Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

HarlemSquirrel · 2014-04-27 17:13:56

Since moving from Ubuntu to Arch late last year I have been using GNOME. After having a number of suspend and blank screen issues I decided to give the Enlightenment desktop environment a spin. I like many things about it and it's ability to be customized. However, I am noticing lower framrates with Dota 2 and other Steam games. I tried switching off compositing and switch from OpenGL to software compositing. This helped somewhat but the games are still not as smooth as when I run them from GNOME. There is very little documentation I can find online about Enlightenment, so I turn to the awesome Arch forums!

Kopkins · 2014-04-27 20:42:34

For the best performance you could run them in a VT. That's what I do since my computer is already underpowered. This runs them in on their own X server.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ru … _X_display
If you do make sure your user is in the sound group or you won't be able to hear anything.

HarlemSquirrel · 2014-04-27 21:24:48

Interesting...can I launch steam with this and then run a game from there, or should I be launching the game itself? For instance, the desktop shortcut for Dota 2 uses the command

steam steam://rungameid/570

so according to this Arch Wiki page, I should use this command?

xinit "steam steam://rungameid/570" -- :10

Kopkins · 2014-04-28 01:08:54

When I was trying that I had to use 'sudo' which would almost definitely mess with your games. I used the script that is on that page and only tweaked 1 line I think to make it work properly.

Here's my xrun,

http://bpaste.net/show/241543/

I just had to add sudo to fgconsole to get the next available VT.

Try it out.

HarlemSquirrel · 2014-04-28 02:16:45

Interesting. I guess I'm a noob. I don't know quite what to do with this. I don't see the line you changed. Which line would I change to run Dota? Thanks for the help! I save the file as .sh?

Kopkins · 2014-04-28 12:56:27

You can save it as whatever you want, I called it xrun. The line I changed is line 4 because fgconsole doesn't work correctly for me without sudo.

The script there gives you control to run stuff in a simple way without having to type out a long command every time. So you don't have to change any lines for a different program. So the usage would be

xrun COMMAND

#example
xrun minecraft

As long as xrun is in your path it will work. If it's not, you just have to move to the directory the file is in and run ./xrun COMMAND. You could put it in /usr/local/bin and then sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/xrun to make it exucutable. Then you can call it from anywhere.

For you it would probably be `xrun "steam steam://rungameid/570"`

And you could alias that in .bashrc

alias dota2 = 'xrun "steam steam://rungameid/570"'

Then all you need to run it from command line is dota2.

HarlemSquirrel · 2014-04-28 21:33:45

Thank you again for the help, Kopkins. I tried all of this and am running into this error:

setversion 1.4 failed: Permission denied

Buddlespit · 2014-04-29 00:31:49

I found that the xrun script didn't work for me with a playonlinux game, so I logged out of KDE, logged into console, startx'ed and ran my game thru the terminal. Ran fine, but I didn't have any difference in fps's. It was a good exercise in scripting for me, though.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-04-27 17:13:56

Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#2 2014-04-27 20:42:34

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#3 2014-04-27 21:24:48

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#4 2014-04-28 01:08:54

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#5 2014-04-28 02:16:45

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#6 2014-04-28 12:56:27

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#7 2014-04-28 21:33:45

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

#8 2014-04-29 00:31:49

Re: Enlightenment, Steam Games, and AMD OpenSource Video Drivers

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