End of rope: pathetic frames/sec performance in Spring

[mekoryuk]

System specs:
AMD64 X2 3800+
4GB DDR2-800 RAM
GeForce GTS 250 w/ 1GB VRAM
Running Gentoo Linux

When I first started playing with the Spring engine, I was getting great performance out of the engine (enough that I made one of my friends jealous enough to buy a new video card to play with me). With maxed settings I'd peg at 60 frames/sec with vsync turned on.

Now? ~5 frames/sec, even lower.

Lowering the graphics settings to their minimum does not give a significant performance boost at all. The most I get is 20 frames/sec, and that's only at the beginning, when the fighting hasn't really begun. Of course it seems this is intermittent...sometimes even on lowest settings and starting out I find I only get 1 frame/sec. There seems to be no suggestion as to what might cause this.

Other games perform just as expected. I thought it may be a significant regression was introduced somehow with the latest Spring engine update. Downgrading the engine from 0.82.7.1 to 0.82.6.1 did not solve the issue, nor did downgrading my kernel from 2.6.38 to 2.6.35, just in case there was a kernel issue I wasn't aware of. Nvidia drivers are at 260.19.44 by default, and I've tried downgrading those drivers to no avail.

I've tried starting with a fresh config, on a fresh user account. I've looked through the logs--nothing seems anomalous. No errors. Even tried the "core affinity" thing in the FAQ, and zero improvement. It really does seem like just one day Spring decided, "You know what, I'm going to run like you're on a Rage128."

I'm at the end of my rope here. I honestly don't know what else to do. Does ANYONE have an idea as to what may be causing this, or how I might fix it?

[Beherith]

Try turning off threaded optimization (if possible for nVidia under linux). If you play BA, try the multithreaded executable.

[Forboding Angel]

turn off vsync

[mekoryuk]

Try turning off threaded optimization (if possible for nVidia under linux). If you play BA, try the multithreaded executable.

Not applicable for Linux. You must understand what I started out with was pretty much the default. It doesn't seem any settings have changed. I didn't have to fiddle around with core affinities or try to find multithreaded executables when I first started playing BA to get great framerates.

The real mystery here is why the game will no longer attain those framerates even though it HAS done so before on the same hardware and the same settings.

turn off vsync

Framerates are the same with vsync on or off.

[Google_Frog]

When is the framerate drop? At the start of a game or later when lots of things are going on? Pathing recently became very very slow in some cases so if you only have trouble later on it could be due to pathing.

[mekoryuk]

When is the framerate drop? At the start of a game or later when lots of things are going on? Pathing recently became very very slow in some cases so if you only have trouble later on it could be due to pathing.

Framerate drop is immediate compared to before. Before I could get easily over 60 frames/sec on max settings at the VERY start of a game, and during the course of the game it would probably drop down to 30 frames/sec, unless someone starts lobbing nukes left and right. :)

Now I only get ~5 frames/sec upon loading into the game on max settings, and it drops to 2-1 frames/sec quickly as more units show up--exact same settings as before. Only thing that's changed in the meantime has been Linux kernel version, nvidia driver version, and Spring engine version...but downgrading all of those did not fix anything.

With everything on the absolute lowest settings I now get 20 frames/sec out of the gate (whereas playing on lowest settings before would get me several hundred frames/sec at the beginning), and it drops down to <10, then ~5 frame/sec when things get busy.

No other game has exhibited this performance hit. Here's the start-up log, and I don't see anything wrong:

