Arch Linux

KingofKIngs

Member

Registered: 2013-04-03

Posts: 20

CPU VS GPU Acceleration

When gaming under Arch linux, gaming seems to be more cpu accelerated than gpu accelerated when using Wine. A prime example is Diablo III. I was getting 15-30fps on it earlier today depending on what tweaks I did to the graphics card and other wine tweaks. When I overclocked my CPU for unrelated reasons, when I later tested my fps, it increased to 60-75fps. I am unsure of why it would be using CPU acceleration. I had similar poor performance on other WINE games. I haven't had this problem on other distros in the past, leading me to believe that this is a problem with some arch configuration I have.

Hardware info:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5
CPU: AMD Phenom II 1055T stock 3.2ghz overclock 3.8ghz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 470 (stock speeds)

Software info:
I have had this issue on the stock kernel as well as linux-ck. I have used the most recent drivers, as well as 304xx on both stock and ck. I have also installed them myself under ck. I have had this issue on stock wine as well as an AUR build for wine for diablo. I have both the 64 bit and 32bit drivers installed.

If you need any more information I would be glad to give it to you.

Thanks.

[edit] When I used windows I easily maxed any game including Diablo at stock speeds. I am unsure of if this is useful for comparison.

Last edited by KingofKIngs (2013-04-03 01:06:59)

AleXoundOS

Member

From: Russia

Registered: 2009-07-18

Posts: 31

Website

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

I expect that Diablo III uses directx, that is not native technology to Linux. So wine developers implemented a code that converts directx calls into OpenGL. This conversion requires CPU time. Probably this makes CPU to be a bottleneck in such case.

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http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

You are not going to play games with Wine just like on Windows this is simply fact. Sometimes you can't even make up the performance penality with a super beefy system.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

15-30fps... 60-75fps

If you're playing with vsync on, try turning it off.

Nvidia doesn't play well with composite - get best performance by disabling composite, e.g. in xorg.conf

Wine has an Nvidia graphics performance patch.

A big problem with wine is that it uses a separate process, wineserver, which is good for stability but bad for performance. It would be great if there were a variant of wine which didn't use a separate process.

mich41

Member

Registered: 2012-06-22

Posts: 796

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

You shouldn't get such a big improvement from 20% CPU OC.

Do you have Cool'n'Quiet enabled? It's awful for gaming but enabled by default in Arch. OCing AMDs has a side effect of disabling C'n'Q so this could explain your observations.

Jedipottsy

Member

Registered: 2008-05-22

Posts: 18

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

Your CPU may be bottle necking your performance, it may be due to memory bottle necking, which when cpu is overclocked may also overclock memory (depending on memory dividers etc)

However with the actual rendering of frames, the cpu contributes almost nothing to the rendering of frames, however a slow cpu will be unable to provide the data the gpu requires, which can cause slowdown. Hence if you do benchmarks with a highend gpu and set it to the absolute minimum settings, you can see almost no difference between an i3, i5 or i7 in some cases.

http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/5 … /Intel.png
http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/532/bench/CPU.png

In regards to your problems, wine can also vary widely from version to version, some times wine can introduce regressions, which is why things such as Play on linux are great as they let you have specific versions of wine for each application, sometimes older versions with patches for best performance and compatability, so you may want to give that a shot.

KingofKIngs

Member

Registered: 2013-04-03

Posts: 20

Re: CPU VS GPU Acceleration

Update: With Cool n Quiet disabled, I get 40-50 fps, with spikes as low as 20. It is almost playable, with more tweaks I may hit a stable 30-60.