strange graphical performance

[4rson]

I am interested to know if anyone else gets this, or if it is just an oddity of my system.

I run RedEclipse on SUSE linux with the Nvidia binary graphics driver and a NVS series mobile GFX card.

If I run the game with shaders turned on and playing online I get severe and uneven framerate drop after the start of the second game that I play. Turning off and on the shaders or enabling and disabling vsync make things go back to normal so I assume changing those options resets something in the game that has become corrupted. I don't see this behaviour when playing offline or with shaders disabled.

EDIT: After further tests, it seems that it also occurs when playing offline, but not if I keep starting a new game on the same map.

[Ulukai]

The amount of video RAM might be your problem. I believe that all textures are loaded into memory when changing maps, but the memory don't get freed when loading the following map. The additional textures and models are just loaded next to the data of the first map. Not quite sure however, so I might be wrong about this. And I don't know at all whether shaders affect your memory consumption a lot or not.

[4rson]

I have an NVS4200m with 1GB RAM. It's not huge, but it seems unlikely to fill up that quickly. However, the way it doesn't happen if the same map is reloaded does seem to suggest something like that.

[qreeves]

The amount of video RAM might be your problem. I believe that all textures are loaded into memory when changing maps, but the memory don't get freed when loading the following map. The additional textures and models are just loaded next to the data of the first map. Not quite sure however, so I might be wrong about this. And I don't know at all whether shaders affect your memory consumption a lot or not.

This is correct, Cube doesn't have garbage collection.

[eihrul]

I am not sure if this is your problem or not, but at least using the proprietary NV drivers on Linux, I notice they are rather touchy about their performance/power throttling. After only a few minutes of playing they drastically throttle down the GPU, which halves framerate, or worse.

A workaround for this is to go into nvidia-settings and look at the PowerMizer settings. Make sure they're not set to adaptive or what-not, just maximum performance or whatever the equivalent is. The problem is the throttle, so the goal is to just turn that mean old throttle off. Mind you, this may cause your GPU to run a bit hotter during play, so also turning on something like VSync in-game or in the nvidia-settings app will help to compensate by giving your GPU some cool-down time between rendering frames, and as an added bonus, reduce screen tearing.

Also if you're using a laptop, make sure your laptop is adequately propped up on something like a laptop cooling platform, or, in my case, just 4 bottlecaps from some soda bottles, so that it gets adequate ventilation underneath and doesn't just trap heat in like a furnace. If using a desktop, getting one of those external GPU coolers than plug into a PCI slots next to the GPU is also a good idea.