New pledge, trying Linux client, need direction from devs/gurus

Hi,

I just pledged today and am trying out the pre-alpha (been a fan since Ultima5, this is great!)

My question is mainly to devs, or anyone who has been around long enough to kinda know how things have been going. With my hardware (Intel i5 quadcore 3.2Ghz, Geforce 610 w/ 2G vram, 8G ram) I get about 3-5fps in the client. I've been running Linux since 1994 or so, and I know what I'm doing (binary drivers are updated, compositing turned off, SotA graphical settings dont seem to make much difference, etc). I understand why (pre-alpha software) and am not complaining, but I'm curious what to do.

Does anyone really care about Linux bugs at the moment? I don't know whether the team is interested at this point in development; reporting Linux-specific bugs/performance issues may be beyond their scope at this time. If it is important to have Linux testing/bug reporting being done, I can try to stick it out. If more general bug-reporting is needed at this time, and having a playable (i.e. not 5fps) test platform is more important, I can easily install Win7/Win10 (it'd probably be a bit more fun too ;-)

So, anyone with ideas on this, holler back.

Merc

 

Turn the shadows off, as a Linux user using a weaker machine a year ago, that helped the most. Also stare at your feet, I suspect that the devs like Linux users to remain penitent.

 

As I stated in the post, I turned off all special graphical effects and chose "Fastest" for quality. No discernible fps difference.

Hah, I did stare at my feet, got 10fps out of that!

 

First stupid question (you seem to know what you're doing but we all get caught sometimes) you're sure it's using the nvidia card and not built in graphics?

Have you installed cuda? Some distros pull it in with the nvidia driver and some don't.

 

Switched to linux mint from windows 2 days ago not my first time running linux but i would very much put me in the newb corner.
That being said I now only get low fps and bit choppy in dense populated areas like owls head, about 15 fps there.
In player owned town Chaos crossroads it gets better but still only 30ish, however in the hunting scenes I've visited so far fps was at around 45 with everything on / high same as I had on windows.

my point is I think you would suffer with your setup even under windows, it's hard to tell though with new releases coming all the time and I have been constantly upgrading my system. switched graphics card earlier this year (GTX 560Ti) sota did not run well with it. Right now my setup is somewhat high-end and the game is playable both in windows and in linux but still waiting on those performance optimizations from portalarium, some time alpha / beta.

edit: where are you when you have 5 fps? and what's your fps on world map?

 

Quite sure. The on-board graphics are disabled in BIOS, so it wouldn't work if I tried.

CUDA isn't really geared for 3D graphics, so I doubt it would make much difference. At any rate, the CUDA installation is complex and Nvidia does not currently support building CUDA modules on the Fedora 22 toolchain. I really don't think this is an issue; I could be wrong, but I'm not going to find out.

Thanks for the reply.

 

Thanks for replying. Your video card is probably just way better than mine. While the GT610 is quite old/slow, it's not SO bad that 5fps is explained. I can run mature games like World of Warcraft and EVE Online with at least 20fps if not more, in WINE no less.

I'm sure performance wouldn't be great, 10-20fps maybe? But I have a feeling it would at least be playable. To be honest, I'm not sure the graphics quality settings in SotA actually do anything at this point. I could be wrong, but likely they are placeholders for when someone starts really banging on the engine optimizations.

Yeah, that'll be cool. I'm not complaining at all, really, I understand this is pre-alpha software and that, especially for the Linux build, this is just the state of the game. I'm mostly interested in whether me slogging through in Linux would do anyone any good, or if I can be of most help dealing with the Win64 build.

In the first area, where you meet the guy/kill the skeletons. I haven't gotten much farther, I crashed when I got to Soltown.

Merc

 

Yeah it didn't feel like they did much of anything... I have exactly the same outcome on lowest/highest under linux.

If it is really unplayable (like 5 fps ) you would probably get more online time if you had bit higher fps is my guess, more online time = more testing done though I switched partly to be one more tester for the linux build, so if you go windows we even it out
and as you implied I would guess the linux/mac builds are somewhat behind windows one

PS. would recommend you to at least upgrade gfx before launch

best of luck you ya

 

What are your system/gpu specs?

