I really like the look and feel of Zorin, and wanted to try the distro out for some gaming.
"Lighter" games like Creaks (Steam) work flawlessly. Medium-weight games like Manifold Garden (Heroic) demanded a more recent Nvidia driver, otherwise the performance was "iffy".
Titanfall 2 (from Steam) failed to launch at all, and the whole thing locks up during the "preparing game" step from the EA launcher (that is to say, Steam launches the EA launcher under the hood and that should start the game, but locks up).
I did manage to get this title to run on other distros like CachyOS or Bazzite, but I know those are a bit more gaming-focused.
@Aravisian@Storm
Lads, I think you missed some key details from my original post.
On CachyOS and on Bazzite I was able to launch Titanfall 2 on the same hardware (I'm doing some distro hopping trying to find a distro that suits me; right now Zorin is my top pick when it comes to aesthetics and ease-of-use*). So it's unlikely to be a spec issue.
In addition this is a Steam-owned game, meaning Steam should do most of the heavy lifting as far as Proton is concerned, no?
But the hardware is an Inspiron laptop with an integrated Intel GPU (i7 7600HQ) and a dedicated Nvidia GPU, GXT960M. Titanfall 2 runs decently under Windows on the same hardware.
*- Barring an off-putting audio issue, where there was no audio OOB on Zorin and I had to modify the alsa modprobe.d settings; seems to be a thing on Ubuntu-based distros, as Ubuntu and Mint had the same problem, whereas Bazzite and CachyOS did not.
Is secure boot disabled in your BIOS? Which driver is shown in use at Software&Updates > Additional drivers?
Are you on Wayland or XOrg? If you are on Wayland try to switch to Xorg. Logout and at login click on your username then a cog wheal appears at the bottom right corner. There you can switch.
Secure boot is enabled (it was also enabled in Bazzite and Cachy).
Nvidia driver version is 580 (I've also tried 535, but then the performance in Manifold Garden, a less demanding game, was really bad despite clearly using the dedicated GPU). The laptop has 24GB of RAM so while it's no powerhouse by today's standards it can certainly handle some older AA and AAA titles, not to mention indies.
By default Zorin seems to use XOrg.
Ooooh, actually on Wayland it seems to be working! I had no idea it's even an option and I can switch at will! Initially the performance was somewhat... bad, but I do recall from my attempts at running this game in CachyOS that the game does some shader caching in the background and typically doesn't inform the player of this, so I've waited a bit and the performance improved to a playable state. Perhaps not the same kind of smoothness as on Windows, but definitely acceptable.
I know Wayland is the newer protocol, but what are the downsides of using it in Zorin? Especially if Zorin itself, by default, picks X?
Initially the performance was somewhat... bad, but I do recall from my attempts at running this game in CachyOS that the game does some shader caching in the background and typically doesn't inform the player of this, so I've waited a bit and the performance improved to a playable state. Perhaps not the same kind of smoothness as on Windows, but definitely acceptable.