Pre-modified Engine.u for 21:9 ultrawide ratio (link in topic)

[r3dux]

I tried out Mirror's Edge on Linux via the compat. layer this evening and it works great. But, as I have an ultrawide monitor I wanted it in 21:9 without any Windows-specific hackery - so I hex-twiddled the Engine.u file and yeah, that works too.

Here'a a link to my hex-edited version of Engine.u and a brief doc about how to use it:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_gbfIBxRi-LP-f2IuXFk-qkpSrQ4yeaR?usp=sharing

And here's the source of knowledge I used to perform the modification. You might want to take a look if you want to make any FOV adjustments:
https://www.wsgf.org/node/293

Cheers! 🤘

[r3dux]

An hour later... it turns out we're in software PhysX mode, so while the early parts of the game are fine, when there's a lot of glass we drop to single-digit FPS.

I've been having a mess around updating / removing the physx files:
- PhysXCore.dll,
- PhysXDevice.dll,
- PhysXExtension.dll, and
- PhysXLoader.dll (in the PhysXLocal subdir).

But to be honest I'm stumbling in the dark a bit here.

Any guidance would be very much appreciated 🙏

[mirHL]

You are on linux, so du-uh of course hardware acceleration doesn't work without special patches.

[r3dux]

Originally posted by mirHL:

You are on linux, so du-uh of course hardware acceleration doesn't work without special patches.

As it turns out, GPU accelerated PhysX can be made to work with modern Nvidia drivers on Linux if you just go `Properties > Compatibility > Force the use of a specific Steam Play Compatibility tool` and pick `Proton 6.3-8`.

----------

For those interested, from my experiments nothing above proton 6.3-8 used GPU PhysX, they all got stuck on the CPU - namely 7.0-6, 8.0-5, 9.0-4, Experimental, and Hotfix.

Saying that, you can trick the setup by replacing `PhysX/PhysX_SystemSoftware.exe` with a later version and it'll happily install that. I tried with `PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe` (renamed to remove the version number from the installer filename), and everything installed and was good - but it didn't help engaging the GPU above proton 6.3-8.

Also, you can delete any PhysX file in the `Binaries` folder except `PhysXExtensions.dll` and the game will still happily boot - so these being `PhysXCore.dll`, `PhysXDevice.dll` and the `PhysXLocal` directory containing `PhysXLoader.dll`. It's probably grabbing stuff from the per-game "Wine Bottle", but I'm not sure where all that setup is stored atm so some further digging required.

Cheers!

[r3dux]

Also, if you're testing PhysX GPU stuff the best place is probably "Chapter 3 - Heat | Checkpoint B" - it's the one with the water running over the wet tiles on the left once you punch through the office glass.

You don't have to climb it, you can just look at it. If PhysX is on the CPU it'll crunch down to around 20fps, while it's full speed on GPU.