 

Hey Mercster, I don't have an answer for you but I ran it on Linux a while back and have similar hardware (except for a GeForce 750ti by MSi though). It ran ok if not blazingly fast but I was also using a 64 bit version of Ubuntu and not Fedora so I don't know if that makes a difference or not.

I am no expert but I did download the latest drivers from nvidia instead of using the ones that came with the distro and that seemed to help.

Anyway, best of luck and I would recommended testing/playing on whichever operating system you feel most comfortable doing it in. Any feedback is useful and will help improve the game.

 

Aye, all us linux users certainly do.

Devs time is however just too precious at this time to expect linux-specific solutions and fixes. For example, the multimonitor bug plagued SotA as long as I remember, but I'm not holding my breath to see it plugged.

Your gfx card is seriously underpowered, however. Also, HDD or SSD? Performance increased a lot when I moved from the 4xHDD RAID I had, to the single 1TB SSD I have now - all else being equal. I guess the loading thread got a great buff with a faster mass memory unit.

 

Yeah, that's what I figured, so I installed Win10. Maybe down the road I'll revisit the Linux client.

Hah, I know! WHICH is why I actually upgraded yesterday . Got me a GTX 750 w/ 2G VRAM. All I could afford at the moment, but it's *way* better.
Getting 40-50 FPS in deserted places and 10-15 FPS in very crowded places now (like yesterday's telethon events). It's playable now.

Yeah any I/O done with an SSD is going to improve, but I cannot afford SSD drives, so just using a 1TB HDD. I doubt that's where most of the bottleneck is, but who knows.

 

Did you try that new card with Linux or only with Windows 10?

 

Only with Win10. I'm sure it would drastically improve performance in Linux as well, but I just got Windows up and running smoothly so I don't want to switch back immediately .

 

Enjoy the game

 

When you say your binary drivers are updated, were you up to 355.06 on Linux? They certainly care about Linux bugs, and if you care as well (which I think you do), you should try to get it into a playable state and report any Linux bugs you find.

By the way, which distribution are/were you using?

I have only been playing Shroud of the Avatar on Linux, but my hardware is quite on the high-end side of things. It has been and still is taking me a long time to move and get settled in, so my gaming hours are few until I'm done with the house.

 

Mint 17, i5, Radeon R9 270, proprietary drivers, other one a laptop with i7, built-in Intel graphics running Arch Linux. Both (even the latter one) were ok. Until release 21, now there are some places like e.g. Kingsport where I get very low fps as well.
Do you have the problem "everywhere" or only in some in game locations?

.... when I go to the same place again now, no issue with fps anymore. Nothing changed except the latest update, maybe shows how quick they do fix issues?

 

what bug is it you speak of? I've heard of it several times but never more info than 2 monitors involved.
I had some problems with my two monitors under windows, game would launch in the middle of both screens and all white, took forever to load.
after switching to Linux no such problem and getting into game is way faster because of it.

just gotta brag about my equipment a little ( no friends will listen ) 6x64gb SSD @550/500 rw in raid 0. according to box that is, I think mine was 270/250 last test

 

Cheer! Congratulations!

SotA is really demanding on hardware side, and I'm sure its requirements will drop once they start seriously optimizing it - caching and codepath optimizations hopefully can do wonders on such a beast. Also, I'm sure we run with full debug clients, sending tons of telemetry back to Austin, and huge symbol tables loaded in memory, useful in case of crashes.

If you have two monitors (or one monitor and an Oculus DK2, like I do - which basically doubles as a monitor anyway), and the game starts in fullscreen, the viewport stretches both screens (as expected), but with the button hotspots only on one (the main screen), and actually not corresponding to where the buttons are drawn, but shrinked down to a single monitor.

To restore the game in a playable state, you must edit the config file by hand.

Brag at will. RAID0 is fast, but impressively unsafe. Any lost bit in any disk, and you're busted. I hope you backup frequently. 0+1 would be a better bet. 5 would be perfect, with your six disks, as you'd get 5 disks worth of space.

I have 120GB for the OS, and 1TB for /home - basically everything else.