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  • #71
    Originally posted by Farmboy0 View Post
    As for pulseaudio while I am not exactly a fan it does work very well *if* you configure it correctly.
    But in order to do that you need to understand how pulse works and your own workflow.
    For starters I would try the ArchLinux wiki and their Troubleshooting page:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...roubleshooting
    I don't really know what's wrong with my setup... I'm running Arch, with a years old alsa configuration for playback, mic recording, snd-aloop playback recording and an alternative playback sink not recorded by snd-aloop.

    With recent Unity5 games I experienced crashes on game loading so I decided it was time to move to pulseaudio, and I failed:
    After removing snd-aloop from loaded modules, removing ~/.asoundrc, installing alsa-pulse (which creates an additional file with pulse alsa sinks), pulseaudio ended up using 3%~5% of the total time of my AMD FX-8350 (the most cpu-intensive background program on my setup and by far). But, well, that aside I'm also getting an annoying delay (like ~0.5 s) on playback.
    I tried to lower the samples (on the config files) to mitigate the delay, but that changed nothing.

    Right now I ended up doing this ugly thing: my old ALSA-only setup, running pulseaudio within alsa (pointing to my custom dmix instead of the actual hardware) only when I need it. All my Unity5 games had their execution line changed to pulseaudio --start; %command%; pulseaudio --kill.
    No need to say that I'm still getting that 0.5 s delay on playback on these games, and it really sucks...

    If you have some magic hint to throw, please throw it, kung fury with 0.5 s sound delay is unplayable.

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    • #72
      You can try Kanotix Spitfire 64 Special in gfxdetect mode (for binary drivers) and run steam within your home even in live mode to see if your problem is specific to your install. The ISO is hybrid, put it 1:1 onto USB key.

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      • #73
        Originally posted by smilzoboboz View Post
        I don't really know what's wrong with my setup... I'm running Arch, with a years old alsa configuration for playback, mic recording, snd-aloop playback recording and an alternative playback sink not recorded by snd-aloop.

        With recent Unity5 games I experienced crashes on game loading so I decided it was time to move to pulseaudio, and I failed:
        After removing snd-aloop from loaded modules, removing ~/.asoundrc, installing alsa-pulse (which creates an additional file with pulse alsa sinks), pulseaudio ended up using 3%~5% of the total time of my AMD FX-8350 (the most cpu-intensive background program on my setup and by far). But, well, that aside I'm also getting an annoying delay (like ~0.5 s) on playback.
        I tried to lower the samples (on the config files) to mitigate the delay, but that changed nothing.

        Right now I ended up doing this ugly thing: my old ALSA-only setup, running pulseaudio within alsa (pointing to my custom dmix instead of the actual hardware) only when I need it. All my Unity5 games had their execution line changed to pulseaudio --start; %command%; pulseaudio --kill.
        No need to say that I'm still getting that 0.5 s delay on playback on these games, and it really sucks...

        If you have some magic hint to throw, please throw it, kung fury with 0.5 s sound delay is unplayable.

        Hi, you might want to test your game with PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=value (example PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=20), export it berfore or add to launch command in steam.
        For some reason unity games, probably unity4, and GRID autosport, crackle and distort audio for me, so adding PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 %command% to steam game launch command, seem to help for that, maybe also for you.

        Edit: Don't get me wrong, if i understand correctly this is something, the client talking to pulseaudio needs to specify, so it's not the fault of pulse, but rather the client to specify the latency that it needs.
        Last edited by sterky; 02 April 2016, 08:22 PM.

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        • #74
          Originally posted by wodencafe View Post

          Yes and no, I imagine a lot of Linux Steam gamers are in a position like myself, where there are some games that work better in the native Linux Steam client, and others that work better (or only work) in Wine Steam.



          Let's be real, Wine for gaming is a D3D -> OpenGL translation layer, and you don't get that for free.

          If all the Steam games functioned correctly in Linux Steam AND Wine Steam, I would use Linux Steam because as a gamer, because I want the best performance. That's the incentive.

          That, and modern cross platform game engines make it so easy to target multiple platforms now. Even just a 1% market share is a lot of $ for a big game title.

