Once again game eating 100% CPU - Linux

[twiistedkaos]

System Specs
3.0Ghz Dual Core
2GB Ram
Nvidia drivers

before when I had this issue it was with the sound lib which caused the 100% cpu eatages. I noticed in the last few releases even without the sound and music, the game is eating 100% cpu. This may just be due to updates, and changes that result in more CPU power I suppose. But in the beta, I only ever used 40%-60% cpu.

Sorry noticed posting in wrong section, please move to Linux :)

[DuoMaxwell]

I think its prolly just reporting it wrong, it's always said the same to me hovering at 99% in the in game info, but without seeing any preformance gains or hits when the CPU is either underclocked or overclocked, your best off just running windowed for a while and check usage with the system monitor or top.

[fluffy_muffin]

I think its prolly just reporting it wrong, it's always said the same to me hovering at 99% in the in game info, but without seeing any preformance gains or hits when the CPU is either underclocked or overclocked, your best off just running windowed for a while and check usage with the system monitor or top.

Same here. Top showing 99%-100% all the time.

[magnet]

Yeah and it's green because for the game, it's a good thing :). If you have a dual core, it will use only one of the cores.

[Froste]

you don't want a game to take 40% cpu, you want a game to take 99-100% cpu

you can use nice (or renice) to change its priority down so it'll only take 40% cpu, but you're not gonna like playing it like that.

[NightTwix]

yes, those 100% usage are a Good Thing (tm) :)

[niclam]

Exactly,

The games uses all the CPU it can chew its teeth on in order to process more frames per second. You can minimize the game to diminish the cpu used but I don't recall if the game supports that right now.

Regards

[Athens101]

Not if you keep the game running on a dual monitor setup ;)

I think the question being asked is why does Regnum use 90-100% CPU when WoW running under Cedega/WINE uses about 45% of my CPU.

I see 75-90% on our dual Opteron 275 box. and no it's not my personal PC it's our SQL server.

[Froste]

A game (any game) will always take whatever is available, if a game is only taking 40% of the cpu, then something else is taking 60%, or you are interpreting the data incorrectly

[DuoMaxwell]

yes, while the game does take very high priority there is a point where more power just doesn't help it, like if you where to take an older game from more then 5 years ago and put it on a decent machine these days you'll likely cap out what the game can actually use quite easily, I've seen a few ppl online ask why their old game only gets x amount of FPS when they have a new omega quad core boxx with liquid cooled overclocked everything. Is it the game engine not being able to make use of that speed or is it caped off in some way to have a max possible FPS and once it reaches that point it no longer tries to go for more, which is arguably the best way to do it. cap the game at 100FPS, no screen can do that and even the fastest of human eyes(think like fighter pilots traind for this) will have trouble ever seeing a skip. The question is then, why make the machine run that much harder for no precevible gain other then more player's going on about their e-p3n0rz because they get 2 more fps then the other guy or cause they got 5 more marks on 3d mark.

Why all of this? Simple, we precive unstuttering motion at about 16fps, so thats a bare minimum, tho we see it even better at 24fps, which is what movies in the cinima are played at, tho 29-30 looks smoother on the TV and it should be the minimm for fast action like a shooter, double that to 60fps and you're doing great graphically, 85fps is optimal tho, as most screens start to top out here in thier ability to draw frames a seccond, so a 100fps cap off would be fine for a max cap as if there is a small slowdown it shouldn't drop below 85fps for long at all.

So what am I getting at? Well anything over that 100fps would be wasted cpu and gpu power which draws more electricity and produces just that much more heat. Now I am an overclocker with my own systems, but I only like doing it if I'm actually going to need the power for the tasks I'm going to do, like for video editing, playing around with blender 3d and other power hungry tasks, but I also underclock my cpu if I don't intend to be doing much, as before I started playing regnum I actually had my system underclocked to where any lower and it wouldn't start at all lol, as who needs 3Ghz of power to download torrents and browse the web? Taking the cpu to about 950Mhz, down from 1.8Ghz stock, or 2.8Ghz overclocked lowers the power draw a bit, as does dropping down the GPU speeds to below stock, on the low end the sem actually can run fanless with the monster sized scythe ninja cooler I have lol.

But then I'm a little nutz when it comes to my equipment.

