Steam Linux Usage Still Roughly Around 1%

[kernelOfTruth]

@all:

thanks for your comments so far

important mesa stuff is compiled with hardened gcc 4.7.3*, mesa can only be compiled without custom cflags (so mostly the offending flags should be filtered out)

wine works flawless right now, had some outdated libSDL libs and other stuff - all of the important stuff is available both on x32 & x64 (abi_x86_32 abi_x86_64), using ebuilds from the FireBurn & x11 overlay

The newer stack caused GPU hangs for me on 5850, till I manually forced radeon.dpm=1 via kernel cheat. It seems the card is unstable with old reclock method. Maybe worth a check?

got a suspicion that this has to do with the memory compressing & conserving technologies:

tmem/zswap/zcache

and

zram


got zram disabled on 3.13-rc8 right now since it doesn't build with some bleeding edge patches

and the black screen (gpu turn off, unsuccessful reset ?!) appears much later, albeit with Rayman Origins on Steam + Wine

this box could run Unreal Tournament 3 for several minutes (if not hours) perfectly stable in the past [not sure if zram or zcache were enabled at that time but I believe not]


so the next thing that will be tested is with zswap (currently with lz4 compression running) disabled


the more stumbling blocks are known and removed out of the way - the better and more reliably games will run & steam can be used with its native Linux Client or on Wine


Rayman Origins, btw, appears to run more fluidly than under Windows 8.1/8 were it seems to slow down from time to time

(wine 1.7.11)

[kernelOfTruth]

got a suspicion that this has to do with the memory compressing & conserving technologies:

tmem/zswap/zcache

and

zram

disabled zswap and it still happened (hyperz disabled, vblank_mode=0 set - is this known to cause issues ?)

the only "advanced" game besides UT3 I tried was Serious Sam 3 BFE and that also leads to this black screen (gpu turning off) or gpu error (the bios says after the reboot via Magic SYSRQ key that the gpu is faulty/has an error, so the system has to be turned off then turned on again)

at the beginning it (Serious Sam 3 BFE) wouldn't even start - only black screen right from the start (monitor in standby / probably gpu also off), then gradually it now works for some minutes then the gpu turns off, monitor black/blank and attempting to switch to VT doesn't help

[Vash63]

It's just that Left 4 Dead 2 is a very, very crappy port. Other source engine games work much better. (e.g. Half Life 2 Episode 2 has about the best graphics of those source engine games and it works perfectly for me)

I didn't much care about this because there aren't many games ported, but I installed Mint 16 as an alternate OS (I normally use a customized Slackware'ish system and I'd never pollute it with all the shit that Steam and the games would need) so I could try Steam on Linux. Most of the titles available I already had in Windows, so I didn't have to go out and buy new games. I did buy Amnesia A Machine For Pigs just to buy something using the Linux Steam client though. At this time, there is nothing else I want that I don't already have.

Left4Dead 2 was unplayable for me at first, until I built a proper kernel (my way) and latest fglrx beta. (13.11 Beta 9.4). After that, it was good enough. Still a bit laggy in some spots very briefly but it doesn't affect anything. Similar story with Serious Sam 3.

Metro Last Light works, and looks great. Somebody did a very good job porting that game. I actually bought that in Windows more because I wanted to reward them for their Linux support. (At the time I was not planning on having a Linux setup that could run Steam) It turned out that I really liked the game (I hated Metro 2033) so I was glad I did. Now I'm playing it in Linux. My only complaint is that it has segfaulted a few times but it's not like games never crash on Windows. I had that game crash in the same area in Windows, in a swamp scene where you have to fight creatures as you wait for this gas powered rope bridge to come to you.

Anyway, as for AMD vs. Nvidia, I love AMD graphics cards for the "bang for the buck" factor, but they can smoke a turd in Hell for their Linux support. I'm starting to put money aside for an Nvidia card. The last straw for me was fglrx Catalyst 13.12 downgrading kernel support in the release. They think that because no distros are using Linux 3.12 (moreover, 3.13-rc is out now) that they don't have to support it? They can lick me where evolution split me.

No, I need better than "radeon" for games (which I must say is now excellent for desktop use on my hardware, HD 5870. Congrats for that, but...)

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but I just had to say L4D2 is absolutely not a crappy port. It's your drivers. It's run great for me on Nvidia since it left beta. There's a large number of developers who have been recommending staying away from fglrx for their Linux ports.

[johnc]

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but I just had to say L4D2 is absolutely not a crappy port. It's your drivers. It's run great for me on Nvidia since it left beta. There's a large number of developers who have been recommending staying away from fglrx for their Linux ports.

Well something's wrong with either the port of the drivers because it doesn't work for me on nvidia either.

There are widespread reports out there and the github bug tracker seems a bit meaningless since often there's no confirmation that an issue report has even been read, let alone being worked on.

Not to mention that there have been bugs in the Windows version of the game for many, many years that Valve refuses to fix (lobby voice chat, etc.). I appreciate that Valve runs its business where each employee gets to work on whatever he wants, but the corresponding downside is that they have absolutely lousy customer service.

I do love Valve though. But they piss me off a lot too.