Installing EVE with Wine ( Guide )

[Kitten_Ripper]

@BlintWave_Zero

Running EVE with dx11 does have a big FPS drop on slower systems. Currently on my Intel HD gpu running in dx9 mode is simply faster. But on my other system with NVIDIA the difference is allmost not noticable. So one should surely test with your own hardware how this game will perform.

This is where DXVK comes into play. Vulkan has replaced OpenGL. It’s the official successor. DXVK is a set of Windows .DLLs, which map DirectX10/11 onto Vulkan, much like WINE does. Only WINE uses OpenGL.

The advantage is huge. Using DXVK to run EVE with DirectX11 is as fast, if not a bit faster even, than running DirectX9 over OpenGL. Not only that, but it also uses less CPU while doing so and reduces the power draw. When you minimise EVE will your CPU often drop into idle mode.

Here is a comparison of the different performances (the latest DXVK produces 112 fps). If you want to give it a try, then here is what you can do:

# For full OpenGL & Vulkan support with Nvidia graphics cards:
apt install \
    nvidia-alternative \
    nvidia-alternative:i386

# For full MESA Vulkan support:
apt install \
    mesa-vulkan-drivers \
    mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386

# Installing DXVK from your distro:
apt install \
    dxvk \
    dxvk-wine64-development \
    dxvk-wine32-development:i386

# Set up DXVK for EVE Online:
export WINEPREFIX=/home/$LOGNAME/EVE
dxvk-setup install

This should install Nvidia’s proprietary libraries including full Vulkan support, MESA’s Vulkan support and also install the DXVK .DLLs into your WINE prefix. This enables support of Vulkan within WINE and allows DXVK to map DirectX10/11 to Vulkan (on Windows) within WINE, which then gets passed through by WINE to your platform’s Vulkan API (on Linux).

There are also some more variables one can or should set:

# This is needed when running multiple EVE clients, because DXVK cannot handle multiple state caches per executable currently:
export DXVK_STATE_CACHE=0
 # For when you use a config file with DXVK:
export DXVK_CONFIG_FILE=/home/$LOGNAME/.config/dxvk/dxvk.conf
# Turn off logging in DXVK:
export DXVK_LOG_LEVEL=none

# Turn off logging in WINE:
export WINEDEBUG=-all

 # This is for Nvidia's proprietary libraries and can give better performance (probably no longer needed):
export __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1

I actually set these variables directly with the EVE launcher icon on my desktop. This is how it starts EVE for me (I use ~/.eve as my prefix and I also use my own build of WINE):

env DISPLAY=:0.0 DXVK_STATE_CACHE=0 DXVK_CONFIG_FILE=/home/$LOGNAME/.config/dxvk/dxvk.conf DXVK_LOG_LEVEL=none __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX="/home/$LOGNAME/.eve" /home/$LOGNAME/wine/bin/wine "C:\Program Files (x86)\EVE\Launcher\evelauncher.exe"