[SOLVED] Xonotic is terribly slow. What gives?

I know there have been multiple performance threads, but this has been peeving me for a while.

My machine is as follows:
Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit
Core 2 Duo @ 2.8ghz
6gb DDR800
Geforce 8800gt 256mb

Yet I still get usually no more than 30fps on much of any map. This is not on any kind of crazy settings, just default stuff. This game does not look so good that it should be running this poorly on this particular machine. I know Xonotic/Nexuiz used to run very well on this same machine and not much in the way of graphical quality has changed... so what gives? Why so slow?

Pictures for more info:

Settings:
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....41.29.jpg
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....42.09.jpg

the_big_keybench timedemo:
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....44.15.jpg
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....46.59.jpg

Need any more info, you know who to ask.

1. what drives do you use?
2. you know you should upgrade your system
3. that gpu is too slow for Xonotic at that (fulhd) resolution - try to lower the resolution
4. try lowering the details to 'normal' or 'medium'
5. Xonotic does have higher hardware requirements than Nexuiz

I know Xonotic/Nexuiz used to run very well on this same machine and not much in the way of graphical quality has changed... so what gives? Why so slow?

I'd say you probably have a driver issue. What res are you playing the game at? Are you using lots of AA or AF?

Maybe you should benchmark your gpu and cpu and see if other games are slow too?

I would lower the settings if I were you, also did you use the SDL or GLX version, i dont know the difference but GLX seem to run smoother on Ubuntu.

Also, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 to get your latest mesa drivers or the latest non-free drivers! 10.04 is no longer supported.

2. you know you should upgrade your system

Let's not be too hasty.

3. that gpu is too slow for Xonotic at that (fulhd) resolution - try to lower the resolution

No, the 8800GT should be just fine for Xonotic at this resolution and settings. I run a 9600GT (less powerful than 8800GT) and use Ultra with offset mapping disabled at 1920x1200. You absolutely should not have to be switching to anything below high effects.

First, get some standardised performance numbers by running Xonotic/misc/tools/the-big-benchmark.sh. This runs the big keybench loads of times on every setting. This should take around 20 minutes on your system.

Here are a nice table of results:
http://dev.xonotic.org/projects/3/wiki/H...quirements

Just for a comparison, if you can not beat 292, 287, 255, 236, 187, 82, 42 for each effect level then you have a very broken setup as those results are for my C2D E8200 with a 9600GT and that was before I did some further work.

I would suggest you take a look at my system tuning guide:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=2685

@Cyber Killer
1. I use the standard Nvidia (version current) drivers from the Ubuntu repo.
2. Why? 10.04 is supported until 2013. I'm planning to upgrade, just haven't done it yet.
3. No, it's not. This gpu can run UT3 at max settings and get 60+ FPS. Xonotic doesn't come near this level of detail.

@rocknroll237
I'm using neither AA or AF. Other games seem to run fine (Sauerbraten, OpenArena, Savage 2).

@machine!
I'm running the SDL version. The two don't seem to make much difference to me, but I benchmarked them some time ago and the SDL version came out ~1% faster.
Again, 10.04 is supported (by Canonical) until 2013. I don't know if you're referring to Xonotic or Nvidia support, but the drivers in the repo are essentially unchanged iirc.

I will hop over to Win7 and report back to see if I get better performance there. I also have 12.04 installed on a separate partition, so I'll experiment there as well.

1. I use the standard Nvidia (version current) drivers from the Ubuntu repo.
2. Why? 10.04 is supported until 2013. I'm planning to upgrade, just haven't done it yet.
3. No, it's not. This gpu can run UT3 at max settings and get 60+ FPS. Xonotic doesn't come near this level of detail.

1. No, that one is over 2 years old.
2. Cause the drivers ans libs are 2 years old.
3. Probably cause the old libs and drivers you are using arent working well with Xonotic which is compiled for the latest stable drivers and libs.

machine!, that should not matter, really. Don't try to make him update, he wants to stick with LTS and so be it.

Okey, sorry. But I must say, I used Debian Stable with a really old graphics driver, when I moved to 12.04 I got much better FPS on most 3D games. I guess the case is the same with Xonotic.

So I guess it is a driver/older distro issue, I ran 0.6 under 12.04 and get 200+ fps (as I should!) with the very same settings.

http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.14.jpg
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.52.jpg

That still leads me to ask, why such poor support for what's still considered a modern distro? I haven't upgraded because 10.04 is less buggy than the interim 11.x versions and even still less buggy than 12.04 in some respects. I would think Xonotic should be able to run better on a wider variety of distros, that would certainly allow room for a bigger user base. Not everyone wants to switch distros/upgrade just for one game that SHOULD run well on their system anyway. Other games don't seem to have trouble supporting 10.04... why not Xonotic?

