numerous claims that wine-pba provides even greater
>>>>> performance than DXVK on certain titles, so I'm curious.
>>>>
>>>> The PBA patchset is a wined3d patchset. It doesn't have any influence on DXVK.
>>>>
>>> If you're interested in doing performance work though, I'd argue it
>>> would be more interesting to try to close the gap for those cases
>>> where DXVK is currently faster than wined3d. It's great that DXVK is
>>> working so well for some people, but it's also ultimately a dead end.
>>>
>> Yeah, in most case DXVK seems to be indeed faster, sometimes it's slower
>> though (I don't know if it's my setup, or the game),
> 
> What is your setup / what games, for reference?
> 

I'm using the Nvidia Vulkan beta driver 418.52.10 (for DXVK) currently 
on a (somewhat dated) GTX 750 Ti card. Suffice to say it doesn't have 
that much horsepower for most games to run at 60 FPS, even on Windows, 
although ideally wine should have a 10%-20% perf hit, if it's possible 
(I know it's complicated, but one can dream).

As such I'm mostly looking at more indie games (preferably free to test) 
because those tend to have lower graphics requirements. One recently 
released game that is using UE4 that I found on Steam and I'm having 
difficulties with DXVK with is Kurtzpel. For some reason DXVK keeps on 
having a black screen randomly on launch so it's difficult to test (I 
tried workarounds suggested and it happens only some times). However, 
even when it works, the performance is quite bad compared to wined3d.

Reports on ProtonDB suggest that the game should work fine with DXVK 
albeit with some graphical glitches, so I'll also give proton a try in 
the near future for it, but first I wanted to see how wine-pba vs DXVK 
is handled.

The reason I ask for PBA is because, obviously, if I end up finding the 
bottleneck is PBA and it's "already solved" (just not upstreamed yet) it 
would be quite a wasted effort. Also, I'm aware that 32-bit games will 
suffer from PBA due to the limited address space, unfortunately. That's 
not the case here, though.

>> but I see a lot of
>> people who test both DXVK and wined3d with pba claim that wine-pba is
>> actually faster than DXVK by a nice margin (10%-20% or more) in many
>> cases, which is why I want to test it out for myself. :-)
> 
> Do you recall which GPU and drivers? FWIW wine-pba is mostly a
> proof-of-concept (if a VERY interesting one :), a number of things are
> simply ignored / not handled, which means applications might crash or
> otherwise not work correctly. Performance might also be affected,
> along the lines of "it's fast, but it's also wrong".
> 

Sorry, I have no idea, I think it was a post on stackoverflow or reddit 
with people sharing their experiences, I'm not even sure if they posted 
specs honestly. It's just what I remembered seeing.

> 
> Sure, as Henri mentioned I don't have them in any public place at the
> moment and yeah, they are not exactly clean in places (the hope is to
> start upstreaming them in the near future though). I'll send you a
> separate email pointing to some place you can find them.
> 

Thank you, and also I'm really looking forward to seeing them upstreamed 
at some point. :-)