Code: Select all

LogOutput initialized.
Spring 0.82.7.1
Build date/time: Apr  8 2011 10:07:50
Available log subsystems: CollisionVolume, unit, ArchiveScanner, VFS-detail, VFS, Sound
Enabled log subsystems: Sound
Enable or disable log subsystems using the LogSubsystems configuration key
  or the SPRING_LOG_SUBSYSTEMS environment variable (both comma separated).
  Use "none" to disable the default log subsystems.
using configuration source "/home/mekoryuk/.springrc"
[CMyMath::Init] CPU SSE mask: 120, flags:
        SSE 1.0:  1,  SSE 2.0:  1
        SSE 3.0:  1, SSSE 3.0:  0
        SSE 4.1:  0,  SSE 4.2:  0
        SSE 4.0A: 0,  SSE 5.0A: 0
        using streflop SSE FP-math mode, CPU supports SSE instructions
OS: Linux
OS: 64bit native mode
Using read-write data directory: /home/mekoryuk/.spring/
Using read-only data directory: /usr/share/games/spring/
Scanning: /usr/share/games/spring/base
Scanning: /home/mekoryuk/.spring/maps
Scanning: /home/mekoryuk/.spring/games
Scanning: /home/mekoryuk/.spring/mods
Supported Video modes: 1920x1200, 1600x1200, 1400x1050, 1280x1024, 1280x960, 1152x864, 1024x768, 960x720, 928x696, 89
6x672, 832x624, 800x600, 720x400, 700x525, 640x512, 640x480, 640x400, 640x350, 576x432, 512x384, 416x312, 400x300, 36
0x200, 320x240, 320x200, 320x175
Video mode set to 1920x1200/32bit
[f=0000000] SDL:  1.2.14
[f=0000000] GL:   3.3.0 NVIDIA 260.19.44
[f=0000000] GL:   NVIDIA Corporation
[f=0000000] GL:   GeForce GTS 250/PCI/SSE2
[f=0000000] GLSL: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
[f=0000000] GLEW: 1.5.8
[f=0000000] Joysticks found: 0
[f=0000000] Joystick 0 not found
[f=0000000] Connecting to local server
[f=0000000] Pre-scanning demo file for game data...
[f=0000000] [Sound] OpenAL info:
[f=0000000] [Sound]   Vendor:     OpenAL Community
[f=0000000] [Sound]   Version:    1.1 ALSOFT 1.13
[f=0000000] [Sound]   Renderer:   OpenAL Soft
[f=0000000] [Sound]   AL Extensions: AL_EXT_DOUBLE AL_EXT_EXPONENT_DISTANCE AL_EXT_FLOAT32 AL_EXT_IMA4 AL_EXT_LINEAR_DISTANCE AL_EXT_MCFORMATS AL_EXT_MULAW AL_EXT_MULAW_MCFORMATS AL_EXT_OFFSET AL_EXT_source_distance_model AL_LOKI_quadriphonic AL_SOFT_buffer_sub_data AL_SOFT_loop_points
[f=0000000] [Sound]   ALC Extensions: ALC_ENUMERATE_ALL_EXT ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT ALC_EXT_CAPTURE ALC_EXT_disconnect ALC_EXT_EFX ALC_EXT_thread_local_context
[f=0000000] [Sound]                   ALC_EXT_EFX found (required for air absorption): yes
[f=0000000] [Sound]   Device:     ALSA Default
[f=0000000] [Sound]   Available Devices:  
[f=0000000] [Sound]                       ALSA Default
[f=0000000] [Sound] air absorption enabled: 0.1

[Cheesecan]

Maybe a widget is causing problems? Try running the profiler widget to see.

[knorke]

which game/mods and map? all?

ingame press crtl+b to see some stats what spring spends most time doing (physics, drawing world etc)
maybe screenshot that.

you can try typing into chat:
/advshading 0
/shadows 0
/water 0
(just to see if it changes fps)

try fullscreen/window

[mekoryuk]

which game/mods and map? all?

Yep. Any map, any mod. So far I've tried the CA Chickens mod, Balanced Annihilation, Advanced Balanced Annihilation, Zero-K.

ingame press crtl+b to see some stats what spring spends most time doing (physics, drawing world etc)
maybe screenshot that.

This is process usage info with "max" settings turned on:


Here's process usage info with everything set to "low":

try fullscreen/window

Doesn't really make much of a difference. Also, I've tried playing with and without "compositing" enabled, insofar as to launch an isolated X process (no desktop environment or window manager) and starting the game from there. Still no difference.

Maybe a widget is causing problems? Try running the profiler widget to see.

Here's the output from the profiler widget. Not sure how to interpret this information:


These should all be pretty much the default widgets. I don't recall ever going on a widget downloading spree unless another mod installed something I didn't know about.

[Forboding Angel]

Please try with Evolution RTS ( http://www.evolutionrts.info ) (evo disables all user side stuff) and see if it makes a difference.