Quake 4 Tweaking/Speed

[nukem996]

It seems that Quake4 is sucking up 99% of my CPU during most of the ingame movies and at random during the game and around 70% of memory(according to top via ctrl+alt+f1). Has anyone else seen this? I was thinking of playing with renice and trying out the ck-sources again. Anyway does anyone have some tweaks to make the game run more smoothly?

EDIT:
Wow I was just looking through my dmesg and I saw this

Code: Select all

warning: many lost ticks.
Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts
rip __do_softirq+0x48/0xb0
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 13, 0002 beef4a01 0000004a 00000304 00000000 00000002
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 13, 0002 beef4a01 0000004a 00000304 00000000 00000002
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 6, PE0002 0000 beef4901 000d0540 00000000 00000000
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L0 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 6, PE0002 0000 beef4901 00000000 00000000 00000000
NVRM: Xid: 6, PE0002 0000 beef4901 00000000 00000000 00000000
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 3, C 00000002 SC 00000005 M 0000019c Data beef4201
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 3, C 00000002 SC 00000002 M 00000198 Data beef4201
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0
NVRM: Xid: 3, C 00000002 SC 00000005 M 0000019c Data beef4201
NVRM: Xid: 25,  L1 -> L0

Is this a driver bug or lack of memory/CPU?

Thanks,

nuke

Video Quality: Ultra
Screen Size: 1024x768
Aspect Ratio: Standard
Fullscreen: Yes
High Quality Speical Effects: Yes
Shadows: Yes(how could you use the doom 3 engine without them?)
Specular: Yes
Bump maps: Yes
Vertical sync: No(What does this do?)
Antialiasing: Ive been playing with this and im trying to find a good place.

System:
CPU: AMD64 3500+
Mother Board: ASUS A8N Premium
Memory: 1gig
Graphics Card: eVGA Geforce 7800 GT
Sound Card: Audigy 2 Platium
Harddrive: 200gig SATA 150

[nec]

ive heard that the "ULTRA" setting in q4 is buggy, for most people the game crash with this Option.
By me it crashes too, but d3 works perfectly so its a bug for me and i hope they will fix it!

Greetings nec

ps: Vertical sync means that the frames are synced with the monitor refresh rate, looks a bit better on flat monitors
and lookes a bit better cos u dont have " stripes" when u aim from left to right but your framerate stuck on 85FPS when
your monitor have 85Hz (100fps on 100Hz of course;) )

[ckenda1]

ive heard that the "ULTRA" setting in q4 is buggy, for most people the game crash with this Option.
By me it crashes too, but d3 works perfectly so its a bug for me and i hope they will fix it!

Greetings nec

ps: Vertical sync means that the frames are synced with the monitor refresh rate, looks a bit better on flat monitors
and lookes a bit better cos u dont have " stripes" when u aim from left to right but your framerate stuck on 85FPS when
your monitor have 85Hz (100fps on 100Hz of course;) )

Too bad the game engine is capped at 60fps, so that really does not matter!!

[wolf31o2]

It seems that Quake4 is sucking up 99% of my CPU during most of the ingame movies and at random during the game and around 70% of memory(according to top via ctrl+alt+f1). Has anyone else seen this? I was thinking of playing with renice and trying out the ck-sources again. Anyway does anyone have some tweaks to make the game run more smoothly?

I'd try a lower quality setting. I don't think your sources are going to make much difference, but feel free to try them. At any rate, from what I've seen, Quake 4 has higher requirements than Doom 3.

[wesw02]

what about dumping my window manager??? if i create a user that doesn't have a windows manager will that help with speed? vs. using xfce

[Gentii]

Yes running a window manager is very cpu intensive. Thus dumping it will make any games run approximately twice faster.

Edit :

[robust]

Crashing is often due to all physical memory is used. Quake 4 uses 1,4GB memory totaly for me (including SWAP). And regarding the whole "if you don't use a windowmanager your performance will double" that's just silly, not every wm uses alot of resources. Good luck with Quake4 everyone!

[J.M.I.T.]

Yes running a window manager is very cpu intensive. Thus dumping it will make any games run approximately twice faster.

hey... you forgot the smilie ;-P if you were serious, then that's BS. it would only save some MB of memory... the gain in speed would be minimal

[Gentii]

Hmm well, if quake 4 really uses 1.4 gb mem, then saving as much mem as you can wouldn't be that silly.
I find it quite hard to believe, but tbh I really don't have a clue.

[sirdilznik]

Yes running a window manager is very cpu intensive. Thus dumping it will make any games run approximately twice faster.

Edit :

Twice as fast... that's WAY off. Even if you were going from a bloated Window Manager like KDE to no Window Manager, the performance difference would be minimal. Going from a fairly streamlined WM like XFCE to none... I doubt you would be able to notice the difference.

[obsrv]

If Quake4 eats up to 1.4GB ram, then why requirements don't require at least 1.5GB ram?

[nukem996]

Well a couple of updates. I increased the speed somewhat by figured out gentoo dosnt patch the nvidia driver for a bug in the kernel. I created a bug and ebuild for it, hopefully it will get into portage soon. This clears most of the errors in my kernel log except this one

Code: Select all

warning: many lost ticks.
Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts
rip __do_softirq+0x48/0xb0

Is that just saying im out of memory or CPU?

