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.

Originally Posted by Anpu

Load Regnum into RAM

Or cache resources :

Originally Posted by game.cfg

[resources]
res_cache_compressed = 0
res_cache_enabled = 1
res_cache_size = 768
res_database = live_rgn

Would be nice if NGD documented those options

[Nikor]

Originally Posted by platyna

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

What's wrong with

renice 19 `pidof game`

?

[_dracus_]

Originally Posted by Nikor

What's wrong with

renice 19 `pidof game`

?

It's not leet enought if you don't use awk!

Ok I was kidding. It's really common to write thoses kind of code for script since you don't really care if it's efficient or not, what matters is that it works (in a short time).

[-Drv-]

Originally Posted by platyna

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)

unfortunately if you play without particle effects some spell animation aren't shown (mobility, strategic position, stun effects, etc...)* this could be a problem.

Originally Posted by platyna

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.

if you play not only at forts sound is really useful to detect enemies buffing or levelling, without sound you'll be taken by surprise really a lot more.

*at least on my pc