Found a way to play (some) EAC games on Linux again!

[Katarok]

Anyone that plays games on Linux has this one dreaded enemy.

Anti-Cheats.

Even if your game would run flawlessly under wine/proton. An Anti-Cheat like EAC would just crush it because it would think that wine/proton are a cheating engine instead of a compatibility layer.

So the only way to play those games on Linux would be through a windows Virtual Machine. The thing is that those VMs can't have 3D hardware acceleration unless you passthrough a GPU. If you do passthrough a GPU that GPU cannot render the host OS. So it was advice for a long time to have 2 GPUs one for the Linux host or the VM.

The thing is that today we have a GPU shortage so even the RX 550 I have in my system is a luxury.

It seemed that all hope was lost, that I would never play Smite again. Until I met VMware Player.

I don't understand the guru coding magic it goes under it. But for some reason I have 3D Accelerated Graphics on a VM without a passthrough!

And I can play SMITE again. And it runs very close to native. (It causes some stutters from time to time but after a restart of the VM everything is fixed)

I don't know if all games run this way. I tried Dauntless and the game couldn't make it past 4 fps. Maybe I could tweak the settings a bit and make it run, but honestly I am not that into Dauntless in the first place. All I cared about was SMITE and now I can run it again and I am very happy

Thought that it would be nice to share that VM. Maybe VMware Player can help you to run your own game past that pesky anti-cheat.

[Nayr438]

It's because VMWare actually has a 3D Accelerated Driver for Windows that's not limited to something like 256mb. There is quite a bit of overhead, but it mostly just works.

There is no such driver for KVM/QEMU and Virtualbox has had a poor implementation for years.

 

I use VMWare for cross-platform application development for this reason.

 

It may be worthwhile to look over this as well, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VMware#Virtual_machine_settings

If your on a AMD Card or using Intel Graphics, you may also need to add this  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VMware#Enable_3D_graphics_on_Intel_and_Optimus

While the Arch Wiki seems pretty specific about it's use on Intel, I have found I need it with my AMD Navi card.

 

The only real issue I have encountered with VMWare is the Audio can be choppy, but that could be something to do with pipewire compatibility, as that's what I use.

[Katarok]

2 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

The only real issue I have encountered with VMWare is the Audio can be choppy, but that could be something to do with pipewire compatibility, as that's what I use.

Personally I don't have issues with audio and I also use pipewire.

[Nayr438]

10 minutes ago, Katarok said:

Personally I don't have issues with audio and I also use pipewire.

I am not sure what causes it on my end, it's reproducible across 3 of our machines of varying hardware. Considering I don't actually need audio however for my use case, it's not really a big issue.