Arch Linux

Convergence

Member

Registered: 2005-07-02

Posts: 377

Bad FPS When Games First Start

So I've been using Wine to play LoTRO and Steam Skyrim, and the results have been surprisingly good overall.  However, it seems when I first start these games, the FPS count is very bad.  I think that the slowdown is caused by either texture maps or 3d models being loaded into my graphics card's memory.   The problem is repeated as I enter a new *kind* of area, for instance, a cave, or a building.  If I explore one cave, experience the slowdown, then I explore another cave, I will not experience the slowdown (provided that each cave has similar texture maps).  I think that the temporary slowdown is because these types of areas have different texture maps.  However if I explore one of each type of area, like if I play for a long period of time, I stop getting this kind of slowdown.

Has anyone else experienced this?  Is this a wine problem, a problem with my graphics card, cpu, ram, vram, PCIE bandwidth, or xorg?

I don't think that the problem is my hard drive.  It's a 3 gb/second 7200 rpm drive.  Levels and areas load quickly (except for texture maps apparently).  I actually have an SSD (6gb/second), so I can move my ~/.wine if necessary, but it will take some work. 

My system:

athlon 2 x3 unlocked to phenom 2 x4
8 gigs of ddr3
gtx 460 with 768 vram
/ is on a 6gbps ssd
/home is on a 3 gbs hd (this is where my wine prefix is located.

Thanks.

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It's a very deadly weapon to know what you're doing
---  William Murderface

Convergence

Member

Registered: 2005-07-02

Posts: 377

Re: Bad FPS When Games First Start

Well, this *could* be a hard drive issue.  I'll work on moving things around tonight so that I can test it out.

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It's a very deadly weapon to know what you're doing
---  William Murderface

Darksoul71

Member

Registered: 2010-04-12

Posts: 319

Re: Bad FPS When Games First Start

Convergence,

I have no Skyrim, so I can hardly comment on running it under WINE. From what I have read and see, it should work pretty well under WINE.
Your system looks performant enough to run pretty much any new game which is supported under WINE at a decent frame rate.

Does Skyrim show the same issues if you reduce the texture details ?

Did you do some crosscheck if the issue is releated to WINE ? I would try to run the game with a different version of WINE.
For crosschecking you could also try Cedegas gametree, which is available for free after registration. At least under Gentoo someone used it together with Skyrim with big success.

Edit: This is the guy I mentioned running Skyrim under Gentoo:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-90 … 5d071cf805
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIuOJANnNJo

You can run a more demanding native game, crank up the details and see how it behaves (Alien Arena, Unigine Benchmarks).

Also enshure that everything in the system runs fine (e.g. check /var/log) when gaming. You could run "top -n 1" in the background every second via cron and drop the ouput into a textfile each time. This way you can evaluate what process take up your system ressources.

It might also help if you post your issue over at WINEs appDB:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p … &iId=24749

Oh yes, and I guess you are running the propritary NVidia blob, right ?

HTH,
D$

Last edited by Darksoul71 (2012-03-19 21:43:56)

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