Hey, I was wondering if anyone has come up with any tweaks that improve fps performance under GNU/Linux. Currently, fps jumps between 10 and 120, depending on track surroundings and the number of cars on the screen. The game runs perfectly well under Windows XP on this computer.

TransGaming Cedega seems to crash right when 3d graphics are to be drawn (only with lfs) so I don't know how well it would perform fps-wise over the free Wine package.

All gfx detail settings in lfs are at minimum. Screen resolution doesn't seem to matter. I have already disabled cpu frequency scaling (cpu power saving) as it seems to cause fps problems under Wine.

I'm running Ubuntu Hoary with Wine 20050310. I shall experiment with some bleeding-edge cvs version of Wine asap. My gpu is Radeon 9800 Pro, fglrx is 8.16.20. Cpu A64 3200+ @ 2,2GHz. Linux 2.6.13 with K8 instructions (custom build with desktop-friendly settings). To clarify, the OS is 32-bit, not 64-bit. Xorg is 6.8.2.

Native games like UT 2004 run very well on my configuration.

Any hints or suggestions?

Sorry no suggestions.

Just to mention that with the nvidia driver package, I have tried LFS S1 and LFS S2 Demo and they were playable, apart from some glitches in the graphics.

Some people have posted hints and tricks for wine in the old LFS forum @ racingsims, be sure to search around in there too.

Havent tried S2 under wine or cegeda yet. I will be rebuilding my PC tonight, and probably putting Breezy on it, so I'll give that a go - if I get the chance A reasonable suggestion would be to try a bleeding edge CVS build first

Just tried it, under hoary (bear in mind, I use the universe repositary as well), and offline seems to behave itself on my box. Have you got the ATI drivers installed properly (assuming you can get them, as you can for nvidia stuff)?

Thanks for your replies!

avellis, caught some new ideas at the rscnet forums. Thanks for pointing me there.

the_angry_angel, well I'm glad it works for you at least. :-) The ati driver should be properly in place also from wine's viewpoint because quake3-based win32 games under wine report correct renderer info in the console. As I told before, natives run perfectly well so I'd say with good confidence it's 100% ati code running the 3d show.

I installed Wine 20050725 (the newest deb I could find) which didn't affect performance. 0830 has been released recently but the debs aren't available yet. I'm gonna grab the newest wine and cedega sources from cvs and compile them for this k8 instruction set to see if that helps - although I'm pretty sure that won't solve anything. The problem is likely caused by numerous hard-to-spot incompatibilities and not just one defective component.

Thanks.

Update: Newest cedega segfaults at startup displaying a black screen, wine shows no performance improvements. It would be interesting to know if wine performance issues are more frequent among atians than nvidians. It's a known fact that nvidia's linux driver is better.

I've got an old ati card (7200 ) in the junk box, somewhere; I'll see if I can dig it out and replicate it, if you wish. That said, if it is the drivers to blame, then it maybe that such an old card wont have this problem.

What I usually do for gaming, atm, is boot to windows and play them natively. (Un)fortunately I need windows for work, so its always on my machine. You dont even have to give it much space - 20GB is more than sufficient, for an install + a few games.

It can be time consuming to get the ati card running so if you've got spare time and interest in the matter, I welcome you to give it a shot. :-) Otherwise it might not be worthwhile...

I also have a Windows partition for Linux-incompatible stuff. I'm trying to get rid of Windows because I prefer freedom over uncertainty. Currently only games and some music composition software preserve the existence of the Windows partition. I hope I could fully migrate to Linux at some point.

i just installed fedora 4 today and ive got a x800. ill try lfs in wine later (or tomorrow)

ok. its most likely an isue with my config but performance is poor with wine 20050524

the terminal is filled with "fixme:d3d_shader:IDirect3DDeviceImpl_FillVertexShaderInputArbHW D3DVSDT_D3DCOLOR in hw shader - To confirm" while on track.

also it likes to crash when screen res is changed

i also tried playing it under wine with limited success, it does seem to run with the latest wine but almost unplayable slow (10-20fps) with every graphics setting at lowest

it would be very interesting if the game also has opengl support but so far i havent found that option (i guess its a pure directx game?)

maybe this question has been answered by the developers already, but is there any interest into porting this game to linux?

its a dx game. wine runs it the fastest. but cedega looks nicest. but runs at 2fps (Even the menus are slow).

i havnt had time to read the docs or tweak much with it but ill play around with it soon

I've done some more testing in wine but on my laptop with a radeon 9000 32mb using Xorg cvs.

