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Mekoryuk · Post by **Mekoryuk** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 4:04 am

I'm having gaming issues with the latest nVidia drivers (9742) and Beryl 0.1.2, so I thought I'd start a new forum topic that sheds some light on how various accelerated games perform under these new conditions. Hopefully those that have already made the jump, or those that are still debating about jumping will find this information useful for their purposes. I invite people to contribute their experiences with games, and possibly any tips they might have for making things run okay. I have read in another thread that turning off syncing in Beryl's manager might fix a few things, but I haven't tried this for myself as my main machine is "down" for the moment.

My gaming run-down:

ET, Quake 3, and older run fine.

Upon exiting, Doom 3 and Quake 4 corrupts the entire screen, and I must reload the WM to see anything again. One instance when I exited resulted in a hard lock.

UT2004 is wonky; the menu screens flicker bad, and is black most of the time; in-game textures and geometry blink in and out of existence.

America's Army experiences a horrible flicker as well, which carries into the game. Seems like a refresh issue.

Neverwinter Nights seems okay.

BZFlag experiences strange flickering, like portions of the screen are out of sync with each other.

Opengl-mode Supertux exits with screen corruption. The WM must be reloaded.

All of these games are run full-screen.

zerojay · Post by **zerojay** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 9:25 pm

3D games shouldn't be running at all or very slowly when using Beryl.

bigli · Post by **bigli** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 9:59 pm

cedega runs perfectly, just with an obvious loss of framerate.

i still had far cry going at 30fps with all of beryls effects running, and thats on a rather shoddy AMD 64 3000 with a gig of ram and a 6600gt

whig · Post by **whig** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:00 pm

When using Xgl for my X server I had big issues with games. With nvidia 9xxx I can use just X and things have gone just about perfect. A compiz camper for now, might go to beryl later.

Interimo · Post by **Interimo** » Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:43 pm

It's not a game, but for me, Blender doesn't work at all. I start it, the screen goes black, and I have to completely shut-down to get started again.

whig · Post by **whig** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 2:33 am

Does blender crash with the -w (window) option?

Mekoryuk · Post by **Mekoryuk** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 7:24 am

Strange. Blender runs just fine under Beryl for me. Is there any crash information when you run it from a console?

saboya · Post by **saboya** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:05 pm

Tried:

Quake 3, CS 1.6, HL2/CS Source

All games ran fine, like Beryl wasn't even running. Great FPS (125 maxfps on Q3, 100 maxfps on CS 1.6, HL2/Source 90+fps 99% of the time)

But I have to turn Beryl off for gaming for one sole reason: Despite the good framerate, any game runs like the FPS is 40 or something. My first guess is that Beryl had a certain number of screen atualizations, and the games were capped to that, sounds pretty reasonable. Then I head to Beryl-Settings to see if there was such an option, and luckily, it was there! "Refresh Rate" on "General Options" I then set the refresh rate to 120 (which the max refresh rate I use on my monitor, 800x600 @ 120hz for Q3 and CS 1.6) and tried... Same sluggish game. I thought "Maybe I have to restart X or something". Restarted X, nothing. Reboot: nothing...

I'm clueless about this, it gets very annoying having to turn off Beryl to play everytime (I don't play for hours, but I play a bit every 2 hours or so).

saboya · Post by **saboya** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:17 pm

erm... I was just browsing Beryl configuration and I found another setting... "Detect Refresh Rate"

...

Just uncheck it and the refresh thing will work! \o/ Now all games are very smooth again

otherside · Post by **otherside** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 12:16 am

DarkStalker wrote:3D games shouldn't be running at all or very slowly when using Beryl.

What makes you think that

I'm running WoW at normal speed under beryl..

teh_drizzle · Post by **teh_drizzle** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 7:36 am

I can't get stepmania to run O.o
Say ehhhiiii! no direct redering, and I'm like, ya there is.
Haha, running the fglrx drivers.

justwantstohelp · Post by **justwantstohelp** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 12:48 am

I'm on a i945 chip here. Neverwinter Nights works okay, though the gnome-system-monitor applet creates some glitches in the game, so I just remove it. Other games, both full screen and windowed, opengl and non-opengl, work as well.

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Sun Dec 03, 2006 2:08 am

all my games run fine, blender ignores the -w unless i start it in kwin then start beryl, otherwise its always full screen and the box effects dont refresh right. All cedega apps taht are supposed to run fullscreen leave me with no mouse focus. or a black screen. Windowed wine apps seem to run fine but windowed cedega apps are horribly choppy.

karsten_s · Post by **karsten_s** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 11:31 pm

I've been playing with beryl last night and this morning. Got it to where it was running slickly in my xfce, w/o any noticeable cpu load: I'm on an AMD Athlon64 X2 with a Geforce 7300GT. I run X with Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true" and Option "Composite" "enable" im my xorg.conf and Beryl from SVN.

