It definitely sounds like you've already decided to find AI useless regardless of what it can do, but on the chance that I can maybe change your mind a little bit...
I'm a huge AI skeptic myself, at least compared to my coworkers. Almost everything it spits out has been incorrect for me, except in very narrow use cases.
First, I find it useful to find links to actual documentation for tools/libraries/languages I am completely unfamiliar with. The examples and text it generates are usually poor, but it can do a decent job of finding webpages.
Second, I've found it good at guided code reviews. It is no substitute for a real human review, but adding an AI pass before you open a pull request can knock off some of the low hanging fruit.
Considering the depth you've gone in troubleshooting, you've probably already considered this, but just in case you haven't: could it just be the shaders compiling? Wine (and the associated translation layers) need to convert shaders from the format used on Windows to the Linux one. This can only be done during gameplay because the shaders aren't all submitted upfront.
It can cause some pretty crippling frame rate issues, especially when loading into a new area/map.
If you leave the game running for a bit, and things get better (only to get worse randomly later), it's possible this could be the case.
There are some patches for async compilation, and they may be on by default in proton, I'm not sure, so this could entirely be another deadend.
That's why I specified a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency. They use so much less energy that it is practically negligible in comparison, and more on the order of traditional online transactions.
Yeah, exactly. A regular user isn't going to notice an extra few cents on their electricity bill (boiling water costs more), but a data centre certainly will when you scale up.
Scarcity is what powers this type of challenge: you have to prove you spent a certain amount of electricity in exchange for access to the site, and because electricity isn't free, this imposes a dollar cost on bots.
You could skip the detour through hashes/electricity and do something with a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency, and just pay for access. The site owner actually gets compensated instead of burning dead dinosaurs.
Obviously there are practical roadblocks to this today that a JavaScript proof-of-work challenge doesn't face, but longer term...
I appreciate the sentiment 💕