I get at most 10-25fps in the demo, using a pc with geforce 6800 i got nice playable fps, but only when there arent any cars and when you select a view that doesnt shows your own car (either use force view or only the (front) wheels view.

Lets hope the wine team is able to get some improvements

I get pretty good performance on Cedega 4.4.1, about 50fps (about 25fps with a full field of AI in front of me), perfectly playable. Nvidia 6600GT, on Gentoo. My only problem is the huge weird deadzone with the wheel, just can't get rid of it whatever I try. It's the only thing that is installed on my Win partition now...

I never had much luck with Cedega, I've had a few timedemo's and ran the CVS version and most of the time i wasn't able to run any games.

Also using Xorg DRI instead of ATI's drivers probably will not help either, but it's a laptop and i prefer stability so ATI's drivers aren't an option.

So maybe i have more luck with wine some day, until then I'll just dual boot as that works just fine..

hi,
i tried to run lfs with wine (gentoo, kernel 2.6.12, wine-version 20050725, centrino 1.7ghz, ati 9700m) and i had some problems:
- you cannot change the resolution (wine crashes, x keeps the resolution)
- it's much slower than under windows (win: 70-100 fps, linux: 15-25 only, fglrx-info says i use the ati-drivers)
- some graphic-issues (blue braking-lights, no onscreen-cockpit-infos, shadowing-artefacts)
i havent tried cedega, maybe i will do this tomorrow
bye,
daniel

With my wine-20050725 the textures in the menus are completely broken. That means no text is readable. In the race the gfx work better, but unfortunately the game doesn't seem to place any cars on the track, so I always watch the same spot near the start-line.
Edit:
Okay, I took a closer look at it. The license-verification fails and only the demo-cars are available. They are drawn nicely, the AI works, framerate looks good (NVidia GF4 Ti4200, 7676), no cockpit-info, text is still unreadable, skybox is bad.

Vain

Quote from oper@tor :

- you cannot change the resolution (wine crashes, x keeps the resolution)

this you could 'fix' by making wine run in a window (at least to make sure x keeps its resolution)

Quote from oper@tor :

- it's much slower than under windows (win: 70-100 fps, linux: 15-25 only, fglrx-info says i use the ati-drivers)

same for me, glad i didnt have to try ati's drivers though

Quote from oper@tor :

- some graphic-issues (blue braking-lights, no onscreen-cockpit-infos, shadowing-artefacts)
i havent tried cedega, maybe i will do this tomorrow

try tuning down a few graphical settings (setting simple track to off seems to fix this)

cedega didnt do anything for me (at least cvs version) but thats probably related to me using xorg's DRI

Quote from Vain :

Okay, I took a closer look at it. The license-verification fails and only the demo-cars are available. They are drawn nicely, the AI works, framerate looks good (NVidia GF4 Ti4200, 7676), no cockpit-info, text is still unreadable, skybox is bad.

you can probably fix ingame graphical issues by setting simple track to off

Quote from dopez :

this you could 'fix' by making wine run in a window (at least to make sure x keeps its resolution)

starting lfs in a window will crash the game/wine

Quote from dopez :

same for me, glad i didnt have to try ati's drivers though

which drivers do you want to use? the mesa-gl-drivers are much slower than the ati-drivers!

Quote from dopez :

try tuning down a few graphical settings (setting simple track to off seems to fix this)

i tried some options, maybe i will get some more tweaks

Quote from oper@tor :

starting lfs in a window will crash the game/wine

might be related to ati's drivers

Quote from oper@tor :

which drivers do you want to use? the mesa-gl-drivers are much slower than the ati-drivers!

they are too unstable for my taste, i use xorg cvs and compared to xorg 6.8.2 its probably double performance (on cards older then radeon 9250 though) you can give the r300 driver a try but thats probably not going to work for anything else then quake3 at the moment

Quote from oper@tor :

i tried some options, maybe i will get some more tweaks

lets hope we can get it playable under wine or cedega

Try running the wine-desktop windowed and running lfs full-screen within it. That will keep X from changing the resolution and lfs still believes it runs fullscreen.

Vain

I just noticed that new version of Wine is out.

Here's the change log:
One last alpha release: Wine-20050930. Noted changes include:
-Joystick force feedback support.
-Beginnings of Win64 support.
-Many MSI fixes and cleanups.
-Font linking support.
-Several OLE fixes.
-Some fixes for MacOS/x86.
-Lots of bug fixes.


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