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

IIRC it was 354.xx. I realize that updated drivers are important, but I doubt that small of a version difference would have impacted performance to the degree that it would have been playable. Now, my graphics card upgrade is another story...

I hear ya...as I said, might move back to Linux sometime in the future.

Fedora 22.

 

WOOP WOOP!

Yeah, am well aware of all this. Performance optimization will be one of the last things they do in earnest. It's just that in THIS stage of the process, we have to do our best as "testers" to eke out every drop of power we can (thus the switch to Windows and upgrading the GPU).

Also, I just realized quoting posts in one reply would be a lot cleaner, sorry for responding to each of you with an individual post. (Not trying to pad my post count, honest! ).

 

Ah that's why I'm not affected by it, mine starts in windowed. Was going to change it to start as fullscreen but I guess I'll skip that then

Was thinking of going with raid 1+0 and I thought raid 5 was only possible with 3 disks?
I have had instabilities before but have a 5tb NAS so only OS and a couple of games on this machine.
it actually crashed bad just about a week ago, thought of it as a good time to try SotA under Linux ^^

 

Indeed. I doubt you'd notice any difference there. How about overclocking, have you given that any thought?

nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[3]=<insert offset>
nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUMemoryTransferRateOffset[3]=<insert offset>
nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUOverVoltageOffset=<insert offset>

These settings requires: <Option "Coolbits" "8"> in your Device section for Xorg.

I have never really used Fedora, and personally I am rather fond of Gentoo. As such I wouldn't know of any Fedora-specific optimizations/settings without some research.

RAID's scale, and thus RAID5 requires a minimum of 3 disks (some RAID-controllers may require more, e.g. 3ware), but can be used with as many as you want above that. However, going for massive numbers of drives you'd best use something besides RAID5.

 

Thanks for the config tip...as I said I just upgraded to a GTX 750 so I'd probably see how it ran stock before considering overclocking (and I haven't researched this particular card by PNY enough yet to get a feel for whether it's possible). I don't want to fry my new baby!

 

ah thanks for clearing that up, I'm not all that read up on RAID but as I see it most I could lose with my RAID 0 setup is about an hours work.
Only good thing about Sweden, good internet connection

 

Hehe. Quite so, it is best to play it safe and have some fun without frying anything. With that said, it is my experience that most Nvidia cards these days overclock easily at least a little bit. They basically have a kind of overclocking builtin with the boost tech they have. Watercooling makes it better, though.

My pleasure. Hehe, yeah I'm making good use of a fast internet connection as well. My desktop has multiple SSD's which I've combined with ZFS, but I haven't bothered with the safer setups either.

 

read a bit about ZFS sounded like it had some really cool features, tried it for awhile on my NAS with FreeBSD but man jails and all that got my head spinning back to OMV for me hehe

Got a question I'm running a MSI GTX 970 "Super Super clocked" do I dare push it even further or are they already at their limit?
I mean when a manufacturer overclocks it is it only software they are pushing or are there more of "whatever something" on my card?

 

For what it's worth, here are some of my experiences..

I'm playing on a gaming laptop (i7-4810MQ/GTX870M-3GB/16GB), Ubuntu 15.04 64bit, nvidia drivers version 355.06 from xedgers ppa, using laptop display's native FullHD resolution, no external monitors (it's an "Optimus" laptop and those would probably be a nightmare to configure).

For some perspective, here are some PassMark videocard benchmark figures from videocardbenchmark.net (yes I know, benchmarks & grains of salt and all that, but they do provide at least some ballpark perspective), with some cards mentioned in this thread listed, also listed a couple of newer cards:
Geforce GT 610: 357
Geforce GTX 870M: 2262
GeForce GTX 750: 3245
GeForce GTX 560Ti: 3545
GeForce GTX 750Ti: 3686
GeForce GTX 970: 8639
GeForce GTX 980: 9725

Despite the low-ish performance (it's a laptop after all with a mobile version of the GPU), in other games the it has been acceptable, I get a pretty much steady 60 fps (using Vsync) in games like BioShock Infinite and The Talos Principle, in games like Metro: Last Light Redux I need to use "high" level textures instead of "highest" in order for the game to be playable ("playable" in those cases meaning, that they should not hinder completing the game with the hardest settings, e.g. "1999 mode" in Bioshock and "Ranger Hardcore" in Metro games).

In SotA I have all graphics options maxed, except shadow distance is set to "very high" instead of maximum, the game is set to close to Full HD resolution -- 1855x1056 to be more exact, i.e. playing in Ubuntu "full window", not fullscreen (I want/need to have the Ubuntu side and top panels visible all the time, as I do other things at the same time).

