"Serious Sam 3 BFE", difference in its performance with CPU governor use

[woessonio]

After a launch the game in terminal I've noticed a warning:
"WRN: CPU Power saving is enabled and performance governor is not used."

So, I've installed cpufreq utilities

sudo apt-get install cpufrequtils

and switched CPUs to performance mode

sudo cpufreq-set -g performance

After that I've got almost same FPS, as I'm receiving in Windows (risen up to 30-40%), + lags disappeared.

PS. I'm using an Intel i3 4-core CPU (but seems this trick doesn't work on my other PC with AMD64X2,.. need to recheck)

[SUSEd]

Thats why devs recommends to disable all cpu power saving modes in bios.

[Tazza.sh]

I did this and I can now play serious sam 3 in ultra without a hitch and almost a constant 60fps (vsync on) where as previously I couldnt keep a constant framerate on high lol (i5 2500k, 8gb ram, GTX570soc) so im really glad you shared this... however after gaming should I change the governor to ondemand?

[SUSEd]

But i dont understand why this happens. If some app begins to load cpu then cpu clock goes up.
Why it doesnt works for this game?

[woessonio]

I dunno )

Tarron, I think it's desirable. (switch to ondemand)

...

I hoped this way will help with the "Killing Floor" too, but it doesn't affect even a little. (On Windows FPS never goes below 150, while here it drops to 20 on the same map)

[Kano]

Maybe set game to opengl in KillingFloor.ini and use wine for it. Should be faster as you see here:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/828934089658431267/

[[Linux]sulman]

This is a known fix - I got terrible stutter without it. The cpu would constantly throttle back off demand periods. I don't recall why the SS3 devs had difficulty controlling it, but I'm sure there's a good readon.

As for switching it back afterwards, I do. Gives a little powersaving and thermal efficiency, which is the whole idea.

Easiest thing to do is write yourself a little bash script so you don't have to remember the commands.

[blackout24]

I'm aware of this "fix" since the beginning of Stem Beta. However my PC doesn't have any problems letting the scaling at "ondemand". I benchmarked a lot of CPU settings and even disabled Intel SpeedStep in BIOS at one time. No change in FPS. Work great regardless of setting. This is with Core i7 2600K @ 4.5 Ghz and GTX 580 OC

[Dusk of Oolacile]

Croteam could make it a dependency and the game could call it when it launches, then restore the previous state when it exits.

[SUSEd]

/offtopic
How much time was SS3 open linux beta?

[blackout24]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von LOLCAT:

Croteam could make it a dependency and the game could call it when it launches, then restore the previous state when it exits.

Nope, because that'd require root access.

@SUSEd
SS3 was never open linux beta. It was part of the invite only beta for Steam which started initially with 1000 people. As Valve invited more and more people every week they removed it as part of the closed linux beta. The number of people with access to SS3 through Steam Beta was getting larger than the actual sales of that game.

[Hyper_Eye]

I have a plasmoid installed in my taskbar that shows me the current CPU governor and allows me to change it easily. I can change individual cores, change them in groups, or change them all with a click. So I change the whole CPU to 'performance' before I start a game and change it back to 'ondemand' when I'm done. It makes a difference. My CPU is an Intel Core i7 3770. The plasmoid is called plasmaCpuFreqUtility.

[SUSEd]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Hyper_Eye:

I have a plasmoid installed in my taskbar that shows me the current CPU governor and allows me to change it easily. I can change individual cores, change them in groups, or change them all with a click. So I change the whole CPU to 'performance' before I start a game and change it back to 'ondemand' when I'm done. It makes a difference. My CPU is an Intel Core i7 3770. The plasmoid is called plasmaCpuFreqUtility.

Theres also plugin for gnome-shell that does this. Also it can be done via terminal.
P.S. possible to make script that changes CPU governor when this game launched.

[Shark]

I should try this for killing floor, my fps in that game is about 60 fps lower than on Windows and I couldn't figure out why.

[woessonio]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Wouter:

I should try this for killing floor, my fps in that game is about 60 fps lower than on Windows and I couldn't figure out why.

Unfortunately it won't help either. I've tried any possible ways (apart X-session, Steam Big-Picture Mode Session, renice'ing, editing of ini-file, and so on...). There's something wrong with that game at all.

[woessonio]

Ok I found yet another trick to speed up SSAM3 (at least +10-15% more)
If you have a nVidia card and the driver of version 310.14 or newer

Exit Steam client, open the terminal and paste these lines into it:

export LD_PRELOAD="libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1"
export __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1

Then start the game with command:

steam -applaunch 41070

You can also make sh file in your Home folder with all those commands together.*

But if you will launch "Killing Floor" after this, it may decrease its performance, conversely.

So you just need to use this command, changing 1 to 0:

export __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=0

Or simply relogin into a new desktop session.
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* PS. Have spied this method in TF2 launcher (inside of sh file)