Something that still doesn't quite feel right somehow is seeing the likes of a PlayStation logo on Linux. Anyway, the smash hit God of War is now on Steam and works right away on Linux. You can thank Steam Play Proton for that.
It's hard to believe the changing face of gaming sometimes. Previously console exclusive games now coming to PC more often. A trend I hope to see continue for years to come. Of course the new release comes with the kinds of things you would expect like enhanced graphics, ultra-wide support, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and so on.
Direct Link
Enter the Norse realm
His vengeance against the Gods of Olympus years behind him, Kratos now lives as a man in the realm of Norse Gods and monsters. It is in this harsh, unforgiving world that he must fight to survive… and teach his son to do the same.Grasp a second chance
Kratos is a father again. As mentor and protector to Atreus, a son determined to earn his respect, he is forced to deal with and control the rage that has long defined him while out in a very dangerous world with his son.Journey to a dark, elemental world of fearsome creatures
From the marble and columns of ornate Olympus to the gritty forests, mountains and caves of pre-Viking Norse lore, this is a distinctly new realm with its own pantheon of creatures, monsters and gods.Engage in visceral, physical combat
With an over the shoulder camera that brings the player closer to the action than ever before, fights in God of War™ mirror the pantheon of Norse creatures Kratos will face: grand, gritty and grueling. A new main weapon and new abilities retain the defining spirit of the God of War series while presenting a vision of conflict that forges new ground in the genre.
There's some really heavy stuttering though with an NVIDIA GPU. As always with more graphically intense games built for Windows and run through Proton, they need time to build up a shader cache. Once that is done, eventually Steam will have it to give out while the game downloads for your machine to sort it ahead of time. So, if you want a smooth experience, it usually pays to wait a week or so. That said, if you want to put up with the stuttering for a bit, don't let us stop you as outside of that, it seems to play quite brilliantly.
Like me, you might find that the lip-syncing voice audio is completely off though. It's possible you can fix that by adding this as a Steam launch option:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 %command%
In my own testing, that made it match up much better but not always.
One possible way to improve day-1 performance in this and other single-player games is to use the community built Proton-GE, which you can get easily with ProtonUp-Qt. Proton-GE has DXVK_ASYNC, which can help reduce stutter but is not recommended for multiplayer titles as it can trip up anti-cheat. In my own testing, it made God of War massively smoother. If you choose to try that out it's this launch option: DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command%
Since I'm not much of a console gamer, even though I do own multiple consoles, I completely missed this and had no idea that Christopher Judge was the voice actor for Kratos so if you'll excuse me I have some fanboying to do.
You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by damarrin on 14 January 2022 at 8:24 pm UTC
I always try to avoid buying non-linux games.. but.. but.. but.. but.. it's.. it's.. god of war!
aahh..! I used to love this game on the PS!
What to do?!
PS: Regarding the pulse latency environment variable: Have you tried the game with pipewire? does the issue persist? It might be something pipewire can fix - it solves a ton of other old pulseaudio issues. In my experience - sound stuttering and audio sync issues were almost always something caused by pulseaudio itself.
Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 14 January 2022 at 8:26 pm UTC
Oh.. noo!
I always try to avoid buying non-linux games.. but.. but.. but.. but.. it's.. it's.. god of war!
aahh..! I used to love this game on the PS!
What to do?!
PS: Regarding the pulse latency environment variable: Have you tried the game with pipewire? does the issue persist? It might be something pipewire can fix - it solves a ton of other old pulseaudio issues. In my experience - sound stuttering and audio sync issues were almost always something caused by pulseaudio itself.
The sound issues in games are not really due to Pulse but down to WINE (hence why they also had to implement a PIPEWIRE_LATENCY env variable) or rather that it's still not clear exactly how the Windows sound system handles buffers, the wine wiki points to this bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39814 as reference as "known bug in wine for sound issues" and reading it gives me the impression that games asks for a specific sized buffer but then tries to overwrite it before its consumed in full so there are bugs (in that they don't follow the written spec for the API) in lots of games that the Windows audio system somehow have workarounds for.
Runs pretty bad with nvidia 1070, so refunded it for now.
Oh, sad, I am on a 1070TI@1440p - that may be not enough for good gameplay :-(
What to do?!What I do is to wait for a sufficient discount: the developer gets some money by virtue of their game not being broken on Linux, but they'd get more money if they'd made a properly-supported game.
DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command%Call of Duty Advanced Warfare had *horrendous* stuttering whenever you'd load into a map for the first time with a new proton version or new nvidia driver. Setting that gets rid of nearly all the stutter (although some textures will be black until the shader has been compiled for them, which it will do in the background)
If it has anti-cheat, don't use this! It can get you banned!
Would be neat if Steam had a slider for revenue share. Give maximum amount to Valve for Proton games, and maximum amount to devs for native games :)What to do?!What I do is to wait for a sufficient discount: the developer gets some money by virtue of their game not being broken on Linux, but they'd get more money if they'd made a properly-supported game.
That's a must buy. Though, still involved in some other game(s), in a month or so I'll certainly buy and try it.
benjamimgois Jan 15, 2022
Oh boy, another developer that can't be arsed to support Linux, but will still benefit financially from open source software picking up their slack. Whoopee.
Steam gets their part at least.
Last edited by Devlin on 15 January 2022 at 3:20 am UTC
alejandro-bringas Jan 15, 2022
Runs pretty bad with nvidia 1070, so refunded it for now.
You need Proton-Experimental to improve the NVIDIA experience, but it still has VRAM Leak issues
The sound issues in games are not really due to Pulse but down to WINE (hence why they also had to implement a PIPEWIRE_LATENCY env variable) or rather that it's still not clear exactly how the Windows sound system handles buffers, the wine wiki points to this bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39814 as reference as "known bug in wine for sound issues" and reading it gives me the impression that games asks for a specific sized buffer but then tries to overwrite it before its consumed in full so there are bugs (in that they don't follow the written spec for the API) in lots of games that the Windows audio system somehow have workarounds for.
That may be true for wine in some cases. However, you should also note that pulseaudio had stuttering and delay issues even for applications that are not wine (for example, Kodi and VLC). I remember when pulseaudio first replaced alsa - there was problems in just about everything after.
In any case while pulseaudio worked for the most part and did improve in many areas - pipewire is far superior in many aspects.
For example, pulse would often struggle with some bluetooth codecs and may have sound issues with bluetooth, where as pipewire works perfectly with aptX codecs (no tweaking, out the box) and all other BT codecs so now my sennheiser momentum 3s can happily play along using the aptx codec without doing workarounds.
It also solves the jack latency issues and random issues where pulseaudio would get confused with too many sinks and you'd have to kill pulseaudio and restart it to make it work again etc.
In any case, you're better off with pipewire at this point.
I hated PA when it first came out, and I still hold a grudge to it now for all the trouble it caused me over the years
With that said I've experienced issues with pipewire too for example sometimes when playing audio at 96kHz/24bit or above it could "pop" occasionally - but then resume playing normally (no need to reboot it or reset it like pulse
) although that issue seems to have been solved as I haven't noticed it lately.Long story short, neither system is perfect. But pipewire is better.
Just my 2p
Vasya Sovari Jan 15, 2022
Will do the moment it goes on sale.
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