Hello everyone, I have an issue with my vulkan install. Here is my general problem : I use my linux computer to play video games and I encounter instabilities with Blizzard’s Battle net. It seems to me that a good idea would be to identify the versions of the working installation (Proton, DXVK, Vulkan) and save them for backup or to prevent upgrades that could break it.
Concerning vulkan, my problem states as follow : I don’t know which is my current used implementation nor to which package and dynamic library it corresponds. It seems that there is 3 different implementations on my system : the default, one of AMDVLK and RADV. To make it clear, here are the commands used to switch between them :
- doing nothing results in the default one
export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_icd64.jsonresults in the AMDVLK oneexport VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.jsonresults in the RADV one
If it can help, I uploaded the corresponding vulkaninfo --show-all outputs here (txt and html formats).
Of course, Battle net works only with the unidentified one. I would like to obtain the following informations about it : type (amdvlk or radv), version(s), associated dynamic libraries paths, package name in my package manager. Can somebody help me to gather (even a part of) these infos ?
As a related question : since the default implementation is not associated to the previous mentioned icd files, can I generate one in order to make the install cleaner ?
Here is my neofetch output :
OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Host: MS-7C94 1.0
Kernel: 6.18.1-arch1-2
Uptime: 2 hours, 50 mins
Packages: 1253 (pacman)
Shell: bash 5.3.9
Resolution: 1920x1080
WM: i3
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X (16) @ 4.559GHz
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 5500/5500M / Pro 5500M
Memory: 5803MiB / 15910MiB
Thank you very much for your attention and help !
You should be aware that Blizzard/Microsoft make changes to Battle.net somewhat often, and they have a habit of breaking it in Wine. It might work fine for a week or a year, only to get an update and suddenly misbehave or fail completely until the community has time to figure out what changed and develop a fix.
On a few occasions, the breakage has been in a new version of
drive_c/ProgramData/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.*. People who still had the older version installed were able to work around it by removing all permissions from the new version’s directory and marking it immutable withchattr. Battle.net then fell back to using the previous version, allowing games to run until a fix in Wine was developed.Also, fixes make it into some Wine variants faster than others. For example, last time I dealt with this stuff, I found that the GE-Proton9-27 build of Wine handled Blizzard games pretty well while others did not.
With all that in mind, I wonder if the problems you’ve been seeing are not rooted in your Vulkan drivers, but instead the usual pattern of Battle.net updates fighting with Wine. It’s possible that you’ll just have to accept Blizzard games breaking on Linux every once in a while, and when they do, updating the Wine runner you use in Lutris when one with a fix becomes available.
Thank you for your answer. Yes that are things I heard about, but it seems to me that the problem I described occurred even without a battle net update. However, an update may have been applied as I did not notice it.
I will stop upgrade my vulka/mesa packages and see what happens, if the same problem happens again, it will mean that it is a battle net / wine compatibility problem.