          The other unfortunate aspect of having to bring in Wine, and I hate to say this, but it's adding yet another member to the group of "entities that have to work together to make the game run".

          So we have Linux, Mesa, Steam, The Game, and Wine. It's another point of failure.
          You;re looking at it from a user's perspective, I was looking at it from the other side.

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          • #75
            Originally posted by dimko View Post
            I would, but skype... YOu ignore this = 0 social life.
            And every now and then really good games on Steam pop up that dont work on ALSA. Pulse is a fucking cancer.
            I haven't used Skype since 2005, when it was the only VOIP software not blocked by my campus.
            My social life does not suffer of anything because of it (it'd be FB for me actually...)

            Originally posted by dimko View Post

            I lived in 4 countries not counting where I come from by age of 32, can you say same about you?
            Yes I can, and yes it would be true.
            Last edited by geearf; 02 April 2016, 08:13 PM.

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            • #76
              Default settings often work, but newer KDE versions need device setup inside the KDE settings to work after reboot instead of pure pavucontrol. That's maybe a bit tricky but sound delay is most likely a (manual) config issue or some distros use weird defaults. It must be something like that as some Arch users seem to prefer a very special PA config and have got more problems than the rest.

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              • #77
                You may also want to check if you get this message
                "# dmesg | grep bdl_pos_adj
                [ 24.958540] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.
                "

                show current values:
                "# cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/bdl_pos_adj
                32,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1"


                then:
                "nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf
                "options snd-hda-intel bdl_pos_adj=48"

                (if you still get it try 60 or 64)

                it will cause pulseaudio timing issues if you dont fix this.

                (why the kernel doesnt do this automatically is beyond me, -1 is suposed to be automatic :S )
                Last edited by cj.wijtmans; 03 April 2016, 10:45 AM.

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                • #78
                  @debainxfce

                  1% of 1 core, not that I laugh...

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                  • #79
                    Originally posted by eddielinux View Post

                    Oh! nice answer, you don't realize how much this tells me about you:
                    1 - You were/are a windows user (this is not bad, but ex-windows users are more critcs; familiarity bias);
                    2 - You never coded anything;
                    3 - Probably you like linux because is free of charge;
                    4 - You have problem to understand freedom;
                    5 - You have less respect the people on the backstage(devs) and their opinion;
                    6 - You don't know how to act as part of freedom in community (I had some trouble to teach myself too);

                    I have no problem in dealing with it, but I must to tell you something, if you don't fill a bug form they will never know what happened (I know, a lots of newcomers don't know how to do and as veteran users we need to teach them before is too late), to our community survive, information is crucial.

                    Why destruct when we can construct?
                    Why demolish when we can fix?
                    You will possibly disagree with me, but attacking each other will make us colapse, we are community driven and as we see in any world history book, too much disagreement makes everything fall apart.
                    As part of this incredible community we need to never forget that our freedom is at stake and teamwork is needed to reach the victory, even if you don't like one teammate pulseaudio, which for me is a good player.
                    This guy has a point you know. I have played Dota 2 on a windows machine and on Linux and experienced input lag. Linux should in theory should have less lag than windows. I remember running Unreal Tournament x64bit back in the day, it ran far better on Linux than it ever did on windows. So why is it now with steam and their persistent use of 32bit? I wonder if it's a game related thing rather than a Linux thing. Or is it just steam... Who knows. I don't see how understanding programming C or C++ is going to improve your gaming experience on Linux anyway. Users just want to use the computer to do stuff. Not everyone is a developer. This mentality is the biggest issue for the Linux community. Just because I develop software, doesn't make the next person a developer. What if they just want something simple like Ubuntu with word processing and a bit of gaming? Where does it say explicitly that they need to be game developers?

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                    • #80
                      Originally posted by mike4 View Post
                      Typical for Linux users. Spam/cry every site for software but never buy anything.
                      Yeah like for example Apple. You pay a crap load for outdated hardware, pay for sub par performance, and then end up with more advertising on your paid and bloated software.... On top of that, if you don't pay for that new bit of apple hardware, you might end up left with a brick because that new iOS update is needed because your paid app no longer works. Oh well. Better pay for a new iPhone.... Heh.

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