Where is Catalyst 9-1??

[hdas]

but seriously, i found that the stuttering in doom3 for me was solely due to alsa. setting sound device to /dev/null in DoomConfig.cfg or just running timedemo was smooth. that was all fixed with doom3 1.3.1.1304. to be honest, though idsoft has done a great job with doom3, they could have done a little bit more maintaining the code - especially adding openal and smp support like quake4 and may be a little more graphics optimizations (hard shadows suck!).

the quake3 issue was worse. idsoft's quake3 always had that issue with oss and sound mmap. very fortunately ioquake3 sealed it all with openal .

and not to offend anyone of you, but playing with compiz turned on is probably asking for too much. especially on midrange graphics cards, it hurts. (i am not sure about aero in windows.) at least try to use a program like fusion-icon to temporarily switch to non-composite while playing games.

also, in my very honest opinion, linux kernel has only improved. after the golden 2.6.16, 2.6.19-2.6.21 were nightmare for me, but things began improving from 2.6.22 onwards and 2.6.24-2.6.28 have been rock solid. i feel 2.6.28 is *the* best . may be some tinkering with kernel options is required, but i feel even the stock ubuntu desktop/server kernels are very very good.

there may always be that odd corner hardware that has some peculiarities to be resolved with some kernel option. but in general, its a good idea to buy mainstream hardware that is known to play well with linux .

[Aphax]

I've read comments on forums that say the doom 3 engine is just stuttery and some people notice while others don't.

It bugs me in ET:QW but if anything it's slightly worse in windows.

I believe internally the engine doesn't go faster than 30fps.

Edit - should have read the rest of the thread before replying.

The stuttering I refer to is not as bad as I would see with > 2.6.24 kernels - but that affects more than doom3 games UT2004 being the most obvious as well as scrolling glitching when using compiz.

Really sorry to continue this off-topic rambling of mine (is there some other thread about this issue where I can continue? hmmm)

Interesting what you say there.. I tried about 12 different kernel versions today to isolate where the really bad stuttering started, and also came to the conclusion it started between 2.6.23 and 2.6.24.. I've never tried UT2004 by the way, I had assumed it was something specific to Doom 3 (and Doom 3 based games). And I also noticed ETQW being stuttery on Windows, but never tried that on Linux. Doom 3 on Windows runs really well though with no stuttering of any kind noticable.

I've now also seen that even before 2.6.24 there is still some stuttering, but it's only barely noticable and seems to go away completely at random moments. It's so subtle that I initially thought the stuttering was gone completely.

(To clarify because someone brought up sound stuttering, I'm only talking about stuttering in animation, sound has always worked okay here, well, except with iD's Quake 3 client but as said ioQuake3 fixes all that )

[legume]

I keep hitting f5 on the AMD site when I'm at home.
I want to see if some of the bugs are resolved.
The good performance bug is not a priority for me, they can address that one later.
I want doom3 to play smoothly, I do get over 100fps in demo1 at 1600*1200 Ultra, max filtering. But for whatever reason, it just doesn't seem so smooth.

I've read comments on forums that say the doom 3 engine is just stuttery and some people notice while others don't.

It bugs me in ET:QW but if anything it's slightly worse in windows.

I believe internally the engine doesn't go faster than 30fps.

Edit - should have read the rest of the thread before replying.

The stuttering I refer to is not as bad as I would see with > 2.6.24 kernels - but that affects more than doom3 games UT2004 being the most obvious as well as scrolling glitching when using compiz.

[duncan_nz]

Heres an idea, windows seven public beta has recently started, perhaps the driver developers have to work on drivers/issues regarding the new OS from ms

[hdas]

To those with Doom3 stuttering, it might most probably be due to alsa. Get the latest doom3 1.3.1.1304 which has sound fixes. The timedemo runs fine as there is no sound, but after few minutes of playing, both the audio and video used to annoyingly stutter. The updated doom3 (and playing around with sound options) fixed it.

Also, regarding quake3, ioquake3 (by icculus) is much better than idsoft's quake3, especially with sound as it uses openal.

