Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Oh well :( Thank you for your clarifications. At least I tried all I could on this machine.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Mesa is not a driver but rather an abstraction of OpenGL that sends calls to the appropriate driver if possible or does it in software otherwise. You have the driver for your GPU installed; there isn't even a proprietary driver that exists for Intel integrated GPUs. But it cannot do everything in hardware, a physical limitation of what the GPU can do (the hardware is designed for a particular OpenGL API and what that particular GPU supports is an older OpenGL version), so some things have to be done in software. Possibly a lot of things. This leads to poor performance because rendering OpenGL without hardware acceleration takes a lot of processing power. In short: what you are facing is not a software problem. It's a hardware problem. The only way you can solve it is to get a newer GPU, so you might as well give up on the idea for now. The best you can do is probably to use a more recent x86 computer.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Well, when spawning the game in a new x server (with the following command found thanks to archwiki: xinit /usr/games/openra mono --gc=sgen -- :1 vt$XDG_VTNR), I do have the laptop's native resolution also displayed on my external screen. At first I thought it was playable, but as soon as the screen gets crowded, it's way too slow, even at the highest speed parameter. I can try an even lower resolution, but that wouldn't be as fun. I originally wanted to play at full resolution of my external screen. I doubt the kernel update would be enough since the GPU is too weak anyway. I'm really curious about having an external GPU linked to a Thinkpad, please let me know if you made it work. That's a great idea.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
If the GPU supports game's OpenGL, you can run it, just lower the resolution, those Thinkpads can not to handle 3d graphics at native resolution, even with 256MiB or 352MiB.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Well, looks like I have very few options left. Here are the answers to my bug report, basically suggesting that my GPU is too weak, and that I should update the Kernel (still need an information from you jxself, about a connection timeout, but I'll try again first), AND Intel Mesa drivers, which are most likely non-free. So, X200 users and OpenRA lovers, there's still a small chance. Any libre alternative to these Mesa drivers btw ?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I need some help on this: I'm supposed to install mono 3.0, but in the repo I have a hard time identifying it, or something similar. I have libmono stuff, varying from 2.0 (even if the column version mentions 3.2.8) to 4.0. Which one is it? Most of them are libraries. Thank you.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Ok, I tried the Libreoot update, unfortunately nothing improved (plus I have to figure out what to modify in the grub.cfg for automatic boot, but that's another story). The only thing that kind of works is running the game with --render sdl. The only issue is that since it's from the command line, it always opens in a second window that remains at half the screen size. Bottom line : I need to start the game with that option, and at full screen from the start. Also I suppose I should ask the devs of the project.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
STK runs reasonably well on 8G desktop with cheap OEM Nvidia card. But only at settings level 3. So I think the problem is these games are just too hard for x200 to handle.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I would bet money on STK not running well at all.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Yes, it's a librebooted X200. In a way, it is reassuring : the machine might have what it takes then.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Thanks for the explanation. I just tried the --renderer sdl command, but the unexpected result was this: it started on the laptop screen only. At the second attempt, both screen were on (mirrored). After closing SuperTux, I had to use the xrandr specific command to get my external screen back. The good news is that even at the biggest available resolution (3200 something, way bigger than my external screen resolution), it's super fluid. The result on screen is exactly the same as the smallest resolution (640 something).
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I can confirm that there's no private convo going on with me involved. I should definitely try SuperTuxKart and see how it runs though.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I had intended to use it as an example in one of my comments. That is really strange thing of me...
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I don't see you mentioning either SuperTux or SuperTuxKart anywhere in this thread (I searched "Tux" on the page). hack and hack is the one who seems to have brought up SuperTux. Was there a private conversation between you two?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I was reminded by jar_jar_head on IRC to ask the op if it is librebooted or not: X200 with proprietary bios has only 32MB of video ram..
