Unplayable rs3 client on Wayland

[smvoss]

Hey everyone,

I know this is likely unrelated to Bolt itself but curious if anyone else ran into this as well. About a month ago RS3 on Wayland seemed to just stop using GPU altogether, and instead pegs all CPU cores to max until I close it. Cannot figure out what's wrong with it, seems to do totally fine in an X11 session. It did work just fine for ages in Wayland, so I'm really not sure what changed?

Running a 9800x3d and a 3080 so realistically it has to be a configuration or installation issue of some kind? Running Plasma on Arch.

[Adamcake]

Wayland+Nvidia is a notoriously broken combo due to Nvidia's proprietary drivers and poor understanding of non-windows platforms. Almost every driver update comes with a regression, and what's most likely happening here is that the game client was unable to use your GPU at all and is falling back on a software renderer using llvmpipe. You'd be able to see this by using the in-game dev console to check what kind of GPU it thinks it's running on.

Updating your package manager (and flatpak update if you installed from flatpak) might help, at least until the next time it breaks, but my frank advice would be to avoid this combination altogether: either upgrade to AMD or get used to X11.

[TheWiseNoob]

For me this problem started with an update to mesa from 24.2 to 24.3. I've held off on updating because of this. The nvidia driver does not seem to be the cause. I'm also using Wayland and it worked fine before updating mesa to 24.3, so I've had to downgrade for now. It also seems like GDM now requires 24.3 because I can't update my system with mesa kept at 24.2 because GDM crashes if I do.

This might be a similar issue mentioned: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/12294

[Adamcake]

Do you mean you're using an nvidia card with mesa drivers? Does that involve NVK, or how's it possible?

[TheWiseNoob]

Do you mean you're using an nvidia card with mesa drivers? Does that involve NVK, or how's it possible?

I'm not saying I'm using mesa with Nvidia. I'm saying mesa and lib32-mesa updating from 24.2 to 24.3 on Arch linux causes exactly what OP is describing. He is also using an Nvidia card(3080). Why? I don't know. Nvidia shouldn't be affected by mesa, but when I last updated Arch rolling those back to 24.2 fixed what OP describes.

[smvoss]

Thats super good to know, that's likely exactly when mine broke as well. I tried nailing down precisely what package updated and I don't remember why I went looking into mesa about the issue (maybe due to something that runescape spit out in the debug interface?) but didn't dig too far since I noticed X11 fixed it. It had been working fine for a long time so I knew it had to be a package upgrade that busted it but didn't know which. I'll try to downgrade and lock that version and see if that's what does it.

[TheWiseNoob]

This problem still occurs. I am able to play RS3 fine via Steam without compatibility/proton enabled. So it's running natively on there fine. I believe this is an issue with Bolt and not a combination of Wayland + Nvidia. Wayland in general is more stable for me than X11 now, especially with the latest driver 570. Also I was positive this wasn't an Nvidia issue that caused this since this issue started occurring after an Arch update that did not include an Nvidia driver update.

@Adamcake Please look into this if possible.

[Adamcake]

I always want to help people as best I can when it comes to Linux gaming, but I'm not really sure what you expect me to do. I haven't experienced this issue, I have an RX 7600 and I've tried on both X11 and Wayland, inside and outside flatpak, and Mesa versions both before and after 24.3. And it all works fine. The only common thread here is people trying to use nvidia drivers with wayland, which like I said is a notoriously broken combination which nobody in the world will be willing to give you support on. So what chance have I got of doing so, even if I want to?

The change that caused this issue for you was most likely not a change to Bolt itself upstream, but a change to libglvnd or the way RS3 interacts with it which caused it to start falling back on a software renderer instead of using your GPU. Beyond that, I can only speculate, and hardly even that. Nvidia just sucks - sorry.

[smvoss]

I am able to play RS3 fine via Steam without compatibility/proton enabled. So it's running natively on there fine.

Out of curiosity, are you certain that steam isn't just inherently doing proton? It doesn't list Linux as a targeted OS, so I'm almost certain whether you have a compatibility layer enabled, it's all but certainly using one even if you're attempting to "opt out" of it.

That being said, like I mentioned in the original post, I don't believe Bolt is actually doing anything assisting in the runtime of the rs2client. I made the issue here just as a sounding-board for other people to group debug.

I actually swapped to a 7900xtx recently and it's flawless. I'd check your base assumption on steam working and Bolt not.