HOWTO: Solving the "Your card is too old" problem

[onemyndseye]

Ok.. this has been discussed in several places on this forum but I wanted to attempt to centralize some of this info into something possibly usefull for most Linux distros... if anyone has anything to add please feel free.


If your card has DRI support but RO reports "Your video card is too old" or you have corrupted textures in game... this is for you. But be aware it comes at a price.... I'll explain.

If you are here you are probably NOT using proprietary drivers for your video card because they are either not available or not functioning for your adapter... Non-proprietary drivers do not contain the needed texture decompression libs needed for Regnum to run properly: S3TC or libxtc

S3TC can be enabled in driconf but this support is very limited as many of you may have already seen.. slow and buggy textures.


This has been discussed here


This is where this Howto comes in... but as I said there is a price. There are some legal problems regarding the license of these libs and for this reason they cannot be distributed in some places... Read more here

So if you would like these lib's on your system and be able to play RO properly you must compile and install them yourself.

Please note that for Debian users the libxtc package is available on the debian-multimedia.org repositories. This package did not work for me however it may for you... In any case this HOWTO is an attempt at a more broad solution.

Its actually is a quite simple process so lets open your favorite terminal emulator and get started

In a terminal window lets create a directory to work in and use wget to download the source code needed to compile libxtc:

mkdir ~/build-libxtc
cd ~/build-libxtc
wget http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheideg...n070518.tar.gz
tar -xvf libtxc_dxtn070518.tar.gz
cd libtxc_dxtn

Now at this point you will need your system to be setup for compiling software... This means for Debian youll need the build-essentials package. For other systems do alittle research to see what the equivalent package(s).

Users of other systems please fill in the blanks here

Also install the mesa headers (mesa-common-dev on debian and the like)

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Now its time to compile libxtc

make

You should see ouput similar to the following:

cc -Wall -pedantic -fPIC -O3 -c -o txc_compress_dxtn.o txc_compress_dxtn.c
txc_compress_dxtn.c: In function ‘tx_compress_dxtn’:
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: warning: ‘alphatest[0]’ may be used uninitialized in this function
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: note: ‘alphatest[0]’ was declared here
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: warning: ‘alphatest[1]’ may be used uninitialized in this function
txc_compress_dxtn.c:419: note: ‘alphatest[1]’ was declared here
cc -Wall -pedantic -fPIC -O3 -c -o txc_fetch_dxtn.o txc_fetch_dxtn.c
cc -shared -fPIC -o libtxc_dxtn.so txc_compress_dxtn.o txc_fetch_dxtn.o

If you dont get any errors its time for to install... you can safely ignore any warnings. Install with:

sudo make install

Output should look as follows:

install -d /usr/lib
install -m 755 libtxc_dxtn.so /usr/lib

Now for good measure restart your X session and fire up RO.. and hopefully happy hunting




-onemyndseye
**** Syrtis lvl50 Hunter: Elusis

[WesMatte]

This makes Regnum online run on my new asus eee 900 without visual errors... Only thing missing now is speed.. I'll get around 15fps in Ubuntu 8.10(RC) at best... In WinXp i'll get around 30fps... Anyone know how to speed up things in Ubuntu 8.10?..

wesmatte

[arlick]

Originally Posted by WesMatte

This makes Regnum online run on my new asus eee 900 without visual errors... Only thing missing now is speed.. I'll get around 15fps in Ubuntu 8.10(RC) at best... In WinXp i'll get around 30fps... Anyone know how to speed up things in Ubuntu 8.10?..

wesmatte

turning off compiz :P

or...:

1) remove ubuntu from your system
2) download a better distribution
3) install the distribution

[onemyndseye]

Glad to hear it helped mate....


Turning off compiz ("desktop effects") will help for sure... My tips here and here may also help abit.

Also turn all graphics options ALL THE WAY DOWN... you can keep Particles and Lighting effects on. Even on my Gaming machine with Premium hardware - this is the setup I use as if nothing else it helps to reduce lag in large battles.


However I have to disagree with arlick...

Im guessing you have a ATI based video card?

The lack of performance is caused by ATI's lack of cooperation with OpenSource OS's. The drivers they do provide are horrendous... and the OpenSource variants are not much better.... if any...

Ubuntu is a fine distribution for Desktop users and its HIGHLY unlikely than another distro will gain you better frame rates...

Arlick: With all due repect...Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? As a 15year user of linux... Im all ears. If not - please do not pollute a support thread with arguments of "my distro is better than your distro ..."



Take care,
-One Mynds Eye

[WesMatte]

1st thing, yes compiz is off! 2nd. gave it try with the "renice" tweek but that gave nothing(speed is the same).. And another thing, The Asus eee 900 has a Intel grafic chip and not ATI...so thanx anyway guys..

(by the way, i'm running xubuntu right now)

wesmatte

[ArcticWolf]

Shall I translate this to Spanish and post it in the Spanish Linux Support forum?

[WesMatte]

Originally Posted by Xephandor

Shall I translate this to Spanish and post it in the Spanish Linux Support forum?

If you have time to do so, yes why not, more "eyes" on the topic is a good thing..

[onemyndseye]

Im sad to say support for the intel chipset cards are even worse ... furthermore Regnum has documented compatibility issues with the Intel cards

sorry guy Sounds like you are stuck with the performance you are getting


Sorry I could not be of more help..


Take care,
-onemyndseye

[arlick]

Sorry about the off-topic, but maybe someone could find that interesting

Originally Posted by onemyndseye

With all due repect...Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?

Yes:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nch_2008&num=1

The result of all test, page 9 and 10:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nch_2008&num=9

Regards.

PS: I dont wanna make a flame war (well, a little bit ). Im my experience there are many things that influence in the performance like: distribution (you can make a comparation with openSuSE againts Gentoo for example), kernel, desktop, graphic driver, version of graphic driver...

In my experience Ubuntu have less performance (i dont know if that the word that i want to use :S) than other distributions like slackware, debian or gentoo. Also i think that opensuse is the worst. I dont know now how are arch linux, fedora and many more.

[Znurre]

Originally Posted by arlick

Also i think that opensuse is the worst. I dont know now how are arch linux, fedora and many more.

You wanna know something really strange?
Using the same version of the NVidia driver on openSUSE 11.0 and latest Arch Linux updates, I get around 1000 fps less each 5 seconds on Arch using glxgears.

I do agree that openSUSE is much slower to work with, application startup times, etc.
But when it comes to framrates I have seen way better results on openSUSE than on any other distro.