Tonight turned into one of those classic MiraNova sessions where several different threads somehow converged into a surprisingly productive evening.
The first major victory came from the Linux side of the house. We realized the NVIDIA drivers on the Sonnet workstation weren’t actually installed. Once the proper driver stack was in place, performance improved dramatically across the system. Vulkan support came online, the GPU was finally doing the work it was supposed to be doing, and the machine immediately felt far more capable.
Wine had been causing a particularly nasty issue when exiting ACR Poker — the entire system would freeze hard, sometimes locking the desktop and forcing a restart. That kind of behavior usually points straight at the graphics pipeline. After some investigation, the solution turned out to be enabling DXVK.
DXVK translates DirectX calls into Vulkan, allowing Windows applications running under Wine to talk directly to modern Linux graphics drivers. Once DXVK was active, the freezing issue disappeared completely. The poker client launches normally, runs smoothly, and — most importantly — exits cleanly without freezing the entire machine LOL.
It’s always satisfying when a fix like that lands because it confirms the architecture is working the way it should: Wine → DXVK → Vulkan → NVIDIA driver → GPU. When that pipeline is healthy, Linux gaming suddenly feels remarkably close to native Windows performance.
Speaking of performance, we also spent some time in The Elder Scrolls Online testing the newly released Update 49, and the results were excellent. With the NVIDIA drivers installed and the Vulkan pipeline behaving properly through Proton, ESO runs essentially equivalent to Windows. Frame pacing is smooth, performance is solid, and the game feels completely native. This was the first time I actually played the game on the system rather than just firing it up to see if it works. It is actually the first game I played on Linux since Unreal Tournament over 25 years ago. The update itself is fantastic. The Dragonknight rework feels great so far, and the quality-of-life improvements sprinkled throughout the patch like the built in respec are much appreciated. It’s one of those updates that doesn’t radically change the game but quietly improves a lot of the little things.
On the studio side, MikoPoker made some visual progress this weekend. The game now has its first set of avatars. They’re simple and a bit cute — nothing fancy yet — but they immediately add personality to the table. Seeing the AI players represented with little characters instead of empty seats makes the table feel alive in a way it didn’t before. Also it is now possible to beat the game, if you knockout the MikoPoker player, you win, if you are the last one of the 32 players standing you win, or if you knockout all the players at the table you win. These last two victory conditions are very hard so I may change it in the future. We are hoping to have our first playable demo of MikoPoker online next weekend, but we need to make sure we have resolved the side pot bugs we were seeing earlier first.
Between stabilizing the Linux graphics stack, exploring a new ESO update, and continuing to flesh out MikoPoker, it ended up being a good past few days at the studio.
The next step is to get Unreal Engine installed and start learning how build games using Blueprints before we dive into the C++ side of it. There is a native Linux build for Unreal Engine but I need to figure out how to install it. We'll see how it goes.
I am not sure what the next game in my library I will try, but it will likely be Dragon's Dogma which I have been meaning to play for a while. I really hope it will run as well as ESO. I might also try Skyrim also just for fun. It has been a long time since I played that game. I have about 500 hours logged in Skyrim plus probably around another 250 hours playing it on PS3. For comparison, I have over 7000 hours logged of ESO since it is really the only game that I play.
-- Michael (Aeonath) and ChatGPT (Chat)