AMD Cool'N Quiet = Processor issues?

General Sarevok · Post by **General Sarevok** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 8:34 pm

Hello there. I'm new to the forums and pretty new to having linux on my desktop but I've had to use command line unix/linux at school and at work.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 64 bit version. I have a HIS 2600XT video card, an Athlon 64 3500+, and 2 gigs of RAM.

I've been having some issues with slow FPS in Guild Wars and Disciples 2 (using the GoG version).

I assumed it's the video card and it's driver and their interaction with Wine. So I compiled the AMD linux driver for the video card for Ubuntu 8.10 (64 bit). That appeared to work well; glxgears is up about another 750 FPS to 7250 FPS.

Then I started to fool around with Wine (versions 1.15 and 1.16; Guild Wars had significant shader issues with 1.01.) settings and regedit settings. I'm incapable of getting more than about 25 FPS out of Guild Wars and I know that when running it on Windows XP I easily get 60 FPS at all times. I did look through the UsefulRegistryKeys page as well as the AppDB page for Guild Wars and tried all combinations that are listed within.

In regedit, however, I stumbled upon the Hardware CPU section and it was saying I had a 1000MHz speed. Now /proc/cpuinfo says I have a 1000MHz speed when I don't have any processes running but it will go up to 2200MHz as needed. AMD Cool'N Quiet keeps the CPU speed down when not in use. Disabling Cool'N Quiet in the bios meant Linux wouldn't let me go over 1004MHz for any reason.

I'm pretty sure that when I start Guild Wars through Wine, Wine is grabbing my /proc/cpuinfo of 1000MHz and using that as my maximum CPU speed to run Guild Wars and that is causing my slow FPS.

Is there a way to tell Wine that I really have a 2200MHz processor?

halkun · Post by **halkun** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 7:30 am

...or maybe there are different execution pathways between Wine and Windows? This is the more likely problem than blindly guessing that wine is feeding an application bogus data. Working with 3D apps myself, I usually time my display updates after a vsync, and only after my code is done rendering the scene. I never check the CPU speed as it's irrelevant. I highly doubt that professional programmers are using something as silly as a frequency rating to gauge how fast a game should run. We try and make the game run as fast as we can. If we need something timer-dependent, there are much better, more accurate, and much more automatic timers we can install.

General Sarevok · Post by **General Sarevok** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 8:18 pm

Well I was thinking that the software would only get the info about the CPU from the registry at startup but upon a bit more reflection, that doesn't seem likely. I'll have to look elsewhere to see why my performance is tanking.

Daemon · Post by **Daemon** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 12:32 am

General Sarevok wrote:Disabling Cool'N Quiet in the bios meant Linux wouldn't let me go over 1004MHz for any reason.

Since you disabled CN'Q it in the BIOS you can uncheck the CPU Frequency Manager(powernowd) under Services. There's a way to set the max frequencies and throttling behavior the cpu governor uses but it's not on the tip of my fingers on how to do it.

loltsy · Post by **loltsy** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:28 am

You could try setting the minimum frequency to same as maximum ie

Code: Select all

echo 2200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq

This should keep it from throttling even if you have a power saving daemon of some sort forcing the powersave or userspace governor.

mnty · Post by **mnty** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 6:34 am

loltsy
much thanks, that worked
had the same problem

cat /proc/cpuinfo wrote:model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1000.000

Code: Select all

sudo su
echo 2200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq

cat /proc/cpuinfo wrote:model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2200.000

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 9:45 am

I have ran C&Q for years on dozens of machines without any problems.
Although I disable powernowd and just use the in kernel frequency
adjustment with ondemand and set the up threshold low.

This is what I have in a startup file:

echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo 15 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold

Which means if the CPU goes over 15% cpu usage it bumps up to the next level.
John

mnty · Post by **mnty** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:26 am

John Drescher wrote:if the CPU goes over 15% cpu usage it bumps up to the next level.

thanks, useful
and when should it go back down?

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:36 am

John Drescher wrote:
if the CPU goes over 15% cpu usage it bumps up to the next level.
thanks, useful
and when should it go back down?

Somewhere around 10%

John