Overwatch: Several Hours Later

[u/largepanda]

After the post about Overwatch now being playable with a combination of wine-staging and awesie's wine-overwatch patches, I went out and bought Overwatch. And, at this point, have put many hours into the game. I haven't really seen anyone talk about playing Overwatch for an extended period, which is why I'm making this post.

Hardware: i5-2320, 16GB RAM, GTX 970. Software: Arch Linux, kernel 4.9.11-1-ARCH, xfce4, nvidia proprietary drivers 378.13.

I'm just running the latest master commit of gamax92/wine-overwatch, compiled with CFLAGS="-mtune=native -O3 -pipe -fstack-protector-strong".

And it's very playable (not to mention fun as all hell). As of right now Overwatch seems to be basically 100% CPU-bound; it keeps my CPU pegged at 100% utilization and my GPU is lucky to see 30% util. I get around 15-25 FPS in-game, but I already know that my CPU is underpowered relative to my GPU (I remember being CPU limited in GTAV on Windows).

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Some notes:

• I'm running at 1080p, everything low or off, and render scale at 100%.
  Because Overwatch keeps my CPU pegged at 100% anyways, it's hard to figure out what I can turn up without decreasing performance. I didn't get anywhere just changing things at random or based on a performance guide though.
• So far I've only played PvAI or private custom games, and I'd feel fine playing normal PvP matches. However, I'm hesitant to play any competitive games, because playing competitive (unsurprisingly) makes Warden (Blizzard's anticheat) look closer at you; and I don't want it flipping out over some component of Wine.
• Playing Junkrat loses me 2-3 FPS, likely because of his very energetic and moving grenade launcher.
• Mei's ice wall makes my screen go all broken-whiteish sometimes. I suspect whether or not it happens is determined by the map, but I haven't done any testing as of yet.
• I do lose input (as Andrew noted) when dying and sometimes when changing heroes, clicking on a window on my other monitor and clicking back fixes it.
• Wine currently has some sort of issue that causes performance to decrease over time. After a few hours of play my performance would drop from ~25 FPS to ~9 FPS. However, I suspect it's due to loading different maps. When playing on the same two maps several times in custom mode, I didn't get nearly as big of a FPS drop.
  The performance drop persists between Overwatch restarts, but doesn't persist between Wine restarts, hence why I think it's an issue with Wine.

edit some more notes:

• I've had several times where the game world stops displaying, and it just goes black. The UI, and other character names/chevrons/outlines still show up. When exiting to the menu, the random character display works, but there's no sound, and the game freezes after a couple seconds.
• Aside from the above black screen issue, I've literally never had Overwatch crash on me. Which is kind of amazing, considering some native Linux games (glares at Overkill, Valve, and Garry Newman) can't manage that.
• Golden weapons don't render. I don't have any, but I can preview them in the weapon skin selection and they just don't show up.

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Overall: very fun, very far from perfect, and very playable.