Showing it to a friend today he asked me about games under linux and I wanted to show him Americas Army and Nexuiz. When I launched Nexuiz, the sceen went completely blank. However, audacious was still playing in the background. I switched to tty1, killall -v nexuiz and back to X, which showed some change but was still black. Music playing, mouse cursor was showing and moving, but no reaction. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to kill X and my computer hardlocked.

Ever since, beryl is not working at all. I reinstalled everything I installed since last night and I just can't get it to work: beryl-manager starts ok, but when I want to switch to beryl as Window Manager, it changes for a moment and goes back to metacity...

I want it back... please...! I loved the cube desktop...

big_D · Post by **big_D** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 7:38 pm

I have a similar problem, cannot switch back to a beryl session from a different login as the screen goes black. I'm hoping this update will fix that.

If this problem arises, one has to

Code: Select all

killall beryl

in tty1 otherwise the hard lock occurs.

D.

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Mon Dec 04, 2006 8:52 pm

Fixed an X server crash starting some fullscreen OpenGL games.

HOLY SHIT, IF THEY FIXED THE FARCRY BUG I'M SENDING THEM FLOWERS

avieth · Post by **avieth** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 9:47 pm

Using cedega to run steam I can play Half Life 2, and CS:Source.

In HL2 single player I get 60 fps went not in a firefight, and around 40 when I am.

In CS:S on a 30 player server I get 20-24 fps, and aftare about 5 minutes of playing X locks, but control+alt+backspace gets me out of the crash.

Any ideas?

Mekoryuk · Post by **Mekoryuk** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 3:33 am

avieth wrote:Using cedega to run steam I can play Half Life 2, and CS:Source.

In HL2 single player I get 60 fps went not in a firefight, and around 40 when I am.

In CS:S on a 30 player server I get 20-24 fps, and aftare about 5 minutes of playing X locks, but control+alt+backspace gets me out of the crash.

Any ideas?

My first instinct tells me heat problems. Is your case properly ventilated? Is the heatsink/fan on your GPU still functioning?

avieth · Post by **avieth** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 3:52 am

Mekoryuk wrote:
avieth wrote:Using cedega to run steam I can play Half Life 2, and CS:Source.

In HL2 single player I get 60 fps went not in a firefight, and around 40 when I am.

In CS:S on a 30 player server I get 20-24 fps, and aftare about 5 minutes of playing X locks, but control+alt+backspace gets me out of the crash.

Any ideas?
My first instinct tells me heat problems. Is your case properly ventilated? Is the heatsink/fan on your GPU still functioning?

Yeah, everything's good, there's even a fan on the side of my case. I never had this problem before installing and using beryl.

EDIT: Just for the hell of it I dusted out my case a bit and tried playing CS:S. I started the game and it crashed beryl

My specs:
AMD Opteron 146
ASUS SK8N
1GB Corsair DDR
nVidia 6600GT

Voltago · Post by **Voltago** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 2:33 pm

Maybe it would be a smart move to write a script that sets the native window manager (kwin or whatever) when the game starts and switches back to emerald when you exit. There is an option in beryl-manager that lets you switch window managers on the fly, so I guess it would be relatively easy to do this. Perhaps there is even a super simple window manager designed for full-screen one-window situations that lets you save a few cpu cycles for the game...?

avieth · Post by **avieth** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 7:34 pm

Voltago wrote:Maybe it would be a smart move to write a script that sets the native window manager (kwin or whatever) when the game starts and switches back to emerald when you exit. There is an option in beryl-manager that lets you switch window managers on the fly, so I guess it would be relatively easy to do this. Perhaps there is even a super simple window manager designed for full-screen one-window situations that lets you save a few cpu cycles for the game...?

I'd love it if beryl just ignored the CS:S window. Just put it fullscreen and forget about it, don't decorate it, don't show it in the scale, no shadow effects, no transparency...

karsten_s · Post by **karsten_s** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:53 am

i almost started writing a wrapper script that would launch opengl games in fullscreen after loading my default windowmanager. however, it wasn't quite as trivial as I expected it to be. switching back to beryl/emerald is as simple as `emerald --replace` iirc, but it was the part about deactivating beryl/emerald cleanly was what got me stuck. I didn't want to just `killall beryl`...

Another idea I had was to start an additional X server containing only the game. That way you could switch from game back to your production/beryl-enabled screen with Ctrl+Alt+F7 and back to the game with Ctrl+Alt+F8. Dunno why I stopped working on that, though...

Voltago · Post by **Voltago** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:55 am

kwin supports replace too (and so do probably most other window managers). So

Code: Select all

kwin --replace
start_your_game
emerald --replace

should work.

zerojay · Post by **zerojay** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 5:22 pm

Voltago wrote:kwin supports replace too (and so do probably most other window managers). So
Code: Select all
kwin --replace
start_your_game
emerald --replace
should work.

Use aquamarine instead of emerald.

Voltago · Post by **Voltago** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 5:28 pm

DarkStalker wrote:Use aquamarine instead of emerald.

Why? emerald seems to work well enough.