[Athens101]

A game (any game) will always take whatever is available, if a game is only taking 40% of the cpu, then something else is taking 60%, or you are interpreting the data incorrectly

DuoMaxwell you hit the nail on the head when you said high priority where when a game takes high priority there is a point where more power just doesn't help it.

Graphically the home brew 3d engine behind Regnum is on par with the id Tech 3 engine. For those of you who have never had the displeasure of working on a 3d game (I been doing this since Glide was popular) the Tech 3 engine is what was used for Quake3.

Just for fun I loaded Regnum on my personal desktop today (it also doubles as our devel SQL/Apache/SAMBA file server. I ran it in a window at a low resolution 1280x960 @ 16

Have a look @ CPU's usage from Regnum and Top it's only 3% off.

http://athens101.com/albums/album03/proof.jpg

So in response to the reply from (Froste) "A game (any game) will always take whatever is available, if a game is only taking 40% of the cpu, then something else is taking 60%, or you are interpreting the data incorrectly" That good sir is a uneducated statement as my screen shot proves. My CPU's were 37.2% idle. This was with Apache/SQL/Dovecot/Gimp/Amarok/X windows/Gaim/Azureus/SAMBA/Sendmail active and running.

I fear if I made a habit of interpreting data incorrectly I would find my persons quite unemployed. @ 37% CPU usage Regnum HAS to be using only one core out of the 4 (2 dual-core Opterons (4 cores, 270 Italy) since running a synthetic Apache benchmark via (Jmeter) this box is only under 40% load @ 25,000 request @ 5,000 clients per second.

Don't get me right I really like Regnum and buy premium content just to support the game. It's fun and the game does not look bad graphically but I think there is plenty of room for optimization, at least for the Linux client. Regnum is not a graphically intensive game and unless the Linux client was built with debugging it should not use as much CPU.

Yet the game is just out of beta so I can't complain and I look forward to new releases of the Linux client.

On the last note magnet said If you have a dual core, it will use only one of the cores. but niclam from NGD said The games uses all the CPU it can chew its teeth on

I have to say it looks like Regnum in fact does not support (SMP/dual core) and this explains why WoW uses so much less since it does support a multi core arch. It does not matter how many teeth Regnum sinks it's teeth into if it's only sinking it's teeth into one of the four available cores between 2 CPU'S.

I guess I should also note everything here runs CentOS minus the Netra's that are running Solaris.

[ChadMC]

Any chance NGD plans on supporting multi-core usage at some point? I'd love for my dual-core to be used to its full potential.

[DuoMaxwell]

Most devs are lazy, this is why SMP is still a little lacking even on Macs even tho Apple had been using dual cpu seups for years, most apps unless made by Apple had no dual CPU/Dual Core support. Apple's only big folly tho in the switch to x86 CPs was in not waiting for the C2D, they started off in amnylower end machines with the 32 bit Core Duo, doing this means that there is room for lazy devs to not give full 64bit support allong with full SMP support.

All hail BeOS, if more OSs where written like it was then SMP would pretty much be mandatory, BeOS was written in such a way that it forced the devs for any app to make everything multithreaded, if you have an old comp take a look at BeOS Max or the like, you'll be surprised at how much more capable it made even the crappiest hardware.

But I digress, This is 2k7 and we have had Dual Core and 64 bit CPUs for some time, yet the vast majority of apps don't yet support either and those that do usually do so badly, I'm surprised that even in the linux world that there are still some kinks to work out with full SMP and 64 bit support, with prices on dual core 64 bit CPUs so insanely low right now ($65 for the X2 4000+ AM2) it seems that at least for AMD that single core CPUs will be a thing of the past, but it will take quite some time for ppl to turn to it as their main focus instead of focusing on the old stuff.

[Athens101]

Most devs are lazy, this is why SMP is still a little lacking even on Macs even tho Apple had been using dual cpu seups for years, most apps unless made by Apple had no dual CPU/Dual Core support. Apple's only big folly tho in the switch to x86 CPs was in not waiting for the C2D, they started off in amnylower end machines with the 32 bit Core Duo, doing this means that there is room for lazy devs to not give full 64bit support allong with full SMP support.

All hail BeOS, if more OSs where written like it was then SMP would pretty much be mandatory, BeOS was written in such a way that it forced the devs for any app to make everything multithreaded, if you have an old comp take a look at BeOS Max or the like, you'll be surprised at how much more capable it made even the crappiest hardware.

