4

I experience weird fps drops while playing games, mostly with Wine.

Some tested games:

  • Hearthstone - fps drops happens pretty often; interesting fact is that while browsing cards every page needs to be loaded for few seconds and after that you can choose it without the delay - even after game restart; could also be true that the whole game works a bit better after restarting.
  • StarCraft 2 - fps drops do happen - sometimes while moving units for example;
  • Skyrim - problem shows up from time to time, for example while attacking;
  • Burnout Paradise - works really well.
  • Teleglitch - without Wine - that's totally weird for me, but fps drops did appear and it's rather simple game;
  • Trine - without Wine - works pretty well, but sometimes I do experience the problem;
  • FEZ - without Wine - works ok;
  • DotA 2 - without Wine - works really well, except few bugs.

After all tests I suspect this may be related to the CPU, rather then the GPU: I can clearly see the CPU usage drop when fps drop appears (at least while playing Hearthstone). Changing the GPU with prime-select did not change much really. I tried changing CPU to performance mode with indicator-cpufreq, but it did not solve the problem.

The most surprising thing is, that while testing something happened and I experienced extreme boost. Everything worked so well that I couldn't believe it. Sadly after a reboot a few hours later that was gone, but now I know it must be possible!

What's the problem about really? What could happen that this boost appeared?

I just would like to not experience this fps drops.

Software data:

  • Ubuntu 14.04.1;
  • Wine 1.6.2 from default repositories;
  • nvidia-331 with nvidia-prime from default repositories.

Hardware data:

  • GPU: Nvida GT 650M 2GB and Intel - Optimus technology;
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M 2.5GHz - 2 cores, 4 threads;
  • RAM: 16GB;
  • 16GB swap partition;
  • 116.1 GB total partition space, 2.1GB free.

Speedtest.net: ping 57ms, 9.81 Mbps download speed, 0.84 Mbps upload speed.

Output of free and df: http://pastebin.com/c4eAwEAg .

kcpr
  • 1,472

2 Answers2

1

Some things to change , then reboot, then test again:

  • Turn off power management: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power active false
  • Free up disk space: You need at least 10% free disk space, (20% would even be better) then look at this Q&A how to defragment your drive.
  • Install the xorg.edgers PPA
  • While rebooting, go into the BIOS and turn off any power management as well.

Advanced settings:

do a sudo nano /etc/sysctl.cfg and add the following parameters to the end:

vm.swappiness = 10
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 75
vm.max-readahead = 2048
vm.min-readahead = 1024

For the explanation of these, see comments to keep answer uncluttered.

As discussed in chat, your Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (rev 24) has a problem. Use a wired connection while you're solving this.

Community
  • 1
Fabby
  • 35,017
0

It finally seems I found the answer. It's pretty surprising for me really. It feels like... it's all about my hard drive!

Hard drive I used while asking this question just died few days ago. For now I'm forced to used my backup, which is stored on my external drive. I've got Ubuntu there and and I'm just using it. I tried playing Hearthstone and it just works brilliantly! Even using Intel graphics.

Anyway I'm not going to accept this as answer until I do some better tests. For now I just wanted to share this news as I'm pretty excited and maybe it could somehow help somebody. ;)

kcpr
  • 1,472