Viewing topic Is there an easy way to enable triple buffering for a specific game under Proton (WINE)?

Is there an easy way to enable triple buffering for a specific game under Proton (WINE)?

dreaper Jul 16

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So, my brother has been constantly crying to me about his transitioning woes; as Windows 11 is complete and utter trash (as if 8 and 10 weren't bad enough). Now he is whining because he has to get used to how things work on Linux. Or, he suffers the consequences of using Microsoft’s slave state platform when he has no choice but to use Microsoft’s latest dumpster fire (and if he does run Windows 11, I will be sure to put him and his dumpster fire system on a separate VLAN).

He gave up a year ago (after a few months or so of running Linux) and just stayed on Windows. But with that recent “Windows Recall” feature, that lit a fire under his ass to start dual booting and make another attempt at switching. So, I can tell he's panicked (even though he doesn't act like it) and is wanting an easy way out. Like as if that will happen with someone who has his rigid preferences.

So, I have to ask, is there any kind of support for triple buffering out of the box? How can this be set through Proton (WINE)? He’s been complaining about this in recent days. Because he wants an equivalent for the AMD control bloatware that comes with the Windows drivers; where he can specify a game profile that forces the GPU to use triple buffering.

He’s a very finicky gamer (with a software developing background and acts like a snob all the while) who likes to make his life difficult regarding computing; I don't know why. And to top it off, he wants to blame me as an easy cop out (a Linux user of course, for 8 years) for how things are on Linux. And says I ignore the problems on Linux in general; no, I acknowledge them and I accept them (and would gladly take that over anything Apple and Microsoft has today). To me, any sacrifice is worth being able to avoid much of big tech today. So, I did what was necessary for the preparation of pure tech dystopia; which is why I also went through the effort of removing much of Google from my life and use a de-googled phone with Proton mail (and block all Google domains on that device). Don't even care for YouTube anymore. How about that? If anything, Google made the decision easy for me by making it horrible. Now, YouTube is full of crap with mostly degenerative people desperate for attention. Hello, Odysee and Peertube. Along with RSS feeds.

Anyway, I keep my gaming simple to remain sane; as I don't care for much of this AAA BS today. But with crud like Ubisoft not optimizing their games right, there's extra tinkering steps that need to be done. For reference, my brother uses an AMD 6800xt (I think) and he's on Wayland using KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.

A very simple solution to this for this problem would be greatly appreciated. Please help me make this torture end. These veteran whiny Windows gamers are just unbearable today; especially when they blame me because they don't like how Linux isn't a one to one replacement for their current setup. What's worse, is that I'm living under the same roof with one...

Long story. I know. But I hope someone can help out with this.

Last edited by dreaper on 16 July 2024 at 8:40 am UTC

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rojimboo Jul 16

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I was curious about this so had a glance.

Try sticking a dxvk.conf into the game exe directory, with
dxgi.numBackBuffers = 3
or greater.

Instructions here about .conf file:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Configuration

Got this from doitsujin:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/1456

Quote"Triple-buffering is active when the app requests it or if you set dxgi.numBackBuffers = 3 or higher. If that doesn't work, something is broken on your system.

Note that XWayland seems to have this issue for some people, and some window managers may also cause this behaviour."

But my understanding is that triple buffering is on by default with vsync on , in linux, unless something is borked. Which is always possible!

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kokoko3k Jul 16

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Quoting: rojimbooI was curious about this so had a glance.
[..]
But my understanding is that triple buffering is on by default with vsync on , in linux, unless something is borked. Which is always possible!

Nice!
I think vsync implies just double buffer tho.
Triple buffering usually helps with smoothness and frame pacing, but worse video latency.

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CatKiller Jul 16

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Quoting: kokoko3kTriple buffering usually helps with smoothness and frame pacing, but worse video latency.

That is not the case. Triple buffering has much better latency characteristics than double buffering.

With double buffering, you have a buffer the display can read from, and a buffer the application can write to, and you flip which is which. The limitation is that if the write buffer is full, because you're filling it up much faster than you're flipping, you can't write to it any more (because the flip might happen while you're writing to it). So the writes stall. But with triple buffering you have the same read buffer and two write buffers; the read buffer can always flip to the most recent complete buffer, and the write doesn't stall because it can write to the other buffer.

Although Microsoft did call some non-awesome thing "triple buffering" as well, which muddied the waters.

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kokoko3k Jul 16

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Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: kokoko3kTriple buffering usually helps with smoothness and frame pacing, but worse video latency.
That is not the case. Triple buffering has much better latency characteristics than double buffering.

With double buffering, you have a buffer the display can read from, and a buffer the application can write to, and you flip which is which. The limitation is that if the write buffer is full, because you're filling it up much faster than you're flipping, you can't write to it any more (because the flip might happen while you're writing to it). So the writes stall. But with triple buffering you have the same read buffer and two write buffers; the read buffer can always flip to the most recent complete buffer, and the write doesn't stall because it can write to the other buffer.

Although Microsoft did call some non-awesome thing "triple buffering" as well, which muddied the waters.

Thanks, great!
My knowledge was stalled to my Windows past :)

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dreaper Jul 16

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Quoting: rojimbooI was curious about this so had a glance.

Try sticking a dxvk.conf into the game exe directory, with
dxgi.numBackBuffers = 3
or greater.

Instructions here about .conf file:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Configuration

Got this from doitsujin:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/1456

Quote"Triple-buffering is active when the app requests it or if you set dxgi.numBackBuffers = 3 or higher. If that doesn't work, something is broken on your system.

Note that XWayland seems to have this issue for some people, and some window managers may also cause this behaviour."

But my understanding is that triple buffering is on by default with vsync on , in linux, unless something is borked. Which is always possible!

Great! I'll tell my whiny Mandy Kim brother about this. He's doing triple buffering for games that need it so that frames don't drop at a certain point; something like that. In this case, some non optimized Ubishaft game. It's one of those Assassin games. Glad I never chose to play any games from Ubishaft ever.

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