[SOLVED] frozen/lost frames

Hi all,

I've been experiencing this for several weeks and I can't figured out why it happened since I didn't have this problem before on the same system.

Attached are my humble video settings that worked for me for years (down-sampled to save forum storage).

With git-glx, my top FPS is 60, and it mostly stays there. However, from time to time, it would drop to 30-40 for about one second, and during that drop, I would experience frozen/lost frames. This often caused my falling of the cliff or me being killed.

With git-sdl, my top FPS is 100 and the frozen/lost frames would brings it to around 75.

I suspect the FPS number shown is just an average over time, and I used to play without problems at constant 60, so the real problem is the frozen frames, which brought down the average. I don't need the FPS to be high, but the lost/frozen frames are bad.

I'm on Linux (5.6.2-arch1-2) with nVidia's proprietary driver (440.82). The kernel update and the video driver update are the only relevant system changes that I can think of. However, the problem has been there since several versions ago. (I'm running X11 with i3 -- however I don't think these are relevant; besides, it used to work well under X11/i3 too.)

EDIT: I also tested these and still got freeze/lost frames:EDIT: These are the tests I've done -- none of them solve the frozen/drop frame problem.

• official release (0.8.2-4 from Arch), both sdl and glx, as well as the latest git
  
• delete all *cfg and start from scratch
  
• change video quality preset to Low
  
• disable compositor (picom)
  

My hardware (card + monitor) isn't high end, but it used to work very smoothly for me.

Not sure where I can even start to tune. Ideas are greatly appreciated.

EDIT 2: see the video. The biggest frame lost/frozen (250 -> 196) is around 0:21, and another one around 0:51.

After many many trial-and-errors, it turned out my frozen frames were caused by CPU limit, not GPU. I was running 3 instances of i3status-rust on 3 screens, with the time updated every second. It doesn't consume much CPU resources (I have a total of 8 cores), but somehow the update actions affect Xonotic (and other apps).

I switched back to i3status (instead of i3status-rust), and use only one instance. The frozen frame problem is now gone,