Anybody play Fallout 76?

[bradleypariah]

I'm wondering if any dual-booters out there play Fallout 76, and frequently switch back and forth between playing via Proton and Windows. I haven't had Windows for over four years, and my question is, is Fallout 76 really crashy on Windows still/also? I'm not interested in installing Windows, I'm just curious if the crashiness is because I'm doing something wrong (or could configure something better), or if the game is just unstable because Bethesda made it.

[rab0171610]

You might have better luck looking at the proton fallout 76 database. The last comment was 3 days ago. It is rated Gold there, but that doesn't mean much if it is buggy. I would assume it would crash less on Windows. Try going through the comments and see if anyone used something other than the default template. Of course, every experience will be different depending on the hardware on which it is run. Some have commented that it bombs while another said it ran fine with the default template.
https://www.protondb.com/app/1151340
Good Luck!

[claydoh]

or if the game is just unstable because Bethesda made it.

This is quite possible, lol.
However, I regularly play Doom Eternal, and that game is rock solid, somehow, despite the fact . I can't say anything about Fallout, I never got into that game. At least not yet.

[bradleypariah]

I came to the conclusion that I need a new GPU and some more RAM. I found out the freezing is happening with all games, not just FO76.

I've been rocking an Nvidia gtx680 for literally a whole decade. It's had a good run, but I think the memory on it is failing. If I turn down texture resolution, it freezes a minute or two later, but always in the same new spot again. The card must be filling up memory and finding a dead spot.

I actually did the GPU bake trick on this thing twice. It's not supported anymore. It's a miracle it even powers on. I'm kidding myself by trying to game with it anymore.

I bought an AMD RX 6700 XT. According to HWcompare, it consumes just a bit more power, but scores over double in all other categories. Plus I'll get to see what all the fuss about open-source drivers is about.

I saw a few other folks also claiming that no matter how much RAM you have installed, DXVK can accidentally look at empty slots for memory (?). No idea if there's any truth to it, but I thought there'd be no harm in upgrading from 16GB to 32, so I threw that in the cart too.

If throwing money at the problem doesn't work, I'm going to literally cry.

[claydoh]

I have a less-old used AMD RX480, I dunno how is still runs. I suspect it was a former mining card, but can't really know. Prices on GPUs are still too steep for me. The card still runs recent games reasonably well to quite good.

Upgrading Mesa drivers via various PPAs may be worth looking at, though if you are running 22.04, this may be less useful than it is for me (20.04/Neon)

[bradleypariah]

Prices on GPUs are still too steep for me.

Believe it or not, I bought the thing for $539 brand new.
My gtx680 was over $600 ten years ago.
Accounting for inflation, I was thinking the price was completely fair.
It's weird, because a used gtx1080 Ti is right around $1,000. I simply do not understand.

[claydoh]

Lol, it has been weird, with high demand, supply disruption, and speculation/scalping.
I bought my 480 for 80 dollars, plus shipping pre-pandemic.
I could have sold it not too long ago for at least 300, theoretically. But then I'd be game-less, and single-monitored.

That 539 is more than I purchased my entire PC for, including the cost of the RX480, some extra ram, and even the 1Tb nvme drive lol.
Basic HP i5-8400 w/16Gb ram.

I am currently bored/foolish, as I type this, in transplanting the CPU/ram/GPU/Drives into a new case, refurb motherboard, and PSU. The aim is to upgrade the CPU, graphics, and RAM as I go, and funds allow.
I know I am limited on the CPU, 9th gen Intel is as far as I can go on this mobo, but a good i7 and decently recent graphics card should hold me for a while. Or swap it for AMD later on, since I have not sunk much $$ in the mobo

[rab0171610]

I am not having any troubles these days.
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core Processor
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650/PCIe/SSE2
Finally broke down and replaced my Nvdia GeForce 650 TI with 1gb ram LOL. It is a wonder it could run anything.
I bought one way before the prices skyrocketed. It all depends on what you can afford. Mine is nothing fancy but good performance and graphics for the price. Hopefully soon prices will come down soon. A good CPU helps tremendously. Spend a little more money there on your next system will benefit you IMO.

[bradleypariah]

Welp, I got my stuff! It was a bit of a nightmare. I read on AskUbuntu and Reddit that it's not necessary to uninstall Nvidia packages before switching to AMD, and while that may be the case for some, it definitely wasn't for me.
It worked at first, but within the first five minutes, the whole system froze. When I rebooted it, I got the boot error "end Kernel panic - not syncing: No working init found."
It's been so long since I had to go into recovery, I tried to use Aptitude, and it wasn't installed! Probably no surprise to anyone else.
I tried booting into my 22.04 live USB, and ran boot-repair, but it just scanned my system indefinitely.

I managed to get into a safe mode of an old kernel, and tried to purge 'nvidia*', but that locked up my system again.
By nothing but sheer persistence and multiple reboots, I got back into the desktop of the older kernel once more, and removed the latest linux-image via Muon, which removes linux-image-generic also, so I let it, which as expected made my system unbootable again.
Booted into recovery, enabled networking, dropped to root.
Installed linux-image-generic, which automatically reinstalled the latest kernel along with it, and all was right with the world!

Outer Worlds was freezing on me very predictably in the exact same spot with the gtx680. I was completely unable to progress. I'm happy to say my new card (and possibly thanks to filling my RAM slots) has eliminated the problem. I breezed right past the problematic spot and started a conversation with a previously-unreachable NPC.

I only said like five curse words during the whole process!

My advice to anyone else who switches: Maybe go into Settings > Driver Manager, and switch to the Xorg driver, power down, then switch cards. Who knows. Maybe what happened to me was a fluke.

[claydoh]

I read on AskUbuntu and Reddit that it's not necessary to uninstall Nvidia packages before switching to AMD

I wonder who actually said that?
Nvidia uses an actual Xorg.conf file, which specifies the hardware device and options, so that would need to be removed, at the very least, not counting any driver BS.

I'd have definitely suggested to switch to the Nouveau driver, and running apt autoremove, (re)moving the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (if necessary), then rebooting to see if things are all kosher before replacing the card.

This is exactly what I had to do when I swapped an Nvidia 610-ish card for an RX460 a few years back. Just swapping did not work, but I tried it knowing it might not work. So I swapped back, and did the above, and no problemo.

[bradleypariah]

I wonder who actually said that?

Doesn't matter now that it's working, I suppose. If I had looked a bit harder, I would have found just as many people saying otherwise. I hadn't thought about deleting my xorg.conf file. Maybe I should still do that.

[claydoh]

I just bought the game, and boy has it been .......crappy to set up
I was getting all of 15 FPS and bad mouse acceleration.

After a dive starting with the ProtonDB website , I did find some game ini settings that have made it playable on my card.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=2579532191
I also use GloriousEgroll's custom Proton, though probably Stream's latest Proton, or its Experimental should be fine

If you are interested in trying Proton-GE, there is a handy gui utility that helps, though manually installing it is not hard, just finding the correct directory to put things.
https://github.com/DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt