slow under linux

[fida]

Hi, I\'m new here and I downloaded, installed and updated Planeshift under Linux, but I have serious problem- game is very slow. It takes 10 or more minutes to run a game. I have FC3, AMD 2000 XP+,256 Ram, Geforce4 MX440, please don\'t say that I have to play Planeshift under Wind... Thanks

[fida]

please

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

How do you define \"slow\"? 10 fps? 50fps? Further info about it would help. Also check if your OpenGL is set up correctly. Run \'glxinfo |grep direct\' in a shell to see if direct rendering is enabled.

[fida]

no i haven\'t open gl enabled, how can i do that
I can barely move mouse, while running client

[confused]

Software emmulation is very very slow even if not particle effects and the like are used.

Better get your OpenGL hardware acceleration sorted out, or you definitely fine the game very unplayable.

[fida]

ok but how can i use open gl?

[confused]

How new are you to Linux?

Have you downloaded the nVidia unified driver from nVidia website. You need to change down to run level 3 to install the driver. Once done you should have the GLX active with hardware acceleration enabled.

Then you can run ./pssetup to just to make sure OpenGL is used. Then run ./psclient and enjoy.

[Luddrigo]

Hello!

I have the same problem like the original poster, and I am clueless how to fix it.

My specs:

AMD Duron 1.2GHz
Geforce4 MX440
256MB RAM
Slackware 10 with the 2.6.10-kernel.

I know that my computer is far from top-of-the-line, but I don\'t feel that it should be this bad. The way it is now it takes forever just to move the mouse two inches on the screen.

I don\'t know how to display my fps ingame, so I don\'t have a clue about what it is.

I\'ve spent the entire day searching through different forums and I\'ve found this:

If I do a \"glxinfo |grep direct\" I get \"direct rendering = Yes\" This is good, right?

If I do a \"glxgears\" in a maximized window I get about 100fps. I know that this is a rather bad benchmarking-utility - but I guess it\'s bether than nothing. Is this normal?

If i play in 800x600, 15-bit, no sound, the game is infact playable inside the first town, but as soon as I leave the area and get the loading-map-screen it starts to \"lag\" horribly.

I don\'t get this:
\"Then you can run ./pssetup to just to make sure OpenGL is used.\"

How can you tell if OpenGL i used?

[Tharizdun]

For those with nvidia video cards you will need to download nvidias proprietry drivers if you want decent 3d/opengl performance in planeshift. An opensource \'nv\' driver is also an option, while this is Free in the GNU/FSF sense, it does not have the performance of the proprietry driver.

These drivers are in two portions:

1. A kernel module. This must be loaded and memory-resident at the earliest opportunity ( ie at Boot ), and talks directly with the hardware. You should be able to view this with lsmod, and load it in with modprobe just like any other module. Without this loaded, part 2 of the driver will not function at all.


> lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
nvidia               3465372  12

2. A userspace X11 driver. This is called \'nvidia\' and must be selected and loaded in your xorg.conf or XF86Config file ( if you are using xorg-x11 or xfree86 respectively ) , for example:

Section \"Device\"
        Identifier  \"Card0\"
        Driver      \"nvidia\"
        VendorName  \"nVidia Corporation\"
        BoardName   \"NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440]\"
        BusID       \"PCI:1:0:0\"
        VideoRAM    65536
        Option      \"RenderAccel\"       \"On\"
        Option      \"Connectedmonitor\"  \"CRT\"
EndSection

There are other adjustments that are also recommended in the \"options\" section of the x11 config files, see the nvidia documentation for the details of these.

The current version of the nvidia drivers is 6629, special versions of these are available for 64 bit intel and amd cpus, use these if applicable to your system. They are available from:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html

Once installed and running with the kernel module loaded and the x11 driver ( how this is done depends on the packaging system your distribution uses, you may ignore this method and install the drivers by hand using the documentation in the driver bundle ), you should see the nvidia information available via glxinfo:

> glxinfo | grep OpenGL

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce4 MX 440/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL version string: 1.5.2 NVIDIA 66.29
OpenGL extensions:

glxgears can be used to benchmark your system as a whole, the performance of which will depend on your cpu, videocard, driver revision, kernel and x11 options, and other factors -

> glxgears
9353 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1870.600 FPS
9343 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1868.600 FPS
9342 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1868.400 FPS
9350 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1870.000 FPS

For reference, this is an Athlon XP 2000+ under Xorg 6.8, Gnome 2.8, and a 2.6.10 kernel running on Gentoo linux.

[Luddrigo]

I already had the nvidia-drivers, and I looked in xorg.conf and made sure that everything was in order. I didn\'t have VendorName, BoardName or BusID so I added those. I toyed around with nvidia-settings and nvclock.  My card now runs at 320MHz core and 430MHz memory. This was my maximum values while runing windows before strange colors, dots and \"flipping\" started to occur.

