Killing Floor Performance issues

[mikeym]

Hi, Reading around it sounds like other people are getting a reasonable performance in Killing floor however I'm not getting what I would expect on my hardware.

I'm running it on an AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor × 4 @3.6 GHz with Corsair 4GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM and a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GiB. I'm using the 12.11 beta Catalyst drivers.

Out of the box (as it were) I was getting up to 110 FPS when absolutely nothing was happening. I tried going into performance mode which didn't improve things much maybe 10 FPS improvement when quiet. I then tried disabling Cool'N'Quiet in my BIOS and it jumped to about 200 FPS.

However, no matter what the setting as soon as there is a wave I'm dropping down to about 20-40 FPS. I also tried setting the graphics down to medium which didn't seem to make any performance improvement.

I've also noticed significant FPS drops in certain areas, I was at 30FPS with noting happening in one room that had red lighting and possibly a particle effect. And I've noticed glitches, in the London level (there may be more than one I've not played it enough yet) when heading to the shop which looks like it's in some kind of basement bunker, the entrance from the street flickered nastily.

Lastly the advice to disable Cool'N'Quiet in the BIOS I don't think is an acceptable solution to frame-rate issues.

[mikeym]

I've made a quick video of the issues I've been having with this: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38280833/KillingFloorEdited.webm

The video and audio recording didn't go terribly well so the audio goes out of sync and playback is even choppier than it really was but you can see from the framerate counter where it's slowing down badly. It was recorded with Cool'N'Quiet turned off in the BIOS to give it the best chance I could at working, and is with the Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers.

[Spuzaw]

I also experience horrible FPS drops in Killing Floor. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the game or the drivers.

However, I do have a feeling it's probably a problem with the Killing Floor port to Linux. It's just not optimized very well is my guess.

I'm basically running the same specs as you.

AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955
8GB RAM
Radeon HD 6950 2GB

[mikeym]

I have noticed that there is a beta option for KF; linuxbeta- but it's passworded. I wondering if they're pushing out updated builds to that? I don't really see the point of doing a restricted beta build if you've already released a version of the game on Linux (admittedly under the also beta Steam). I'm tempted to write something on tripwire's forum to see if we can expect any new builds to be fed to the public.

PS. There's a smaller version of the video; https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38280833/KillingFloorEdited-small.webm

PPS @wazups2x out of interest are you running a 64 bit Linux and what distro are you using? (I'm Fedora 17.)

[mikeym]

OK, the tripwire forums are really beginning to p*ss me off. Tried registering but was denied as a spammer, I've never spammed anything in my life, and was told to contact them via the contact us page, which doesn't appear to exist; no links to it and a google search of the site doesn't turn it up in the first few pages of results.

Not a very good way to start with a customer.

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Found the "contact us" page it was on another website :/

[hTaver]

I was getting these performance problems and lots of glitches too, like the one you described in West London, and when the Siren screams next to you, or being impossible to use the "crossbow" or a sniper, because it didn't render correctly the scope, and some more.

The problem? AMD Drivers (what a surprise..)

I have a much more "modest" card, a HD 4850, but it is powerful enough to run Killing Floor with everything maxed out in Windows.

After I changed the drivers to the open ones... WOW!... Killing Floor runs MUCH more smoothly (it averages at 60 FPS, no problem, and tops at 90 - 100). With everything maxed out. And no graphical glitches. Only on one map or another that the performance suffers a little (but still perfectly playable), but this happened even with FGLRX (some lack of optimization I guess). I am truly impressed with the performance :) (Unfortunately, the performance is not the same on some other games, but still...)

So, to finish it: if you must use the closed driver, you will have to wait for a update from AMD.

[James Pond]

Yeah, I really believe it's a problem with AMD drivers, because I have everything maxed out with a Intel HD 3000 GPU and it runs fine :)

[mikeym]

Hmmmm... appears not to be an option, the Radeon drivers for my card have always been garbage - for the first 6 months or more they messed up my display so I couldn't see anything or recover the system if you tried to start any type of X11 display including logon managers, they still turn off my monitor for a couple of seconds during boot, and they appear to fail when running almost any 3D app. And with Steam they wont even open the client, the main window just doesn't appear when using them.

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Nope in this case it was user error, I mistyped the steam url thing.

[mikeym]

Nope I'm getting < 20 FPS with the Radeon driver in KF and a few artefacts with the Radeon driver, which is much better than my test with SS3 with the Radeon driver where it freaked out.

[hTaver]

Did you installed the "libtxc_dxtn"? Or whatever is the name under your distribution? It's the package that enables s3tc support. Without it, Killing Floor starts, but the performance is horrible. And, maybe, as my gpu is older, it had more time to be optimized.

Just as a matter of description, I am using Arch Linux, with kernel 3.6.7, the latest stable radeon driver and Mesa 9.0.1

If, at the end, it's still not playable, then I am afraid you will have for a AMD driver update.

And, by the way, by artifacts, you mean graphics artifacts on Killing Floor or with the Desktop itfself? Because, for me, there's none in the game.

[arch linux best linux]

Ursprungligen skrivet av hTaver:

Did you installed the "libtxc_dxtn"? Or whatever is the name under your distribution? It's the package that enables s3tc support. Without it, Killing Floor starts, but the performance is horrible. And, maybe, as my gpu is older, it had more time to be optimized.

Just as a matter of description, I am using Arch Linux, with kernel 3.6.7, the latest stable radeon driver and Mesa 9.0.1

If, at the end, it's still not playable, then I am afraid you will have for a AMD driver update.

And, by the way, by artifacts, you mean graphics artifacts on Killing Floor or with the Desktop itfself? Because, for me, there's none in the game.

Could you point me in the right direction on how I install that lib~? I'm on Ubuntu 12.10.

[mikeym]

sudo apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386

I think that's the package name - although I'm not in Ubuntu at the mo to check - so if that doesn't work you may need to use apt-cache search (or synaptic) to search for the package name.

[LinuxVR]

The libtxc-dxtn trick does wonders.
I was averaging 30's and now it's up to the 80's on a 7870.

[mikeym]

@storma what exact package name did you actually install, because adding or removing the obvious packages for libtxc-dxtn on Ubuntu and Fedora doesn't appear to impact the framerate for me. I always have lows of 30 FPS and extreme lows of 20 FPS on a GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

[Laika]

Q9650 and nvidia 9800GTX+ ony having some texture issues in Biolabs other than that 50+FPS
Use openbox as DE and then check your performance. Any 3D compiz like stuff can cause problems at times. (running gentoo myself tough)

[mikeym]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Onyx:

Q9650 and nvidia 9800GTX+ ony having some texture issues in Biolabs other than that 50+FPS
Use openbox as DE and then check your performance. Any 3D compiz like stuff can cause problems at times. (running gentoo myself tough)

Nah, Openbox gives exactly the same results. Gnome 3 actually doesn't seem to affect my performance negatively in any of my games. Unity does a little even with undirected fullscreen.