for a whole week was manually restarting the loaders that crashed, was safe to do even during fights
played only safe with 3 charges on PS for the permafrost (with cold sunder)
but I guess that was the game crash that couldnt be handled...
didnt allow to loot corpse, true hc, d2r already has shared stash anyways
I guess better luck on next ladder
(at times it was a game crash on a random loader in average once every 10mins, for a whole week, that apm was starting to hurt my hand for the past couple of days..)
maybe someday blizz will fix their crashes.. or prob not
o7
So did play a week of that ladder on, it was a
Ubuntu-server 24.04 install on which did an
Code
$ sudo apt install xfce4
for the graphical interface thing, its lightweight, its quick to install and been working good enough for the videogaming thingies
However, few hours before the ladder reset, found out about the 'NOHD mod'
blockhd & CaedendiSkipVideo mods
or NOHD as a standalone mod for the loaders
waypoints to different zones are instant
also skips the annoying cutscenes rather than having to press and hold left click for like forever for 4 Acts * 8 Chars * 3 Difficulties
u would have to manually skip those cutscenes at least 96 times for normal to hell a5 without the mod, it a lifechanger
also allows u to run even more D2R with even less RAM & VRAM usage and is just so much faster than regular "legacy graphics"
So set that up quickly and did some testing between some naps in preparation for the reset
had a crash here and there already but nothing too bad
reset happened, started with Wake of Fire sin (later respec mosaic) for normal then the Nova sorc (later respec Chant) for nightmare and Hell
sin was just running the lootfilter "
CaedendiExtendedLootfiler" and to skip game launch animation videos / act cinematics, the "
CaedendiSkipVideos" mods through D2RMM
the sorc (and every other loaders) only the "
NOHD" mod (with legacy graphics enabled to see the screen)
Usually have the fps capped with something like 30fps on the 2 main rushers (sorc & sin), 15/20 fps for BO/Oak/Smiter and 8fps for the loaders that stay in town for quest items / going to next act etc
Windowed with each (included main rushers) in 1280x720 on a 1920x1080 screen resolution, stayed that way the whole ladder (so could just click the windows without bothering with alt+tabs)
So to speedrun nightmare/hell, did in legacy graphics on the sorc with 'nohd' (so no loot filter compared to the sin), was really nice to just take a wp and have pretty much no load times, was a nice throwback to actual D2 LoD that was very quick to take waypoints without loading but on D2R
But then, the more the ladder went (not ideal temps either in the middle of summer), more and more crashes happened
And since the aiming to 99 grind was already tedious as it was, had to get some music as well to fight the boredom which were video music clip which some were even putting extraload on the integrated graphics on CPU (as seen now per 'nvtop' (one music video using 50% 'DEC' (for the ENC/DEC feature of the CPU) that some clips do require)
So started seeing micro-freezes here and there, most often right before a crash
Then RIP with one of those micro-freeze/crash on the main
The gaming rig was a
- 5700G CPU (with integrated graphics)
- 64GB RAM (16GB preallocated for the VRAM from BIOS with the "UMA_Specified" option) at 3600Mhz
It's not a 16GB VRAM limit (it can be monitored using the command 'nvtop'), its just a buffer and the rest goes to the actual non-buffered RAM (that can be monitored with the command 'htop')
- a smol NVMe drive for OS and a big NVMe drive for the games
- and for cooler, got a few Noctua NH-U12A laying around that, will move one (with dual fan) on that rig but for that ladder it was running stock cooler
Spent that second week just benchmarking different operating systems tried Ubuntu-server 25.04, Ubuntu-server 25.10, tried different setups with graphical interfaces like xfce4 with x11 and the with Wayland
It had micro-freezes on single window after few minutes of play
Now, however
on
Arch Linux, still
xfce4 with
X11just booted up the ISO from USB, typed "Archinstall" when it booted up, very quick to install, no headache whatsoever, it does the whole thing automatically
then pretty much set it up the same way with Lutris, did the AMD drivers install etc
so as per the Lutris documentation on their github, edited the file '/etc/pacman.conf' to uncomment those 2 lines
Code
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
then ran a 'sudo pacman -Syu'
then:
Code
sudo pacman -S --needed lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
for those AMD drivers
and since lutris was giving me a warning that even tho it uses its own Wine things, its also good to still install those as well so from same lutris github repisitory, copy and pasted for Wine dependencies:
Code
sudo pacman -S wine-staging giflib lib32-giflib libpng lib32-libpng libldap lib32-libldap gnutls lib32-gnutls mpg123 lib32-mpg123 openal lib32-openal v4l-utils lib32-v4l-utils libpulse lib32-libpulse libgpg-error lib32-libgpg-error alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins alsa-lib lib32-alsa-lib libjpeg-turbo lib32-libjpeg-turbo sqlite lib32-sqlite libxcomposite lib32-libxcomposite libxinerama lib32-libgcrypt libgcrypt lib32-libxinerama ncurses lib32-ncurses opencl-icd-loader lib32-opencl-icd-loader libxslt lib32-libxslt libva lib32-libva gtk3 lib32-gtk3 gst-plugins-base-libs lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader cups samba
Then inside of Lutris, setting the wine version to use:
'
wine-10.8-staging-tkg-sync' instead of the default 'wine-ge-8-26'
Same rig, same D2R mods, pretty much just Arch instead of Ubuntu, not a single crash yet after few days of running 9x D2R + music, RAM usage stays under 30GB (with full 16GB VRAM buffer)
The games run so much better overall too
tldr: GPUs are overated, gamers will literally buy anything labelled as "for gaming"
as this this is a low powered inexpensive rig without even a GPU and can run even more instances than 9x, while staying stable with great performances