I have also noticed that while I get lag in single player I get none with pretty much a solid 60fps in multiplayer. I have the same settings, maybe its just single player that eats memory/CPU. Does anyone know how I can log the memory(phyical and swap) and CPU usage while im in the game without me having to look at top. Basicly I want it to look at the CPU and memory usage every x seconds and dump it into a file while im playing the game.

Thanks

nuke

[gurke]

my pc:
amd64 x2 4200+
1GB ram
geforce 6600GT

im having good performance at "in room" scenes with 1 or 2 enemys (i tried screen res. up to 1280x1024). as soon as i have a big room, or multiple enemys, i have a huge performance drop (low fps on _any_ resoltion - even at low setting with 640x480). any advice?

[Vincent Weber]

im having good performance at "in room" scenes with 1 or 2 enemys (i tried screen res. up to 1280x1024). as soon as i have a big room, or multiple enemys, i have a huge performance drop (low fps on _any_ resoltion - even at low setting with 640x480). any advice?

Try 800x600 instead of 640x480. Most new videocards are not designed to run at that resolution properly. That's all I know... I'm just a big newbie

[veal]

If Quake4 eats up to 1.4GB ram, then why requirements don't require at least 1.5GB ram?

because that's not the minimum?

there are cvars for cachesizes etc. so you actually can restrict q4 to a maximum of memory usage. it might uses more nevertheless due to other caching but if you got the ram, what do you care? (ok, the swap is bad, but then get lower settings...)

[Aynjell]

If Quake4 eats up to 1.4GB ram, then why requirements don't require at least 1.5GB ram?

There could be many factors at work here. First and foremost, is Linux's memory management behaviour. Unlike windows, Linux uses everything it can get to it's advantage. If that means using more RAM to play a game, so be it. Also, higher quality settings and more intensive AI may or may not increase this requirement, but I am sure under minimal settings it wouldn't require half of that. I've yet ot see the official specs required, but I know my PC could handle it. As for the dedicated linux build I'm setting up (as detailed in my sig), not sure, but it should do just fine.

[bgradid]

i had huge performance problems with this game until i increased my AGP apature from 128 to 256 megs. After i put it to 256 megs the game was smooth as butter (remarkably so) on high @ 1280x1024

2500+ @ 2.3 ghz (stable as a rock)
1 gig of ram @ 380mhz (again, stable)
6600GT 128 meg


I actually bought this game pretty much just because it worked under linux and I want to support the platform (though I realize that none of my linuxy reasons will be realized to the publisher)

[nukem996]

i had huge performance problems with this game until i increased my AGP apature from 128 to 256 megs. After i put it to 256 megs the game was smooth as butter (remarkably so) on high @ 1280x1024

2500+ @ 2.3 ghz (stable as a rock)
1 gig of ram @ 380mhz (again, stable)
6600GT 128 meg


I actually bought this game pretty much just because it worked under linux and I want to support the platform (though I realize that none of my linuxy reasons will be realized to the publisher)

Were did you set the AGP apature? Personally im using a PCI-Express card but while looking in my .quake4/q4base/Quake4Config.cfg file I did see the line seta com_videoRam "256"

[Need4Speed]

AGP apature is usually set in BIOS, and I would assume there is an equivalent setting for PCI Express. The video memory setting you see in the quake config file is just telling quake how much video memory it should expect (I think).

[Splink]

i just use the default settings on mine - let it auto detect, and rammed the resolution up to 1280x1024, and works a treat. PLayed on a few 16 player servers yesterday and never dropped below 62 fps - even on the longest yard map - where you can see all the players on the server at the same time.

Suppose it does help having a fast gfx card though - running on my 9700 pro ... got no hope at all .. max i got out of it is 35 fps :/

oh .. anyone know of a master server for this at all so i can add to xqf ?

[grenouille]

just rename the qstat ebuild to 2.10 and put it in your overlay, will install you a q4 compatible qstat ^^

oh and about the fps, would have been a shame with an a64 and a 7800

[Gentii]

indeed

[Splink]

just rename the qstat ebuild to 2.10 and put it in your overlay, will install you a q4 compatible qstat ^^

oh and about the fps, would have been a shame with an a64 and a 7800

So the one which is already in portage, 2.8 i think it is, just rename it to 2.1 and then just merge that in ?

[boniek]

Here's my multiplayer config - optimized for speed ( still my radeon 9700 pro is not enough for this game ).

[DrFishstik]

my pc:
amd64 x2 4200+
1GB ram
geforce 6600GT

im having good performance at "in room" scenes with 1 or 2 enemys (i tried screen res. up to 1280x1024). as soon as i have a big room, or multiple enemys, i have a huge performance drop (low fps on _any_ resoltion - even at low setting with 640x480). any advice?

I also get random drops at any quality and any resolution from 60-30fps when watching fps counter in top right (in game control + alt + ~ for console) com_showFPS 1 I have tried with vsync on and off export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK="1"

my rig:

AMD64 3000+ @ 2.1GHz
6800GT AGP
1 gig Ram

It shouldnt chug like this. Cedega games do the same thing : (