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I'm talking about 'Super Tux Kart', the game that is like Mario Kart. This game is full 3D and is quite advanced. I have no idea what 'Super Tux' (the platform jumping game) is like as I never played it.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
> But then, why do you think it might be the GPU in my case? Mostly because the only game you mentioned that I'm familiar with (SuperTux) is a game that is going to have its performance heavily influenced by how good the GPU is. Despite being 2-D, SuperTux uses OpenGL and is actually quite heavy. Also because you mentioned that this problem only occurs when you play the games at the full resolution of your monitor. One thing you can check is whether or not SuperTux runs better with the "--renderer sdl" command-line option. If this substantially improves your performance, that would boost my confidence in your GPU being the bottleneck.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I see, so if the game has already fast rendering, the GPU would only be a barely noticeable improvement. But then, why do you think it might be the GPU in my case? My basic guess is that since rendering suffers at bigger resolutions (gotta figure out the game's native resolution btw), then an external GPU would help. Plus this hack (if I fugure out how to do it) could be useful for 3D rendering, video editing. Well, supposing it works, the CPU's the limit, then (specially it's temperature rising easily). Bottom line, I wonder if it's really worth it to push the X200 to it's limits that way. I of course could get a dedicated gaming PC (as libre as possible, but that would be a heavy cost of money and space just for occasional gaming. So, kernel upgrade aside (jxself, help please!), it seems I could try to upgrade to a more recent upgrade of mono.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
> Can I safely assume it's all about the GPU? No. It depends on the game. Here's a real example: compared to the speed of the Python interpreter, 2-D rendering is so fast that whatever benefits come from offloading work to the GPU is not particularly noticeable, or even negligible. Because of this, most of the games I have worked on do not benefit substantially from having a good GPU. I actually did some tests of ReTux on the OpenPandora, for example, and use of hardware acceleration only made a small difference; what really made a difference (though still not to the point of making the game playable) was overclocking the CPU. That being said, it sounds like it's probably the GPU that's the bottleneck in your case.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I tried Freedoom with PrBoom from the repo, and even at the highest resolution, it's fluid (though the temperature rises very high). I even tried the openGL mode. I see your point. Well, I'll see if the kernel update helps. Else, I'll have to accept that my machine is too weak. Though I've briefly read that it's possible to make a DIY port to plug an external graphic card. Depending on how doable it is, I might try that.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
"Even" SuperTux is a very resource-heavy game, and uses OpenGL by default. It's one of the slowest 2-D games out there; the only ones I can think of off the top of my head that are slower are games written in Python. One thing Intel integrated GPUs are known for is not supporting the latest version of OpenGL. I don't know what exactly happens when you run a game that needs a newer version than the GPU supports, but I assume that prevents hardware acceleration from working, or at least from working efficiently. If you want to test games with low system requirements, these are the ones that come to mind for me: - Project: Starfighter - The Ur-Quan Masters - Doom via PrBoom - SuperTux 0.1.3 (this was back when SuperTux just used software rendering by default) Note the inclusion of Doom; Doom's antiquated, basic 3-D rendering actually doesn't need 3-D hardware acceleration, and is much easier to render than the current version of SuperTux. That should put into perspective that you can't simplify whether or not something will run well based on whether it's "2-D" or "3-D". There are other factors at play. By the way, it's perfectly normal for something to run slower at full resolution. What exactly that means depends on the game, but scaling takes time, and rendering a bigger scene also takes more time than rendering a smaller scene. So as a general rule, if you want a game to run as fast as possible, you should do so in the native resolution of the game.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Well, I think even SuperTux runs slower at full resolution, so it happens consistently. Unfortunately, you might be right. My only chance left is the kernel update. I find it disappointing because none of the games I tried are in 3D, only 2D. Well, there's still hope. Worst case, I can still run this specific game at the laptop's resolution, which is better than nothing.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Did it ever work before or has this behavior always occurred? Because if it has always been this way then your graphics card is probably not beefy enough for certain games. E.g it may not have allocated enough video RAM (note that this is separate from regular memory). And I read Intel graphics drivers are not very good.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Did it ever work before or has this behavior always occurred? Because if it has always been this way then your graphics card is probably not beefy enough for certain games. E.g it may not have allocated enough video RAM (note that this is separate from regular memory). And I read Intel graphics drivers are not very good.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I tried it. I tried the one frome Trisquel pages (not as up-to-date), and both brought improvements. But it's still not good. Last thing I didn't try: jxself kernel update (but there's a connection timeout right now).
