Extremely bad performance in games

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 4:11 am

Hello everybody,
the problem is that I have awful performance in games.
CPU: Intel Core2 Quad 2.66 GHz (q9400)
Memory: 4 GB DDR2 800 MHz
Video: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1024 MB
OS: Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64
Wine: 1.4-rc6
The video driver is proprietary, the latest one from the official ATI website.

The game I'm trying to run is GTA IV. Yes, it's not kinda 'light' game, but it used to give me around 30 FPS on Windows, on Linux it gives me only 3 FPS.
I know that performance must be slower, but should it be THAT much slower?
On Windows I used to play 1920x1080 with medium settings and it was okay, on Linux it gives me 3 frames and it doesn't matter which resolution or settings I use.

Any ideas? I see people running the game on double-cored CPUs and cards like nVidia 9xxx, this is so damn unfair

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 7:10 am

This is Linux )
Wine is the best "emulator" (compatibility layer) at this moment at all, if you wanna play Windows games on Linux, you always have to pay the price with lower performance.

See related topic somewhere in topic's list, I created "What about performance..."

As I realized, the Wine is a kind "layer" between linux kernel and between Direct3D (that games extremely using), transforming system calls to understandable in Linux OS to further processing, and It takes CPU time.

Anyway Wine is better (in speed) than any virtual machine for now.

I believe that Wine developers also dreaming when they could reach the higher level with speed of applications work, comparable to native. As they reached that Wine become more stable.
And I believe if they would have much money (more sponsors) and much more people for development, they could do fantastic things

ruinairas · Post by **ruinairas** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 11:49 am

That comment is soo beyond wrong. Wine IS NOT AN EMULATOR (WINE) its purely a compatibility layer, it transmits d3d calls into opengl calls. Which uses little to NONE of the cpu power. Most games and applications run at near the same speed as they would on Windows. My guess is something on the system itself hasn't been configured or installed problem, not wine.

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:07 pm

What's wrong in my comment?

Ok if you know better, tell your version )
If Wine is a "Layer" (note, that I called it "emulator" in quotes) API calls goes through it? So, how could it "transmit" something without of CPU use? All those translations can't proceed in vacuum space, it must use some resources. Or not?

I haven't seen any game that could run at the same speed as native. Even that old, using D3D8 and even OpenGl itself. Usually it's lower from 15 to 50%.

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:16 pm

Ok, just can't agree that Wine uses "little to NONE" of CPU, coz I did some measurements...
Though, maybe low performance is just a problem of (proprietary) videodriver? )

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:46 pm

Thanks for the answers.
Well, I know that it must be slower.
Another example:
I can play GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas on ~50 FPS in 1920x1080.
Tried running that 'debug' test that I found in FAQ, it said that the renderer is enabled.
Time for an interesting fact... GTA IV can't load a savegame if the vsync is turned off. Usually turning off vsync gives a better performance, but in my case it is not even possible.

What can I do?..

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:59 pm

You meant it's impossible (to turn off VSync) coz you can't control your mouse in menu?

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 1:29 pm

I can control my mouse.
But if I turn off the vsync and then try to load, I can only see loading screens and loading takes forever.

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 2:20 pm

Maybe you can find some useful info about the game in AppDB?

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:54 pm

Already checked there, flags -norestrictions -nomemresstrict didn't help.

din99 · Post by **din99** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 6:34 am

dont waste time with these borked FPS tools

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 7:10 am

Yeah, thanks for the answer.
Then I have a new question.
Does Palit GeForce GTX 550 Ti work alright under Wine and Linuxes in general?
It seems to be a good buy for me.

Alex_G · Post by **Alex_G** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 8:05 am

Yes, I have that one, just it is not "Palit" but "Gigabyte".
I noticed that NVidia cards usually give more speed (performance) and compatibility compare to ATI analogs at same level.

Sure, overall performance depends also on CPU, RAM type and its amount... )

landeel · Post by **landeel** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 2:31 pm

Video: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1024 MB

That's the cause of your poor performance. Not the card itself, but the drivers.
Get a Nvidia and you will have close to native performance on most games.

ruinairas · Post by **ruinairas** » Sun Mar 11, 2012 1:17 am

A cheap solution is a Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS (PCI Express) It'll do almost everything you'd want to do. You can pick it up for $30 on newegg. If you are looking for a more advanced solution I suggest actually using Windows, to justify the cost of a high performance card.

DL · Post by DL » Sun Mar 11, 2012 1:18 am

Two problems straight off the bat:

1) Your cpu is slow. Wine requires additional CPU power for D3D > OpenGL conversion. In addition GTA IV is a CPU heavy game.