Well, when I run glxgear I now have around 1100 fps running it in the standard-size window. I haven\'t tried fullscreen yet. But the game STILL runs horribly slow and jerky.

It doesn\'t matter if I run it in fullscreen by pressing ALT+ENTER (btw, I only get 56Hz on my monitor by doing this, but that is another issue) or change the resolution to 800*600 with CTRL+ALT++ before starting the game. I get a warning when starting the game in 16 bit colordepth so I changed the colordepth of my desktop to 24 bit in xorg.conf but I don\'t feel a difference in game performance.

When I do \"glxinfo | grep OpenGL\" i get this:

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce4 MX 440/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL version string: 1.5.2 NVIDIA 66.29
OpenGL extensions:

Does this meen that I run the game in OpenGL-mode?

Is there any eyecandy that can be removed? I really don\'t care if the game looks like shit, as long as it don\'t run like shit.

Sorry for beeing such a noob.

[Tharizdun]

VendorName and BoardName arent necessary in a technical sense, they are for your own information, you could put anything in there.

BusID needs to be correct though, the BusID of PCI:1:0:0 means the AGP slot, which is addressed as though it was a PCI bus entity in most cases. If you have a PCI video card this will need to be different. You can discover the BusID via lspci:


>  lspci | grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440] (rev a3)


Your video driver definately sounds like its working properly now though, as evidenced by glxinfo and glxgears, 1100 fps is ok and shows that its definately using hardware-based opengl rendering.

Planeshift has its own color and resolution settings, these are set via pssetup. I use fullscreen, 1024x768@32bit color, and have enabled the Vertex Buffer Object feature. You can probably tweak it down by using a lesser res or changing the stencil threshold.

The last thing I can suggest is a recompile of the whole lot with CXXFLAGS that start to turn on compiler optimisations, \"-O2 -march=athlon-xp\" for example, with your arch added as appropriate.

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

The Vertex Buffers cause trouble sometimes, so I\'d recommend to leave them off. But to gain speed, you can reduce the view distance in the game options.

[Luddrigo]

Originally posted by Tharizdun
Your video driver definately sounds like its working properly now though, as evidenced by glxinfo and glxgears, 1100 fps is ok and shows that its definately using hardware-based opengl rendering.

Planeshift has its own color and resolution settings, these are set via pssetup. I use fullscreen, 1024x768@32bit color, and have enabled the Vertex Buffer Object feature. You can probably tweak it down by using a lesser res or changing the stencil threshold.

The last thing I can suggest is a recompile of the whole lot with CXXFLAGS that start to turn on compiler optimisations, \"-O2 -march=athlon-xp\" for example, with your arch added as appropriate.

Thank you!

I will download some other game to see if it runs smoothly.

I run the game in the lowest possible resolution already. I haven\'t tried to play with stencil treshold yet.

The recompile thing sounds interesting! How do I do that? I have the 250MB  PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run file.

The only thing I\'ve done is to download the file, put it in /usr/local/games and then:
./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run

If I add -O2 -march=duron at the end it says:

Code: [Select]

bash-3.00$ ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run -O2 -march=duron
Unrecognized flag : -O2
Makeself version 2.1.4
 1) Getting help or info about ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run :
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run --help   Print this message
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run --info   Print embedded info : title, default target directory, embedded script ...
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run --lsm    Print embedded lsm entry (or no LSM)
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run --list   Print the list of files in the archive
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run --check  Checks integrity of the archive

 2) Running ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run :
  ./PlaneShift_CBV0.3.006-3.x86.run [options] [--] [additional arguments to embedded script]
  with following options (in that order)
  --confirm             Ask before running embedded script
  --noexec              Do not run embedded script
  --keep                Do not erase target directory after running
                        the embedded script
  --nox11               Do not spawn an xterm
  --nochown             Do not give the extracted files to the current user
  --target NewDirectory Extract in NewDirectory
  --tar arg1 [arg2 ...] Access the contents of the archive through the tar command
  --                    Following arguments will be passed to the embedded script


So I guess I need the source?

I feel kind of stupid now because I can\'t find the source from sourceforge.net or anywhere else...
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=8351

I found the following link in the playerguide, but it just give me a 404.
http://www.planeshift.it/download/PSV0.3.003_linux.tgz

*confused*

[Karosh_Steinkatz]

Yes, these options are used when you compile it. Btw, look at the installer thread, a new version is available If you don\'t want to download it again, get this archive and extract it into your PS dir. Run the updater to get 0.3.007 then.

[Luddrigo]

Alright, I will give it a go.