But I digress, This is 2k7 and we have had Dual Core and 64 bit CPUs for some time, yet the vast majority of apps don't yet support either and those that do usually do so badly, I'm surprised that even in the linux world that there are still some kinks to work out with full SMP and 64 bit support, with prices on dual core 64 bit CPUs so insanely low right now ($65 for the X2 4000+ AM2) it seems that at least for AMD that single core CPUs will be a thing of the past, but it will take quite some time for ppl to turn to it as their main focus instead of focusing on the old stuff.

Well Regnum was started what, five years ago? Oh SMP support hell we have had that for a LONG time. I have some SMP Sun Ultra 60 boxes running Aurora Linux that were build in the early 90's. After that we saw Dual Xeon, then dual p3, then Athlon MP... now AMD and Intel have good and cheap dual core options. Hell, two cores look at some of Suns 8 core chips. IBM has some nice ones in the POWER arch as well.

BeOS was a great platform but I never wrote for it since it used a microkernel and granted it's a great idea but like most it never really worked right.

I don't think we will see SMP in the Regnum engine since the one they used (yeah I really think this is a modded GPL 3d engine) does not support SMP. I only say this since one of my guys is a former Loki employee and he is "working on his care".

[DuoMaxwell]

For lacking support I meant for more allong the lines of desktop software on linux, which, unless you're willing to do it yourself isn'talways the easiest thing to find precompiled. I use Ubuntu Studio, the one version you'd exspect to see full 64 bit and SMP suppoerted version in the repos, lacks some apps that could or would benifit form it.

Apps on the high end workstation and server end of things usually are the first to support the latest and greatest hardware features to maximize their effeciency, yet consumer lv stuff always lags behind by allot.

[saxtro]

Athens101, you are crazy,
you run everythink on your machine as root!!! :thumb_down:

[NightTwix]

man athens
you really start to annoy people here with you constant trolling.

[Athens101]

For lacking support I meant for more allong the lines of desktop software on linux, which, unless you're willing to do it yourself isn'talways the easiest thing to find precompiled. I use Ubuntu Studio, the one version you'd exspect to see full 64 bit and SMP suppoerted version in the repos, lacks some apps that could or would benifit form it.

Apps on the high end workstation and server end of things usually are the first to support the latest and greatest hardware features to maximize their effeciency, yet consumer lv stuff always lags behind by allot.

True it will be some time since we have to mix and match 32/64 bit repos. Little things like lacking 64bit flash plugin and 64 bit codecs for video playback. But all in time no?

Also for running as root have a look as to why http://www.byteclub.net/wiki/CentOS_Live it makes for a great development env that you can test away on even if you place your box in the DMZ. Everyone saxtro is right it's 100% crazy to run an installed distro as root. su/sudo are your friend!

Night when you have the NGD Team telling you this http://www.regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?p=147929#post147929 you should tend to a mirror for a bit of self reflection :)

[twiistedkaos]

Well my thread turned into an interesting discussion, which I don't mind, cleared up some thoughts of mine. From what I've read, Regnum engine isn't based off any other engine.

[NightTwix]

Night when you have the NGD Team telling you this http://www.regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?p=147929#post147929 you should tend to a mirror for a bit of self reflection :)

trust me, im cooler with niclam than this might have sounded in his posting.
your arguments are misleading and simply wrong and yet you dont get tired to repeat them everywhere.

If you try to smartass about lag, cpu-usage or gameengines you should start to get a clue before shouting around.
For me you appear to be more of a troll.

and yea, self reflection isnt one of my strenghts.
At least i try to be constructive with my critics against NGD and why i say is funded

[Athens101]

trust me, im cooler with niclam than this might have sounded in his posting.
your arguments are misleading and simply wrong and yet you dont get tired to repeat them everywhere.

If you try to smartass about lag, cpu-usage or gameengines you should start to get a clue before shouting around.
For me you appear to be more of a troll.

and yea, self reflection isnt one of my strenghts.
At least i try to be constructive with my critics against NGD and why i say is funded


I gather that much but it's all fine. I understand you wanting to lambast me for making a relay then so be it. I will accept that. My old friend E flew in for holiday this week and pointed out something that escaped me. He is native to Argentina and noted it's a cultural head butting match. I gather that now. Is how we learn no?

If you view me as a troll then fair enough, granted. I play the game in my spare time time and if NGD wipes it because I say something in the forums big deal. It's a game. I might ask them for a link so I can continue to donate however. But that's just trolling me.