The official "ZDoom on Linux" thread.

[Niko]

I just wanted to register an account and say thank you to everyone who made zdoom and gzdoom and the frontend superdoom on Linux possible. It runs great on Arch and I'm reliving all the old nightmares I first encountered in the early days of Doom's release. Like. The 90's, when my dad brought home a 2 disc packed version for our Windows 3.1 machine.

[GuntherDW]

It might be an oversight of me or just something that is "not really supported beyond 'best effort'" but performance with regards to the "software" renderer in Linux seems te be a bit... abysmal.
Even for my ancient by todays' standards AMD Phenom II x4 955.

The weird part however is that when I attempt to run the windows (32bit, 64bit crashed with my wine version) version through wine - (wine-2.3 on Gentoo with staging patches applied. I need to update, I know) with the OpenGL backend, to attempt to match the setup, it even speeds it up because it's one less translation layer to keep track of - it seems to run okay-ish. Upwards of 40-80 in vanilla doom 2 levels.
In the Linux version, using the most recent up to date version atm from the "master" branch (git commit da42c9adf5338be641ee1bb194647aea0355d41b), performance is almost half if not even slower.
Switching it to SDL doesn't seem to change much, from what I gather it should be even slower but it's not noticable.

Turning on the poly renderer makes it run even poorer. Turning off the truecolor renderer speeds it up to "regular" zdoom levels in Linux but like I said only having half or even less of the performance is kind of meh.
Unless the precompiled windows versions have specific compiler flag optimisations or targets set? Then again I do have -march=native and a somewhat recent GCC (5.4.0-r3) installed.

I usually run the hardware accelerated OpenGL renderer which runs fine on my Geforce GTX 670 so it's not something that really affects me all that much, but nevertheless it's something that I find interesting.

Long story short I'd ask if it's just my system or a "known" issue.
This is on 1920x1080 by the way. Windowed mode.

EDIT: looks like CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS and CPPFLAGS gets ignored when running make, it just "forces" it to -march=x86_64 for qzdoom's source and adds -mtune=generic for most of the projects in the source tree.

[_mental_]

All compiler and linker flags must be adjusted via CMake. The default configuration is Debug which could explain bad performance.

[GuntherDW]

Looks like you were correct. I set it to "Release" and the performance boost was enormous.
It is now up to par and even faster than the windows build through wine. Thanks .

[bLUEbYTE]

Tried GZDoom 64-bit deb, version 4.3.3 on an intel 8th gen NUC.
specs: Kubuntu 20.04. Intel Iris plus 655, OpenGL mode, mesa library version 20.0.0, OpenGL 4.6.
settings: 1920x1080, ScaleNX 2x, trilinear, anisotropic filtering at 8x, light shadowmaps at 128.

Had terrible performance on the default X11 KDE Plasma session
As a rough benchmark, at MAP13 start location:
On Windows 10, used to get 137-142 FPS
X11 session: 43 FPS

Then I installed the package plasma-workspace-wayland. After a logout, the Wayland session was available. Picked it, logged in and did the same test: It was going back and forth between 117-200 fps. Pretty good!

So, on Ubuntu 20.04, definitely give a go to the Wayland display server if you have an Intel iGPU.

[middlefingerman]

Hmmm... I can just install zandronum rite off the bat on my Linux computers without compiling nothing...
All I do is

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wget -O - http://debian.drdteam.org/drdteam.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://debian.drdteam.org/ stable multiverse'
sudo apt-get install zandronum doomseeker-zandronum


[middlefingerman]

Well actually, apparently Zandronum only works on 19.04 and below, as 20.04 seems to crash zandronum...
GZDoom works fine though

[Edward-san]

as 20.04 seems to crash zandronum

Please file a new bug report at the zandronum bug tracker, or it won't get noticed at all.

[bLUEbYTE]

Well actually, apparently Zandronum only works on 19.04 and below, as 20.04 seems to crash zandronum...
GZDoom works fine though

Is the crash happening a short time after launching the game? If so, I'm pretty sure it's due to Fluidsynth version. I mentioned a solution here viewtopic.php?f=50&t=69408#p1160411

[bLUEbYTE]

Here's a tip for Linux users who have recent Intel iGPUs (Skylake+ I think) and with recent version of MESA (20+).

What happened is that with the latest Mesa drivers they switched to a new opengl driver backend called 'iris', from 'i965'. While this seems to have boosted performance in other workloads, in GZDoom and LZDoom I verified that this actually has a significant hit to FPS.

