[BUG] Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV & EFLC): constant, cyclic visual artifacts during cutscenes & gameplay about programs HOT 10 OPEN

I should have gta 4 (I think) I'll try

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DXVA2 was also inactive at runtime when I first saw this bug. Enabling it made no difference, so I switched it off again.

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This, however, doesn't happen with stable wine releases (e.g. 5.0.3 or 6.0.1); perhaps it would be good to have them available as executors right besides the staging versions such as vaniglia (which fail with the same errors as their equivalent staging counterparts under PlayOnLinux).
Just a suggestion.

Bottles brings the best features from Lutris along with prefix administration similar to PlayOnLinux, and I find it a very convenient way to install Windows software in Linux; let me know what else you'd need from me to improve the project.

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Is dxvk on?

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Hello Mirko,

dxvk is off, esync is off, no options involving Vulkan or shader compilers are on, as the NVIDIA chip on this laptop doesn't support them.

Basically, a stock wine install plus dependencies required by the game, no performance enhancements active or added.

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On a hunch, I decided to download lutris wine builds, place them under .PlayOnLinux/wine/linux-amd-64 as extra prefixes, install GTA IV in a new wineprefix with lutris-5.21, lutris-6.21 and lutris-7.1 builds, and the problem was reproduced.

Perhaps caffe wine builds share some additions to stock wine with lutris, but I'm just wildly guessing here.
vaniglia also showed the same cyclic artifacts.

A stock wine 5.0.3, 6.0.1 or 7.0 installation will run the game without artifacts, for what I've just tested.

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Caffe (and lutris?) are tkg builds, so it make sense. Vaniglia is just wine plus staging patches, so the problem can be caused by these.

Can you try to enable (or disable) DXVA2 from winecfg?

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Fine, it was worth a try :D

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I ran another experiment:

• Install PlayOnLinux
• Within PlayOnLinux, install wine prefix version 5.0.3 (current 100% working prefix for GTA IV)
• Exit PlayOnLinux
• Open Bottles
• Create bottle using the detected 5.0.3 prefix downloaded with PlayOnLinux
• Install the required dependencies (dotnet35sp1, vcrun2005), and then GTA IV
• The game runs perfectly without the described visual artifacts, but there's no keyboard input possible

I guess it could be a build issue of sorts with wine, but the game can be installed, managed and run with Bottles in a comfortable way.
It could just be a matter of Bottles having official wine stable releases (5.0+) available for some quirky software.

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I've forgot this issue, sorry.

Thanks for your tests, I think this is really a runner-related problem. I'll test on my own (I should have GTA:SA somewhere).

Moving to the right repository.

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