War Thunder major update 'Wind of Change' out now

How's the native client going nowadays? Haven't played it in a long time since EAC got introduced and back then the native client was more or less useless.

Man, I remember playing this extensively back in the day, it was probably my first foray in multiplayer games.
I thought it was so cool to play with other real people, not npc/whatever.
That until I enabled the chat and read it. I never played it again.

Quoting: TermyHow's the native client going nowadays? Haven't played it in a long time since EAC got introduced and back then the native client was more or less useless.

Last time I tried the native Linux client was after they switched to Vulkan. While performance has improved compared to OpenGL, it's still not as good as running it via Proton/DXVK and it's still a buggy abomination. Just look at the Linux issues reported in War Thunder forums. It crashes a lot and there are ridiculous issues like Texture quality limited to medium.
On Proton/DXVK it runs beautifully. I have an RX 580 and I actually get higher fps on Proton/DXVK than on Windows/DX11.
So if you don't play realistic battles (since that's the only game mode that requires EAC), there's just no reason to use the native client.


Last edited by user1 on 24 March 2022 at 4:43 pm UTC

Uninstalled since 24 February 2022. Couldn't stand knowing about the developers Russian roots combined with them not taking a stance other than censoring their forums and social media channels while urging it's users to be apolitical (the very thing that enables the war criminals in the Kremlin in the first place).

Quoting: user1On Proton/DXVK it runs beautifully. I have an RX 580 and I actually get higher fps on Proton/DXVK than on Windows/DX11.

I've seen a few people saying stuff like this lately about a few games. How does this even happen? What happened to the inevitable overhead of a translation layer?

Quoting: TermyHow's the native client going nowadays? Haven't played it in a long time since EAC got introduced and back then the native client was more or less useless.

Can't complain. With 2560x1440 on "movie quality" I get around 100fps+ for most of the time on my RX5700/AMD 5900X combo. Crashes do occur, but not too often: On average I'd say about every 30 or 40 matches I experience a crash which seems to be completely random - talking to my Windows teammates this seems to be comparable to their OS, OTOH my son playing it on a Ubuntu/NVidia combo doesn't report any crashes. RADV offers better performance than AMDVLK (a few months ago AMDVLK was barely usable). One bug remains: Colored discs appearing occassionally the sky when an explosion happens elsewhere. Used to be pretty bad, hardly happens after the last few updates.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: user1On Proton/DXVK it runs beautifully. I have an RX 580 and I actually get higher fps on Proton/DXVK than on Windows/DX11.

I've seen a few people saying stuff like this lately about a few games. How does this even happen? What happened to the inevitable overhead of a translation layer?

While it's true that Wine might have some overhead, It seems negligible in games. I remember someone compared Doom Eternal performance on Windows and Linux with Nvidia (which uses the same driver on both platforms) and the performance was even a bit better on Linux. Regarding DXVK, I haven't seen a lot of comparison benchmarks lately, but I think in my case it's because RADV+DXVK being more performant than AMD's DX11 driver.

Quoting: dubigrasuMan, I remember playing this extensively back in the day, it was probably my first foray in multiplayer games.
I thought it was so cool to play with other real people, not npc/whatever.
That until I enabled the chat and read it. I never played it again.

In game chat stopped you playing a game ? I mean you enabled it, so presumably you could disable it and you thought it was cool prior to enabling the chat also.

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: dubigrasuMan, I remember playing this extensively back in the day, it was probably my first foray in multiplayer games.
I thought it was so cool to play with other real people, not npc/whatever.
That until I enabled the chat and read it. I never played it again.

In game chat stopped you playing a game ? I mean you enabled it, so presumably you could disable it and you thought it was cool prior to enabling the chat also.

Do I really need to elaborate?

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: user1On Proton/DXVK it runs beautifully. I have an RX 580 and I actually get higher fps on Proton/DXVK than on Windows/DX11.

I've seen a few people saying stuff like this lately about a few games. How does this even happen? What happened to the inevitable overhead of a translation layer?

I can't speak for the exact reason, but for the last few years every game i have played on proton was smoother than the native version. Is it the Vulkan pipeline vs native openGL ? Is it the way in which vsync seems to work better on proton ? Is it that Vulkan lowers CPU overhead and my CPU is weak ? Or is it that Linux has more CPU overhead for gaming than windows when taking certain video drivers into account (It used to be like this for AMD afaik, maybe less so now) and so Vulkan removes that constraint ?

In any case i barely bother running native now if i have the choice, not least because i can run FSR and get custom resolutions working. Have properly working vsync no matter what, have the game run more consistently and feel exactly like im playing the 'full fat' experience, no drop in options of graphics settings.

Im sure if the game was made on Linux and used Vulkan with some optimizations it would be 10 - 15% faster than windows. But most aren't so i stick to proton.