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More problems playing Serious Sam 3: BFE on Mesa 10.6.3

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  • More problems playing Serious Sam 3: BFE on Mesa 10.6.3

    After upgrading to Debian 'stretch' and getting Mesa 10.6.3, and compiling and installing Linux kernel 4.1.4, I was all set to start playing Serious Sam 3: BFE without any more crashiness. Alas, it wasn't to be, as the game now experiences the following symptoms:

    - Steam's doesn't properly detect my Radeon HD 7770 with 1GB of RAM; it claims that I only have 512MB of RAM and can't even tell that my card is a Radeon!
    - The game itself runs at an average of about 20fps, and oscillates between 6fps and 60fps depending on the type of game content being rendered. Naturally this makes it almost impossible to play at any settings larger than 1024x768 in windowed mode with the settings turned way down.
    - Twice now, the game has caused my entire display to freeze with no movement. Both times I had to use Alt+SysRq+[K,S,U,B] to kill all processes, clean up my filesystems and reboot.

    Snippets from /opt/games/steam/steamapps/common/Serious Sam 3/Log:

    22:07:50 WRN: lspci: GPU vendor and/or device ID not detected!
    ...
    22:07:50 WRN: [OpenGL] Unable to determine VRAM size... assuming 512 MB.
    ...
    22:07:51 INF: Gfx API: OpenGL
    22:07:51 INF: Resolution: 1680 x 1050
    22:07:51 INF: Vendor: unknown (0x0000)
    22:07:51 INF: Driver: X.Org (0x0000)
    22:07:51 INF: Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAPE VERDE
    22:07:51 INF: Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.6.3
    22:07:51 INF: Video memory size: 512 MB
    22:07:51 INF: Available for textures: 512 MB
    22:07:51 INF: Active GPU(s): 1
    22:07:51 INF: Unable to check for correct version of display driver!
    ...

    glxinfo:

    OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAPE VERDE
    OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.6.3
    OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30

    lspci:

    05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde XT [Radeon HD 7770/8760 / R7 250X]

    /proc/cpuinfo:

    model name : AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor
    stepping : 3
    cpu MHz : 3200.000


    I'm pretty annoyed right now since I was hoping that a modern, updated release of the Mesa stack combined with my updated custom kernel would eliminate the crashiness and also allow me to get at least decent performance from the game...

  • #2
    Originally posted by TheOneKEA View Post
    I'm pretty annoyed right now since I was hoping that a modern, updated release of the Mesa stack combined with my updated custom kernel would eliminate the crashiness and also allow me to get at least decent performance from the game...
    Debian currently uses llvm 3.5 when building mesa, which is not that modern.

    Also Marek recently pushed patches in mesa git which seems to make SI much more stable, but those are in 11-devel and 10.6 git... so it will be in 10.6.4... so that ir very recent the best, but yeah please use at least llvm 3.7 when build mesa.

    That for stability and about that VRAM missdetection on steam or in game is not something drivers can fix... they should implement query for: GLX_RENDERER_VIDEO_MEMORY_MESA. But that does not mean much for the games how they will run, it will use all your VRAM anyway as needed... but in case of Serious engine it mught just set lower settings by default for you - that is all, and in that case you can recheck settings and do it manualy, there are various setting/cvars available in Serious engine games, disabling some of those might bring you acceptible perfromance, etc...
    Last edited by dungeon; 10 August 2015, 12:49 AM.

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    • #3
      But check this anyway, seems to cause system crashes on Macs with ATi cards too:

      http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=2676868

      So I think those "parallax occlusion mapping" can cause isuess on linux too, so try disabling it... especially make sure to disable "men_bUseMenuSimulation=0" that is common and better in config file and before starting game
      Last edited by dungeon; 11 August 2015, 12:16 AM.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by dungeon View Post
        But check this anyway, seems to cause system crashes on Macs with ATi cards too:

        http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=2676868

        So I think those "parallax occlusion mapping" can cause isuess on linux too, so try disabling it... especially make sure to disable "men_bUseMenuSimulation=0" that is common and better in config file and before starting game
        I followed the instructions on the forum thread and I can now play BFE without my system crashing. Hopefully the updates to Mesa you describe will fix my problems, because I've tried to build LLVM myself and it's tremendously complex and difficult to do.

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