What you want to do is set an environment variable to override it:

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MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965

There are a few ways to do so:
for temporary setting, and/or if you're running the game via console, just put that assignment in front of your command.
if you're using a .desktop file to launch it in your desktop environment, you can create a copy of the launcher like so:

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cp /usr/share/applications/gzdoom.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

and then edit the Exec line like so:

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Exec=env MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965 gzdoom

You can also set this globally, by placing this in /etc/environment:

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MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i965

in that case you'll want to restart for it to take effect.

To verify, open your console and GL_VENDOR should say "Intel Open Source Technology Center".

It has doubled my FPS in classic style maps.

P.S. I also recommend you give a try to LZDoom if you have intel iGPU, yes, even if you have one of the newer ones like me, because it has a bit better performance compared to GZDoom using the same graphics settings, regardless of the above.

[BL1TZKRI3G]

Hey. Would anyone here happen to be able to link me to any tutorials on how to install & run GZDoom mods on Ubuntu? Thanks in advance.

[m8f]

To add repository for GZDoom: http://debian.drdteam.org/
To load mods, use a frontend (launcher), or use command line or a shell script.

---

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> pwd
/home/user/Games/doom/all

> ls
 autoautosave-v1.4.2.pk3   doom_complete.pk3     fluids.pk3              hellscape-navigator-0.14.2.pk3   marifx_m-master.zip        pal_plus.wad                  'SpriteShadow v1.85.pk3'
 Billboarder.pk3           Doom_Sound_Bulb.wad   GCV_UAC.pk3             levelinfo.pk3                    master.zds                 play.sh                        SubtleLights.wad
 darkdoomz_v1.4.pk3        dtwidmus.wad          graveyard-v0.3.2.pk3    lights.pk3                       m_gizmos-v0.2.pk3          precise-crosshair-v1.4.1.pk3   wartrophies-master.zip
 death-flip-0.2.pk3        flipper-v1.1.pk3      gzd_brightmaps141.pk3   Lithium_1_6_3.pk3               'mk-champions[2.666].pk3'   smoosh.zds

> cat play.sh
#!/bin/bash

set -e

cd ~/Games/doom/all

gzdoom -file *.pk3 *.zip *.wad -loadgame smoosh.zds

[BL1TZKRI3G]

To add repository for GZDoom: http://debian.drdteam.org/
To load mods, use a frontend (launcher), or use command line or a shell script.

before using apt-get, I decided to remove opt/gzdoom because it may interfere with the installation of GZDoom. But nope, apparently it was necessary. Good work. I love how overly complicated the simple placing of a few files has become for seemingly zero reason.

[Caligari87]

The drdteam repo for GZDoom installs it systemwide (as does the .deb file from the Downloads page on ZDoom.org, I believe). The /opt/gzdoom/ folder is where the main program files live, so yeah, it's necessary. It's not "overcomplicated" unless you're trying to make it work like Windows, which... Well Linux isn't Windows, so some adjustment is necessary.

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$ wget -O- https://debian.drdteam.org/drdteam.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://debian.drdteam.org/ stable multiverse'
$ sudo apt-get install gzdoom

Then you can run GZDoom from anywhere on the system like any regular program/command, and likewise store your mods anywhere on the system. Personally I use /home/username/Programs/Doom/. If you need to edit your config file, that's in your home/username/.config/gzdoom/ folder.

[KynikossDragonn]

Here's a tip for Linux users who have recent Intel iGPUs (Skylake+ I think) and with recent version of MESA (20+).

What happened is that with the latest Mesa drivers they switched to a new opengl driver backend called 'iris', from 'i965'. While this seems to have boosted performance in other workloads, in GZDoom and LZDoom I verified that this actually has a significant hit to FPS.

I'd like to report that, I'm running on a Intel Iris Pro 580 for graphics and I don't get any performance loss using iris_dri rather than i965_dri. I'm currently on Mesa 20.2.3, judging by the name of the library itself I think the new iris_dri is geared towards Iris and Iris Pro graphics and not just the "Intel UHD" graphics family. I could be wrong though. I haven't run into anything other than maybe Blender that I need to manually override the driver to i915.

I even get 60 FPS in Total Chaos. Though it stutters a lot because Mesa's shader compiler is really slow apparently...

I hope it's okay to post this here to let other people know of my experiences with Intel graphics on Linux in regards to GZDoom.