Performance Problems During Gaming

[douglas.gray]

I've used Linux Felicia in the past and am using Linux Helena. Performance during running games like FlightGear and Sauerbraten is horrible. I have 4 Gig of memory, which doesn't seem to run more than 20-30% utlization. I have two AMD Athlon 64 dual core processors, which seem to max right out during gaming. I reduced the graphics quality, which didn't seem to do any good. The movement in the games freezes, releases, freezes, releases. FlightGear and other FPS games never had this problem under Linux Felicia when I had only 2Gig of memory.

Anybody have any ideas?

[richyrich]

Terminal -> inxi -G (enter), post the output back here . .

[Kaye]

Definitely an issue with your graphics card (that's the information we'll get from the inxi -G command richyrich posted).

[xxploit]

Actually. I doubt its his card. I dont know if gnome's to blame or what but I'd agree with the original poster. I have this same problem on Mint/Ubuntu. I didnt have this problem while using debian + xfce. Basically the frames per second while gaming pretty much blows. Be it using windows games with wine or native linux games. My specs are:

2.5ghz quad core
8gb memory
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 (896mb memory)

Also Ive used the restricted drivers and the newer stable + betas but it makes no difference.

[Kaye]

For each person with a gaming problem on Mint there are 598 without a problem.

Ok, so that number may be made up, but it's not the operating system

[douglas.gray]

Graphics: Card nVidia C67 [GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M] X.Org 1.6.4 Res: 1440x900@50.0hz
GLX Renderer GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW! GLX Version 2.1.2 NVIDIA 185.18.36

[xxploit]

For each person with a gaming problem on Mint there are 598 without a problem.

Ok, so that number may be made up, but it's not the operating system

Actually I doubt the majority of mint users game at all and those who do probably do not run any worth while games to note performance.

[ibm450]

-o0o-

• try the following, may help, maybe worth trying.
  

  Code: Select all

  sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

  and add the following into the screen section, either restart x-server or reboot:-
  

  Code: Select all

  Section "Screen"
  	Identifier	"Default Screen"
  	Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
  	Option "BackingStore" "On"
  	Option "Coolbits" "4"
  	DefaultDepth	24
  EndSection

  made a small notable performance increase for me.

[douglas.gray]

Ok, I made those changes. Now, what did I just do?

[rich_roast]

Those are various tweaks to nvidia's driver configuration which are intended to improve performance. I don't own an nvidia card myself so don't have the proprietary driver, but I'd be surprised if they didn't come with some documentation or man page (man nv brings up the open driver's manual page, perhaps man nvidia will get it for you). In any case that's where to look for detailed explanations of the options chosen.

[douglas.gray]

OK, thanks! Update: Sauerbraten runs a LITTLE better, but still freezes. I downloaded Nexuiz and it runs just fine. I'll just have to ditch Sauerbraten.

[rich_roast]

Unless you're really just looking for a quick gaming experience it might be worthwhile fiddling with Sauerbraten's settings; with everything turned on or even its default settings, with shaders and all sorts, it's a surprisingly advanced engine. Also check their community for suggestions or advice and perhaps even file bug reports there; I'm surprised that with your hardware Sauerbraten's unplayable since on an older laptop with under a Gig of mem, an oldish AMD64 Athlon and a 64 Meg ATi 9600 running the OS radeon driver, I can get acceptable performance out of the game.

I'd also suggest Blood Frontier, which is based on the Sauerbraten engine but the map creators actually have controlled themselves (limiting vast expanses) and as such this game runs fantastically well on my old machine and is, as the tagline goes, "Bloody Good Fun".

[Kaye]

For each person with a gaming problem on Mint there are 598 without a problem.

Ok, so that number may be made up, but it's not the operating system

Actually I doubt the majority of mint users game at all and those who do probably do not run any worth while games to note performance.

So no Mint users try to use the same games that you have attempted to use? What makes you so different? You do realize what you're implying when you type things like that right?

Click on "Games" in the software manager - Sauerbraten is the most downloaded game out of all of them. Plenty of people that use Mint like games, and plenty of them play cpu intensive games.