LM-17 Cinnamon is not good for gamers. - SOLVED

[Megazell]

I had to leave Cinnamon for KDE because too many games on Cinnamon had slow downs. That's gone on KDE but I am still on 16.

[Ranthe]

I'm currently looking at solutions for running Oolite with a decent FPS rating on Mint 17 (64-bit) Cinnamon - would switching to MATE help as an interim solution?
A comparison FPS check between Oolite 1.80 running in Windows Vista and in Mint (using the same game configuration):
* Windows Vista 32-bit (using proprietary Radeon 3200 drivers) - 30-50FPS
* Linux Mint 17 64-bit Cinnamon (using Linux generic drivers) - 15-27FPS

I did try installing what I thought were the proprietary ATI drivers for my Radeon HD 3200 card, but after a nerve-wracking crash I managed to backout the changes and recover back to normal (I think). CPU / graphics output from inxi -Fxz:

Code: Select all

System:    Host: Vixen-IV-L Kernel: 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.2) Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 17 Qiana
Machine:   Mobo: Gigabyte model: GA-MA78GM-S2H version: x.x Bios: Award version: F5 date: 06/18/2008
CPU:       Dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (-MCP-) cache: 1024 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 svm) bmips: 4008.42
           Clock Speeds: 1: 1000.00 MHz 2: 1000.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS780 [Radeon HD 3200] bus-ID: 01:05.0
           X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1680x1050@60.0hz
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RS780 GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.0 Direct Rendering: Yes

Suggestions appreciated

[grungy_me]

@Ranthe

I would seriously doubt it would make a difference. The issues I had with the Cinnamon desktop environment were that a lot games just would not run at all.

The difference in FPS between Vista and LinuxMint 17 with that game is likely the open source AMD graphics driver in Linux that you are using. It's improved a lot from what I understand but is still not on par with the performance of the proprietary AMD graphics driver for Linux which still is not great when compared to their Windows version. Unfortunately, AMD no longer supports the HD 3000 series desktop graphics card with their proprietary Linux graphics driver. The oldest graphics card series that does is the HD 5000. So your only choice is to use the open source driver and live with the low FPS, upgrade the graphics card with something that is supported by a proprietary Linux graphics driver, or upgrade or replace the whole computer.

So I notice that your motherboard does have a PCI-E x16 slot that conforms to the PCI-E 2.0 standard. My Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 motherboard for AM3+ CPU socket is the same for the PCI-E x16 slot. And I just replaced my AMD HD5770 with a Nvidia GTX 750 for not a lot of money. This would run fine on your computer as long as your power supply is powerful enough to run it. You'd just have to disable the integrated AMD HD 3200 graphics card in the BIOS. I haven't done a whole ton of testing with it yet, but so far so good once the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver for Linux was installed.

[gugacavalieri]

Hey guys,

I've installed cinnammon yesterday and finally got it to work with NVIDIA Optimus technology. Tested DOTA2 with bumblebee and its running flawlessly. I am gonna try other steam games to see what happens and I hope I don't have problems gamming with Cinnamon. I will let you know.

Cheers.

[-Michel-]

Games made for linux are running perfectly under cinnamon. I installed wasteland 2, breach & clear, xcom and anomaly defenders. No issues here at all. I don't know how games from windows would run with cinnamon with wine or other emu, but games made for linux are running great.

[var]

I was trying Hotline Miami yesterday and it was literally in slow motion. Despite my little netbook having more then enough power to run it.

Switching to Mint XFCE as my main desktop.

[Dirkoir]

I think much may depend on the combination of one's hardware and the games. For instance, when I made me the LMDE 17 ISO, it wouldn't even boot my ThinkPad. OTOH, in LM 17 Cinnamon (which does run my machine), I managed to install Runes of Magic (ROM) via PoL-Wine. It took a huge battle to diagnose and get all the missing libs (plus I had to use a copy of the game downloaded on Windows), but it worked. One of my problems was probably that my LM is 64-bit and doesn't come with 32-bit libs out of the box, and some of the Software Manager's (SM) 32-bit library installs automatically remove their 64-bit equivalents (whose brilliant idea was that?) which makes the SM unusable at times. After all the trouble made it possible for ROM to run at all, ROM runs perfectly on my LM 17 Cinnamon. Then, again, I have battled unsuccessfully on and off for two months trying to get EQ2 (Everquest II) to work (textures simply won't load) even though I was able to help others to run it on their Linux installations (I solved the notorious Arial font verification bug. -- The solution is to append " (TrueType)" to each Arial font name in the Windows registry). I am beginning to think that it just might be impossible to run EQ2 on INTEL integrated video, even though ROM, which I am sure is no less demanding, runs like a dream on the same graphics hardware.

So, Windows games can be iffy. Thankfully there now exist a few Linux games and ports to give some relief. The Linux versions of Eternal Lands, Other Life, PlaneShift,and Ryzom work very well on my machine so far with only minor glitches which don't really hurt anything.

[doctorx]

man... try 17.1 cinnamon... best gaming distro i have tried over the last 8 months. I posted my experience in a separate posting.

[konjad]

Cinnamon has inferior performance compared to any other GE.

[doctorx]

Cinnamon has inferior performance compared to any other GE.

may be true in the past, but with mint 17.1 cinnamon (2.4?) I have had the fastest, smoothest gaming... and i have tried kde, gnome, unity, xfce, xfce with kwin, mate, mate with kwin, openbox. There are couple of others, but i cannot remember them. Maybe you should provide some evidence to support this statement? All I know, I have the same performance in diablo3 and serious sam 3 bfe at or slightly faster than windows 8.1 or windows 10.

[grungy_me]

I've since decided to give the Cinnamon desktop environment another try with LinuxMint 18.1. And I'm happily surprised to see that it works beautifully for games and video with my Nvidia GTX 750. I bought two games from gog.com, The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition and Flatout 2. They both run beautifully in full screen in addition to some old games for dosbox that I installed. I even noticed that I didn't have to do anything special in the xorg.conf file to eliminate screen tearing like I had to do in LinuxMint 17.x XFCE 64bit. All I had to do was go into "Preferences--->General" and turn on "Disable compositing for full-screen windows". I consider this thread solved.

[Moem]

I consider this thread solved.

Good, then please mark it as such in the very first posting. Thanks!

[grungy_me]

Whoops! Sorry about that. I will correct it.

[Moem]

Now all is right with the world again!