[Aphax]

I had stuttering in ut2004 with my 8600GT - framerate war great, but FPS aren't everything.
Reducing the FPS via cranked up AA/AF made the stutter go away... found that hint in the windows part of nvnews - obviously I was not alone.
With my HD3870 I have seen stuttering too - but this time it was caused by PAT. If you are not using a very recent kernel - like 2.6.27 or 2.6.28, try the nopat boot option and see if it goes away. It did for me - and it is fixed anyway for a while now.

About the late driver: I can't wait. I want it so badly, but there were christmas AND Sylvester/NewYear. That mean almost two weeks lost. So it should be pretty normal to see it a bit late. 8-12 was early, 9.1 will be a bit late. Until then - the leaked ones are pretty promising and very nice to play with.

Yeah I had already disabled PAT on my 2.6.28 kernel to solve some MTRR-related errors (though I guess I might've had the same problems you mention here but never noticed).

Anyway, I just spent nearly 5 hours trying dozens of things to get rid of the stuttering in Doom 3, and I *finally* got rid of it by downgrading to 2.6.20. I'll have to try a few more kernels and see where the issue appears and maybe pinpoint exactly what changed.

I can also not rule out that it might be some obscure kernel config option I happened to configure differently for 2.6.20 that may have caused it.. (I guess I could try testing on a default Ubuntu install) oh well. I'm glad I have something to go on now, this has been bugging me for well over a year.

[energyman]

I had stuttering in ut2004 with my 8600GT - framerate war great, but FPS aren't everything.
Reducing the FPS via cranked up AA/AF made the stutter go away... found that hint in the windows part of nvnews - obviously I was not alone.
With my HD3870 I have seen stuttering too - but this time it was caused by PAT. If you are not using a very recent kernel - like 2.6.27 or 2.6.28, try the nopat boot option and see if it goes away. It did for me - and it is fixed anyway for a while now.

About the late driver: I can't wait. I want it so badly, but there were christmas AND Sylvester/NewYear. That mean almost two weeks lost. So it should be pretty normal to see it a bit late. 8-12 was early, 9.1 will be a bit late. Until then - the leaked ones are pretty promising and very nice to play with.

[cement_head]

new amazing bugs

those are called "features"

[mits]

I keep hitting f5 on the AMD site when I'm at home.

I've been hitting that button for a year+ now
I thought I could stop that when support for xv with compositing came, but noooooo...
I have to wait for xserver 1.6 support too to try jaunty... *sigh*
f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5f5

[Aphax]

I keep hitting f5 on the AMD site when I'm at home.
I want to see if some of the bugs are resolved.
The good performance bug is not a priority for me, they can address that one later.
I want doom3 to play smoothly, I do get over 100fps in demo1 at 1600*1200 Ultra, max filtering. But for whatever reason, it just doesn't seem so smooth.

I don't think this is ATI/AMD specific. I get the same thing on my RadeonHD 4850 and Geforce 7950GX2. It seems to be some odd timing issue, for example if you disable frame-independent physics simulation with com_fixedTic 1 (i.e. one simulation 'tick' per frame) I get a really smooth 200+ FPS, unfortunately this makes the game run faster/slower depending on how high your FPS happens to be (you could turn on vsync, but that will cause a high amount of input lag (3+ frames) with ATI/AMD cards for some reason). with the default setting of com_fixedTic I get an FPS jumping wildly from 40 to 60 making everything very jerky. I've had this for nearly a year now I think, I'm not sure when it started happening, maybe something in the linux kernel changed that made Doom3's (and Quake4's for that matter, it suffers from the same issue) timing mechanism not work right. I had initially suspected it was because of the new 'tickless' feature (http://kerneltrap.org/node/6750) but turning that off made no difference :/

I had kind of given up on finding a solution for it because google yielded absolutely nothing on the matter.. in fact you're the first person I found that is having the same issue

EDIT: Just to clarify though, normally doom3's FPS is limited to 60 (since that is what the physics simulation and everything runs at, and there's no point rendering the same frame twice), this isn't the problem here though (for me anyway) since 60 FPS is something I'd still call smooth. The problem seems to be that there are frequent jerks or pauses that make it very much not-smooth. using com_showFPS 1 it'll show a framerate varying between 40-60 (though it's normal for the FPS shown by showFPS to vary a little of course)