Linux

While I'm not sure I can attribute any specific performance hits to any specific recent patches, I also am on the hunt for any tips to improve Eve performance in Linux. I was part of the big HERO fleet rushing DD's sov earlier tonight, and saw my FPS drop to 10 with the whole gang on grid. That is of course with fairly high graphics settings, but I get the feeling something can be done to squeeze some more performance out of it.

Funtoo, kernel 3.13.5
Wine 1.7.14
Radeon R9 290X, ati-drivers-14.2_beta
i7 at around 4.5 GHz

On Windows with max graphics I get 400 FPS in station and 250-350 on the undock (depending on whether I'm looking toward the station).
On Linux with slightly below max graphics I get 150 FPS in station and 90-120 in uncrowded space. Scaling is also horrible; like I said above, I dropped down to 10 FPS in a big fleet.

Not sure if this is relevant, but I also get a ton of this repeated when I run Eve from the console:

err:d3d:wined3d_debug_callback 0x194af0: "glUseProgram has failed because the operation requires the referenced program object '28' to be successfully linked (GL_INVALID_OPERATION)".
err:d3d_shader:shader_glsl_select >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> GL_INVALID_OPERATION (0x502) from glUseProgramObjectARB @ /var/tmp/portage/app-emulation/wine-1.7.14/work/wine-1.7.14/dlls/wined3d/glsl_shader.c / 6162

Looks like a shader thing, and indeed I do see a significant FPS boost when I turn shaders down, but then everything looks like crap, and it's still not even close to what I get in Windows.

Any general performance tips? Wine settings/registry hacks to squeeze out that extra few FPS? Would be much appreciated.

It's been a long time since I did big null fleets but the settings that saved my old pc from meltdownin 300+ local battles were :

brackets off (this was the best one, but not always practical depending on your role in the fleet)
effects off (all those sebo effects do take their toll)
turn off shadows + drones being drawn (possibly comes over as patronising but really useful to check these settings)

if still getting slow then down the list of turn off missile effects, reduce shaders and so on till you get something playable. None of these are really linux specific but hope it helps.

One thing to consider is your window manager. Unity, KDE, and Gnome all do video acceleration. This is a bit hit. In some window managers like KDE you can turn it off. In other like Ubuntu's Unity you can't. Of course no matter what Linuc distro you run you can install a different desktop. I'd also shutdown other programs, and reduce the number of open browser tabs/windows.


It's also worth noting that many people find full screen faster. Also it's not all GPU (video card) speeds it may be you are low on memory or cpu. Your disk speeds matter when loading grid more than you think. Try running a program like atop or top in the background. If you max out your cpus (or more likely max out a single core), fill up memory, or max your disks (in top you'll see io wait use up a lot of cpu if disk is a problem).

Lastly there is the issue of drivers. At you running the current rev of drivers. If you are using NVIDIA are you sure you are using the NVIDIA drivers and not the open source ones.

Ideally if you want to throw money at speeding things up you want:

- A fast nvidia card
(fast graphics)
- 4G of RAM per Eve client (well really 4G plus 2-3G per additional client)
(enough memory to run Eve plus a browser, voip, and still cache disk reads)
- An SSD hard drive
- A fast cpu (in this case fast is GHz not number of cores, you only need enough cores for 1+eve clients + other apps)


With linux you might want to consider changing a few things on the filesystem where Eve runs, but honestly Eve doesn't appear to be disk bound outside loading the grid...
- disable atime
- switch to data journaling to writeback instead of ordered
(Yes this is less safe)
- Set barrier=0
(even less safe)
- Set commit=20
(your data might not make it to disk for 20 seconds)
- Fire up hdparm and set the write caching on your disk on
(not very safe)

That said I run 2 clients with a 3 year old mid end desktop with 8G of memory, a modest sata drive and a 1.5 year old $150 nvidia card. With modest video settings Eve seems fine on Jita undock which is as close to NS conflict I'll ever get. Some times I even run Dwarf Fortress, and Chrome running chrome with 2 Eve Clients. I do run with data=writeback, no atime, and commit=20, but that's for Dwarf Fortress and other games that are occassionally disk bound....