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ValveSoftware / SteamOS

SteamOS community tracker
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Big picture hurting performance #82

Open paulonarciso opened 10 years ago

paulonarciso commented 10 years ago

Steamos big picture have serious performance issues with Left4Dead 2. After the intro on the first level, performance drops to single digits and stay stuck there, and no matter what I do it's stuck there. I now that it's big picture related because I have ubuntu running on another partition and big picture have the same behavior. Running in desktop mode doesn't have any issues. I´ve seen this behavior in at least two more games, Serious Sam 3 and Metro Last Light. Sometimes in Metro Last Light the performance tanks after the intro, in the menu selection. In Serious Sam 3 it happens randomly in the middle of the game. I'm running a Gtx680 with a 4770k.

Edit: After further testing I came to the conclusion that the performance issues have one cause: Incompatibility between Steam big picture and a compositor running behind it. I've reached this conclusion by installing openbox in my ubuntu install, booting from an openbox session (which doesn have any compositor), running Steam big picture and running Left4Dead 2. Everythinh is fine now. Ubuntu is using compiz so it's not a specific problem with Steam compositor, but an incompatibility between compositors and big picture. I've tried to run SteamOS with compositor disabled, but surprisingly I loose the ability to navigate the menus through my keyboard (mouse works), but when I enter a game none inputs work (mouse and keyboard). From my experience running Steam Bigpicture without any compositor give the best performance and no problems. So ditch the compositor, there's no need for it.

Toetje583 commented 10 years ago

Confirmed, removing the compositor and disabling Big Picture mode fixed issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/70 But again only when i disabled bigpicture + the compositor.

tested with Natural Selection 2

paulonarciso commented 10 years ago

Compositor are the number one enemy in linux gaming, so I won't understand why using it in a gaming os. It's better to use a light windows manager like openbox which will provide much better performance. Openbox session in ubuntu running big picture doesn't have any performance issues. The compositor is clearly the issue.

paulonarciso commented 10 years ago

The -u option doesn' t fix the abysmal performance drops in the mentioned games, but the ones that work fine it increase performance. In games that use unity3d engine like rochard, shadowrun, etc. Vsync doesn' t work unless steamcompgr is used to force vsync or the compositor is completely disabled. Running with -u produces tearing on those games, because the engine makes the stupid decision to disable vsync when it detects a compositor running.

PaulDixon commented 10 years ago

I can concur that performance is crappy with big picture mode as an interface over the standard layout.