So I guess it is a driver/older distro issue, I ran 0.6 under 12.04 and get 200+ fps (as I should!) with the very same settings.

http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.14.jpg
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.52.jpg

That still leads me to ask, why such poor support for what's still considered a modern distro? I haven't upgraded because 10.04 is less buggy than the interim 11.x versions and even still less buggy than 12.04 in some respects. I would think Xonotic should be able to run better on a wider variety of distros, that would certainly allow room for a bigger user base. Not everyone wants to switch distros/upgrade just for one game that SHOULD run well on their system anyway. Other games don't seem to have trouble supporting 10.04... why not Xonotic?

What was it I said (kidding ). Anyway try lowering the settings as much as possible and see if it give any results.

So I guess it is a driver/older distro issue, I ran 0.6 under 12.04 and get 200+ fps (as I should!) with the very same settings.

http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.14.jpg
http://www.img48.doomdns.com/images/1341....37.52.jpg

That still leads me to ask, why such poor support for what's still considered a modern distro? I haven't upgraded because 10.04 is less buggy than the interim 11.x versions and even still less buggy than 12.04 in some respects. I would think Xonotic should be able to run better on a wider variety of distros, that would certainly allow room for a bigger user base. Not everyone wants to switch distros/upgrade just for one game that SHOULD run well on their system anyway. Other games don't seem to have trouble supporting 10.04... why not Xonotic?

What was it I said (kidding ). Anyway try lowering the settings as much as possible and see if it give any results.

I think you're missing my point. I shouldn't NEED to lower my settings. Xonotic should be able to run well on my setup... period. Like I said, other games have no problem supporting this. Early builds of Xonotic ran very well on this configuration...

Delete config.cfg and see what happens if it's recreated. Of course back it up first.

That still leads me to ask, why such poor support for what's still considered a modern distro?

This shouldn't be the case. I wouldn't blame it on the driver version though. I have run Xonotic with a 4 year old NVIDIA driver before and their was no order of magnitude performance difference that you are seeing. Newer drivers magically giving extra performance is a bit of a myth. Normally it only happens shortly after initial releases of hardware because the first driver releases aren't optimised perhaps, but later on down the line, no improvement is likely to be seen and it may get worse as the driver becomes more bloated with features for newer hardware. The one big exception with NVIDIA was the 75 series when OpenGL 2.0 support was added which gave across the board improvement to Geforce FX, 6 and 7 cards.

Do you have compositing on? Some different window managers show a different performance impact with compositing enabled and that will be a difference between the 2 distro versions you have tried.

I would think Xonotic should be able to run better on a wider variety of distros

Xonotic should run well on every distro in some form. Whether it does with every piece of hardware with each configuration is another matter. The software that goes into each distro is more or less the same and will run Xonotic pretty similar, how they choose to set it up is different and it is this which will be more likely to make a difference.

I haven't looked back since moving to Arch Linux because all of the configuration is down to you, there is no standard set of software and as a rolling release system you can always get up to date. There is no need to worry about a resintallation being needed every 6 months.

You certainly shouldn't have to lower settings, the 8800GT is a brilliant card for Xonotic and you should be able to run it on Ultra settings no problem.

Well deleting config.cfg got me up to 90fps... still not good enough. But...

It would seem I've isolated the issue: It has something to do with Nvidia's twinview implementation (I'm running dual monitors). When twinview is enabled (even though Xonotic only runs on one monitor at 1920x1080, and the other screen goes black) it runs horrendously. However when twinview is disabled and the second monitor is disabled entirely, I get the 250+ fps I should. I just ran Xonotic on Ultra @ 1920x1080 on 10.04 and got ~35 fps. This seems more realistic.

So I guess the problem is with Nvidia's implementation. I didn't have twinview enabled under 12.04 so I was unable to test if this issue still exists. Here's my Xorg.conf: http://pastie.org/4199746

So in the words of Linus Torvalds... "F*** you Nvidia!"

Well ATI isent much better

Understand why you don't wanna update, the Unity interface is simply shit, buggy and slow is what it is. xD

Sorry for being little off topic.

unity isn't that bad ... or buggy ... it only has issues where the special effects need to be off ... nad applications that have more that one title bar ...

also also ... the version of ubuntu by no means dictates what de you use ... you can always go back to old gnome .. gnome 3 ... kde ... xfce ... razor qt ... and more!

Well if it's not Unity it's Ubuntu 12.04 itself which is buggy! xD

Sorry for starting this off topic discussion. Hutty if you wanna continue discussing this(which I'll happily do), then please pm me instead or create an topic for this in the off topic forum.