2) Video not that great, and it's ATI which equals poor linux drivers.

That being said, 3FPS still seems excessively slow, even with those factors at play. I would except something closer to 8-15 FPS at a guess, assuming benchmarks on both of your systems are accurate. Which of course is still to slow to bother trying with that hardware, honestly.

Your best bet as far as hardware goes for wine is:

1) Fastest CPU you can find with regard to single thread performance (so i5 2500K overclocked is probably your best bet)

2) Midrange nvidia card. Don't need the fastest card, however, as CPU will still bottleneck it, even an overclocked 2500k.

DL · Post by DL » Sun Mar 11, 2012 1:20 am

Two problems straight off the bat:

1) Your cpu is slow. Wine requires additional CPU power for D3D > OpenGL conversion. In addition GTA IV is a CPU heavy game.

2) Video not that great, and it's ATI which equals poor linux drivers.

That being said, 3FPS still seems excessively slow, even with those factors at play. I would except something closer to 8-15 FPS at a guess, assuming benchmarks on both of your systems are accurate. Which of course is still to slow to bother trying with that hardware, honestly.

Your best bet as far as hardware goes for wine is:

1) Fastest CPU you can find with regard to single thread performance (so i5 2500K overclocked is probably your best bet)

2) Midrange nvidia card. Don't need the fastest card, however, as CPU will still bottleneck it, even an overclocked 2500k.

Oh and finally, you still won't get native windows performance even with the best hardware, at least with most modern games (and even older ones). You'd probably need something ridiculous like a 6GHz SB cpu to reach that (maybe Ivy Bridge will be able to do that). Lets just hope we some more D3D optimisation over the coming months/years, or that hardware catches up.

Davvvve · Post by **Davvvve** » Sun Mar 11, 2012 4:30 am

Try wine 64 bit .

DL · Post by DL » Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:38 am

Davvvve wrote:Try wine 64 bit .

This is only useful with 64bit games, correct? There are only a handful of those.

FrÃ©dÃ©ric Delanoy · Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:55 am

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:38, DL <[email protected]> wrote:

Davvvve wrote:
Try wine 64 bit .
This is only useful with 64bit games, correct?

Right.

People seem to believe wine 64 bit is required on a 64 bit OS, which
isn't true. Wine 64 is used to run 64 bit Windows apps (and optionally
32 bits)
Standard wine is probably sufficient for 99% of the people.

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Mon Mar 12, 2012 12:48 pm

I see people with dual-core processors playing IV.
So I don't think the problem is my processor, since it's maybe 70% in use when playing IV: it still has some resources.
Waiting until May to buy a new card, thx for your help to all.

Vincent123 · Post by **Vincent123** » Tue Jul 24, 2012 7:18 am

Sorry for the late answer, but I find it necessary to write here, because when I was googling several months ago nobody wrote the 'solution'.
You guys were right.
ATI drivers for Linux (at least in my case - with an 'old' card) provide awful performance, so the only solution was to buy a new NVidia card.
So did I, now I'm a happy owner of GTX 550 Ti by MSI.
In the beginning I got like 3x more FPS than on ATI, it was around 15 or so, w/o much difference between high and low settings.
A week ago I decided to overclock the CPU to 3.2 GHz and set my memory timings to 5-5-5-15 (defaults were 2.66 GHz and 6-6-6-18 or so).
I didn't get anything too...
But yesterday Ubuntu 12.04 LTS asked to update its core (linux packages), so did I, and now I have 24.6 FPS in the gta iv benchmark (medium settings,shadows off).
That's on Wine 1.5.8~ubuntu1 package or smth, ~ubuntu3 has a sound bug that decreases FPS and 1.5.9 has a weird black textures bug, so be careful with that all.
Also found this interesting, but not sure that it worked for me.
Good luck to you guys, don't buy ATI cards if you're planning to play games on Linux lol
P.S. Ran the benchmark again... 28 FPS this time

Separate X window, in winecfg everything on graphics tab's checked.
I think the mainest is that it thought I had 75 Hz, now it was 60.

redfeilds18 · Post by **redfeilds18** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 3:22 pm

ruinairas wrote:That comment is soo beyond wrong. Wine IS NOT AN EMULATOR (WINE) its purely a compatibility layer, it transmits d3d calls into opengl calls. Which uses little to NONE of the cpu power. Most games and applications run at near the same speed as they would on Windows. My guess is something on the system itself hasn't been configured or installed problem, not wine.

oh i do agree with you but you can call it emulator as well cuz the name wine initially was an acronym for "WIN"dows "E"mulator.. i have been using wine for last six months.. but in windows you can run pirated games/software as well and Pirated software is not supported in WINE..which is a good thing!!!