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Here are the steps I followed, and I'm stuck at step 5 (the update > connection timed out): 1 - sudo aptitude install apt-transport-https 2 - Then edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file on your system and add the line: deb https://linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/freesh/ freesh main 3 - wget https://jxself.org/gpg.inc 4 - sudo apt-key add gpg.inc rm gpg.inc 5 - sudo aptitude update 6 - sudo aptitude install linux‑libre64‑4.1 7 - cd /boot/grub sudo ln -s grub.cfg libreboot_grub.cfg
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
When streaming heavy videos, yes, it heats up to the point of crashing. But it's hard to specifically reproduce this issue. For the game, temp and CPU % are both pretty low. Just to make sure, I'll see if that % reflects CPU frequencies.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Have you looked at the temperatures and cpu frequencies? It might be overheating and then going to lower frequencies to limit heat.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Ok this is what I'm gonna try first: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=51486 If still not successful, I'll try a kernel update.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I'm running i3wm, and RAM shouldn't be an issue (I think I got 8GB). Supposedly, another X server would provide better performance, but it's indeed troublesome to setup. I think it's weird because lowering the FPS limit works for a while, and as son as there is some more action onscreen, it lags. Like, instantly.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
It seems like launching another X server is too much trouble. I suspect that this is not necessary and would not solve your problems if you continue to run some bloated environment along side the other X Server. Have you tried using a lighter environment such as OpenBox or Fluxbox? It is possible that there is not enough Video Ram available if running some bloated thing like GNOME or KDE. If you are really desperate try the Ratpoison as it requires a mere 2MB RAM to run.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
You only have to replace with "wily" instead of "xenial" that is the last actualization we have in our repository. sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-wily xserver-xorg-core-lts-wily xserver-xorg-lts-wily xserver-xorg-video-all-lts-wily xserver-xorg-input-all-lts-wily libwayland-egl1-mesa-lts-wily
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Wait, I don't understand, but now it's very fluid, and even the rendering curve is below the treshold. Even Compton is on. It's great, but it would have been better if I could measure and knwo what went wrong/right so I can fix it in the future. Oh well, can't complain on this one :)
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Thanks. So this stack actually updates the kernel as well. At least in Ubuntu, I'll read the Trisquel page about this, it's probably a bit different.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I don't understand how this works yet. Supposedly, if I can launch a game on another X server, I should be launch any other program along with it. Anyway, I'm not there yet. I can navigate through tty1 to 6 (7 being my normal X server). The problem is, on tty1 (ctrl+alt+F1), I have some warning text about XKEYBOARD error report (non-fatal, I know I see some similar log every time I turn the PC off), while other tty have the login prompt that I have on start up (I have no gdm or such). If I do ctrl+c on tty1, I get the login prompt. But then I lose my original session on tty7. I need to confirm, but trying to login on other tty does the same, or at least messes everything up.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I see, thanks for the warning as well. I'll try to properly span another X server first, and see how this goes.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Yes. The order of updating these probably isn't important, And of course newer things don't _always_ work better so see for yourself.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
It's a long time since I experimented with this, and since then, I have reverted my experiments. As such, I don't know if Mumble can be started there along with the game in the second X.org server spawn.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
You mean updating that "xorg stack" thing? That means I should update the kernel first, then this?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
My current version is 3.13.0-92-generic, so I'll tr this if the second X server option isn't satisfying, thanks for the idea.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
No, but turning Compton off made the "rendering widget" go down. the rendering one is still too high though.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Yes, turning it off imporeved the situation a bit, but it's still too slow.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Thanks, I'll try this. I tried, but without much success yet. It seems I need to go to ctrl+alt+F1, and then type some command. Something along "x :1", or maybe with startx, I have to find the different sources again. Isn't it possible to start a Mumble session there as well? Windowed mode isn't satisfying because it leads to buttons to be misplaced, as if their position ws fixed in relation to the whole screen in openRA.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Also, do you have the latest xserver+etc? https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/update-linux-libre-kernel (nevermind the misleading link title)
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
How about Compton?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Are you using compiz by any chance? going back to metacity worked for me one time.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
Yes you can have X.org server spawn twice. It's almost one year since I tried to do so, so I don't remember how to do so. I didn't like the outcome, so I reverted my "experiment". My "experiment" worked well, the game indeed went to a different X.org server instance, and I could use, say, Ctrl + Alt + F8 to go there, and still have my desktop on Ctrl + Alt+ F7. However, spawning another X.org server also takes away some functionalities that one would expect to have, mainly if you're using a keyboard shortcut for some program that is in the background of the first X.org server instance (e.g.: Mumble with push-to-talk) and so you try using that shortcut while in the second instance, which won't do what you would expect. I also face similar issues, but only when recording videos of a game in fullscreen (the game itself plays fine, but the resulting video has dropped FPS). I worked around the problem by running all my games in windowed mode instead, and it even feels better to do so since I can also switch windows with combinations like Alt + Tab (while in fullscreen, some games don't accept Alt + Tab, to the point of not even letting the combination pass to the window manager being used).
[Trisquel-users] Full screen at full resolution slow for some games
I've seen this with 2 open source games (with non-free or freeware assets): every time I set the display according to my screen resolution, it works, but it's pretty slow. It's not even 2D stuff, and I'm running these (openxcom and openRA) on an X200. Is it just the CPU being too weak, or is there something left to try? I know both run well at small resolution. openRA's FAQ suggest to spawn another x server and launch the game in it (https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/FAQ). What does that mean? I didn't know I could have 2 xservers (is this that xorg thing?). When displaying data, no surprises here: the rendering and rendering widget curves both go through the roof. the rest is acceptable (mostly).