Using R21 318 patch, I get 10-25 fps (typically 15-20) in Ardoris, 20-25 in Kingsport, 25-40 in overland maps, and 35-45 in places like North Valeway. All these are from single player mode, though I haven't noticed that much difference between the modes. All in all it's playable except in Ardoris, where it's sorta-kinda playable (it was much worse before so the devs have clearly made at least some improvements).

Switching to SSD did help, everything is smoother, and load times are a bit shorter, but SSD brought less improvement to load times than I would have expected. I guess a lot depends on the quality of the network connection and server load.

The most tangible improvement came from upgrading the memory from 8GB to 16GB. I also moved all system temporary disks and caches to ramdisk (tmpfs). SotA is still quite a memory hog, and still has memory leaks so the memory upgrade improved also the stability of the system.

I do not think the OS has that much to do with the prevalence of bugs, after all it's largely based on Unity. I'm not aware of a single Linux specific bug in here (except the dual display one mentioned by Katrina), of course I might be just ignorant, but so far my ignorance hasn't prevented me from enjoying the pl..testing the game

 

From what I've heard it can be reliably overclocked to around 1500MHz, give or take (core clock). So you want to check your manufacturer specs. Of course if it eats your puppy it's all on you.

 

pretty much the exact same results I have been getting on the exact same settings.
my memory probably is lacking 8gb@1600mhz problem is I wanna switch out the motherboard before hand so I don't have to do it again
gotta say though before SotA I never felt I really needed to upgrade memory but the want is always there

thanks a good start helps a lot
Lots of reading would be done beforehand, too much time and money has gone into this puppy to let it die now
still haven't decided if my wallet would allow me to go SLI either hehe.

 

Thanks for replying and thanks for all the stats, very interesting...

Yeeeouch! No wonder I got a big boost going gtom GT610 -> GTX750 . I'm thinking about trying to overclock a tad, maybe to TI-level GPU clock,
it seems these cards (especially mine with dual fans) have a bit of wiggle room...

In Linux I noticed no graphical degradation, nor any performance improvements, when fiddling with the video options. I got the feeling that those options didn't actually do anything yet. I do see a lot of difference in the Windows client.

Sounds similar to me, maybe a bit better.

Yeah, I'm only in 8G...but I keep a close eye on memory consumption and even with Chrome running alongside, I've never seen myself getting close to running out. That being said I'd like to upgrade, but all 4 of my SIMM slots are used up, which means a huge cash layout :-(.

 

ZFS is awesome and the tools to handle it with are very intuitive in my opinion. I like it better than btrfs.

It will most likely handle even more overclocking, but I would do some research on other people's results with a similar card. The manufacturer overclocks are usually handled in the card's BIOS. There's also a lot of people who modify card BIOS's to have their desired overclock kind of builtin, and possibly evade restrictions.

Manufacturer pre-overclocked cards are basically the same hardware as the reference non-overclocked cards, but with a bit of testing with a different BIOS. There are exceptions, though, like EVGA's Classified models. Those cards usually have a modified PCB and added extra's that set them apart from the rest.

 

One should consider the two basic ways how added memory can help; firstly it can prevent swapping, and secondly it can help speed up file access (extra ram used for caching, dedicated ramdisks etc.).
The former is an absolute nightmare when it happens, but I think most of the benefit (for the game) is from the latter -- first there is the "normal" file caching, and ramdisks (in addition to speeding up some often used file operations ) may also free up disk i/o capacity (this is especially relevant with those spinning disks, with SSDs maybe not so much). The system just feels more "relaxed" and snappy in general, so the game benefits too.

I don't know how easy this kind of added benefit is to realize in Windows installations, for example how easy is it to create ramdisks for certain system areas. Supposedly Windows handles disk caching pretty much with similar efficiency as Linux. And perhaps the SotA Windows client does not suffer from memory leaks as serious as the Linux one (as I'm writing this my htop shows 6766MB memory usage, slowly creeping up, with 8GB I would be approaching the edge of swapping abyss..). So if you're not experiencing swapping related issues, the added benefit might not be worth the trouble.

 

Having run Linux since 1994, along with 8-hour kernel builds (no RPMs or DEBs back then) with 8M RAM, I am well aware of swapping ;-) I played for like, 3 hours awhile ago and did see the leaks start to add up, SotA was easily using 6G or so.

Yeah, even if I did create a RAM disk, I wouldn't know what to put in it under Windows.

 

I run on Ubuntu 15.04 (64 bit), running an nvidia 740 (using the NV drivers, of course). I'm definitely seeing the same sort of memory leaks, but my performance other than that is modest. Not amazing, but about the same I was getting on Win 7 when I still dual-booted (for Neverwinter, but never mind that).

I'll watch this with interest