Upgraded Mandrake Linux -a now game is unacceptably slow

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 3:49 pm

As the topic says...

Was running Mandrake 10.0 with no issues - now running 10.1 and the game takes up all available CPU and runs like a one legged dog. It's unplayable.

Any suggestions - or people in a similar state?

JeffM · Post by **JeffM** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 6:15 pm

make sure that when you upgraded it didn't remove or invalidate your video drivers. Most X systems do not ship with hardware accellerated drivers for modern cards, you usualy want to get them from the chipset maker.

Workaphobia · Post by **Workaphobia** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 7:37 pm

90% of the time, when the game runs slow, it is because BZflag is using software rendering instead of hardware acceleration. Go to a terminal emulator from within X and type "glxgears" - if you do not see a window pop up with animated gears moving quickly, then it's not an issue with BZ but with the system.

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 8:56 pm

Hmmm... GLX gears gets me:

1391 frames in 5.0 seconds = 278.200 FPS

How's that?

As for the hardware accelerated... I have an ATI radeon M6 mobility.... and mandrake wanted to install the fglrx radeon driver - but it wouldn't work... so I installed the radeon driver... but it offered either xorg 6.7.0 with or without accelleration....

I saw that the ati provided drivers want xorg 6.8.0 - may try that... man what a pain in the ass... I just wanted access to PHP5 and MySQL 4.1 (available one mandrake 10.1 and not 10.0)...

JeffM · Post by **JeffM** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 9:01 pm

yes you need hardware accelleration for it to be fast. For the mobility I think the best your going to get is what ever the DRI driver gives you, and it won't be that much. The ATI oficial drivers are for the 8000 series and above, and I think the mobility is a 7000, but you'll have to check your hardware. Basicly what ever drivers you used to have in 10.0 you need to make sure you have the 10.1 compatable versions as well.

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 11:09 pm

Well, they switched from XFree86 to Xorg - and the ATI Mobility M6 is poorly supported under Xorg... meaning that 3d accelleration is broken.

Great.

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 10:35 pm

Ok - here's my own personal hell from the last day with regards to mandrake 10.1 and xorg:

1. upgraded to cooker version of xorg
2. got rid of dkms-ati, ati and ati-devel
3. edited xorg.conf to enable dri
4. made sure that radeon module loads on bootup...

and I seem to have things working reasonably now... nowhere near where it was before... but reasonably.

glxgears gets 3305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 661.000 FPS now... which isn't great... but it's better than the 200 or so it was getting... going to tweak more.

Scorch · Post by **Scorch** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 1:37 pm

sorry but i hear you guys talking about 200 FPS being bad and I'd just like to ask, is this in the game or out of the game because in game im lucky to get it in the 40's

The Red Baron · Post by **The Red Baron** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:39 pm

Scorch wrote:sorry but i hear you guys talking about 200 FPS being bad and I'd just like to ask, is this in the game or out of the game because in game im lucky to get it in the 40's

They aren't talking about bzflag, They are talking about a small program that tests/measures how many frames per second there graphic card is getting/giving.

Hmmm... GLX gears gets me:

1391 frames in 5.0 seconds = 278.200 FPS

glxgears gets 3305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 661.000 FPS now... which isn't great... but it's better than the 200 or so it was getting... going to tweak more.

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:19 pm

Yeah - I'm getting about 40 frames per second in the game now... used to get over 250 in the game...

RPG · Post by **RPG** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 8:41 pm

Luckies! Try playing on 10FPS!!! Can you really tell the difference between 40 and 250FPS?

harwoodr · Post by **harwoodr** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 10:06 pm

RPG wrote:Luckies! Try playing on 10FPS!!!

- no thanks... that's virtually unplayable... and before I got the DRI stuff working - I was just under that.

RPG wrote:Can you really tell the difference between 40 and 250FPS?

Yes. Yes you can.