How to improve your client performance on Linux (with some hints useful also on Win)

[platyna]

Well lag is obvious design flaw of the game, however it can be relieved by the following steps, that allows up to 2x performance gain comparing to default setup.

1. Captain Obvious: newest drivers from producent's site (Nvidia), in case of Intel cards - newest Mesa3d, newest Xorg drivers, newest libdrm - those that comes with your distribution are usualy old.
For Nvidia (especialy Ubuntu users, since their packaged nvidia driver sucks badly):
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Intel users:
ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/individual/driver/
http://dri.freedesktop.org/libdrm/
http://www.mesa3d.org/

WARNING for Intel users - recompilling those to not screw up your OS is easy, but requires some knowledge how are original distro packages built (configure options), when I will sexy enough, I will write some howto.

ATI: Sorry guys, never touched this sh!t.

2. Get rid of eye candies in your setup - compiz etc. has to go - refer to your distribution documentation.

3. Renice 19 game client, so it doesn't fight for resources with other things, after getting char screen open a console and paste in it the following command:

renice 19 `ps axu | grep game | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}'`

4. Use your native resolution.

5. Close all currently not needed resource hogging programs - use htop to see what is going on your system ("yum install htop" or "apt-get install htop")

6. Use safe mode, however turning it on has some bugs (eg likes to wear off between logins), plus turn off unnecessary eye candies (set your options exactly like on pictures below)

First set your options like that:


Then set advanced options like that:


Now set safe mode:


Mind that "advanced options" button is inactive now. And this is how it should be when safe mode is realy set.

But sometimes it looks like that:


You need to check it every login, then unset and set safe mode again. When safe mode is correctly set then eg. you can't see paint on armours.

Also make sure your in game options looks like that:


Ok, now some nvidia stuff:




7. Few notes about sound: as several people pointed out - turning off the sound is also performance gain, however keeping the sound on (at least for me) improves game play, so I am leaving it up to your consideration.

Let me know if it helped you. ;-)

Regards.

[Pornstar]

Turning off the sound increase performance a lot. Also turn off the fog options in game.cfg.

[platyna]

I know that turning off the sound increases performance, but it also makes game play more difficult (you can eg. hear aca comming). ;-) Well it is up for individual consideration.

Regards.

[Arafails]

Really renice 19? You want to incurr a massive performance penalty on the client? You didn't mean renice to -19? Better yet, set it to rt priority (but only if using fullscreen and no VoiP applications).

Anyway, guide for ATi users:

(a) Make sure you have something with dedicated VRAM (preferably over 32Mb). An integrated X200M for example will not cut the mustard. Sorry, it's just facts. I expect this applies to nVidia, Intel, VIA, etc...
(b) Use the latest fglrx drivers if you have an r600 or newer chipset (So Radeon HD2000 +). Older chipsets may either work fine with Mesa, in which case see above (but I think you have double buffer performance penalties), or use an fglrx release that supports olders cards.
(c) Turn water quality right down, because the shader was written by an nvidia monkey and having it turned on will just use linking cycles for no reason.
(d) Turn off Anti-Aliasing
(e) Having Anisotropic Filtering anything 4x or below is unlikely to hurt performance.
(f) Safe mode is craptastic. Leave it off unless you're having huge performance problems.
(g) Compositing (Compiz, etc) really is not an option until they sort out the performance bottlenecks. You can unredirect fullscreen windows but your manager will probably draw things you don't want to see over the top of the game.
(h) Enjoy, just don't expect a mumble overlay.

[Anpu]

Load Regnum into RAM

[Znurre]

Just a tip.

Use the NVidia 177* drivers if you have a GeForce 7000 series card, I found that it gives me around 20 more fps than the 180*drivers. Not tested on other GPU series, feel free to report how it worked out for you if you decide to try it.

Oh, and platyna - about the sound...
You recommend turning on Safe Mode, but keeping sound? oO

To me, it's way more important to see who is knocked, stunned, etc than hearing footsteps.
Good camera usage ftw.

[platyna]

Arafails, I meant renice to 19 - RO client doesn't need high priority, it is better for it to run with lowest possible priority, I have explained above why, RO hogging resources interferes with other system components eg. xserver that may cause it to crash as described in several threads here. Hints included above were actualy tested, since I am very concerned about my system's stability and performance. ;-)

Znurre, as I said abose, I use the sound, despite the fact that turning it off is performance gain, because without sound it seems less playable (eg I can hear who casts what spells without seeing them etc.). I think I will add the comment to my howto about it then.

About turning off the fog - I have tested it, indeed gives few fps more, however I noticed weird hang ups when turning around.

Post your other hints guys, and I will edit my posting further more.

Regards.

[Nightchill]

do not turn on safe mode, rather tweak the game.cfg since safe mode doesn't disable all

[-Edge-]

The game is playable for me, but I like to have it look, I dunno, like other games? This is what I get when I auto-detect my graphic settings:


[Note: Anisotropics and Antialiasing are not affected by Auto-Detect, they are manually selected]
And that's reasonable, I run on a pretty nice computer where I can get like ~70 FPS in heavy graphical games like Guild Wars.

• OS: Windows Vista

• Graphics: nVidia 9200M GS (256MB)

• Processor: Intel Pentium Dual CPU T3200 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPU's) 2.00GHz

• Memory: 2GB RAM

• DxVersion: Direct X10

But when I log on those graphics lag my computer to no end. And if I want to play I have to tune everything down on the lowest possible point, looking back at recordings I did months ago (before 1.0.6) the record rate and FPS were amazing, I just can't believe things are this way now. I actually thought that my graphics card was corrupted too, and the reason Regnum was lagging so badly was due to overheating and graphic corruption, but I went to the store all ready to return my new computer, and the support there tested quite a few games on my computer, and it turns out that everything is fine, its just Regnum.

Fuck Safe Mode, I should be able to play and record videos in Regnum on maxed details just like any other game, the problem lies in the game itself. You run on a notebook too don't you? You should know its obvious you get different results depending on battery and power management.

[platyna]

Autodetect is bullshit. ;-)

Regards.