AA kills fps with the r300 OSS driver

bobbens · Post by **bobbens** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 4:24 pm

I've recently decided to try SVN to see if it fixes the upgrades and missions and adds more new content to the ancient debian SID version. So I load up SVN and am pleased to find that the landing mouse and such is not nearly as choppy as before. Also there are many new and improved upgrades and such. I am quite impressed. Then comes the moment to take off, I'm getting more or less the same FPS ( ~12 ) so I grab a mission and head off to the jump gate. When I get near I start to see the FPS drop until it finally croaks rolls over and dies forcing me to exit out of the game. Looking at the logs I find the culprit:

*********************************WARN_ONCE*********************************
File r300_render.c function r300Fallback line 428
Software fallback:ctx->Line.SmoothFlag
***************************************************************************

So I try tweaking the settings to low (usually I play on medium) and find that the bug still exists. So now I'm digging through the config file and trying to find a way of disabling the smoothing being done. Is there any option I missed or would I have to try and hack the code (or wait for someone else to do it for me

)?

I remember seeing something about ATI problems with vegastrike somewhere else.

Just in case, system specs:

debian sid
amd athlon 2600+
512 MB ram
ATI Radeon 9600 using r300 OSS driver (from sid repos)

pheldens · Post by **pheldens** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 2:34 pm

r300 DRI is pretty good here (X700)

I use the highest detail settings @ 1024x768 with one adjustment

In section geforce3 of vegastrike.config
(GeForce3 is the highest detail template name, adjust the template you are using):

<var name="smooth_lines" value="false"/>

------

and
> cat ~/.drirc
<driconf>
<device screen="0" driver="r300">
<application name="Default">
<option name="disable_lowimpact_fallback" value="true" />
</application>
</device>
</driconf>

SVN has been running quite smooth and with spectaculair detail.

bobbens · Post by **bobbens** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 4:04 pm

The issue was actually that the r300 driver uses a software fallback for antialiasing since it can't actually handle it atm. The solution was to install driconf to configure it and disable the fallback so I don't get AA at alll. It speeds it up alot and fixes the issue with all apps that use antialiased primitives.

EDIT: i see you posted the .driconf at the end, sorry, looked like a gigantic signature

pheldens · Post by **pheldens** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 7:12 pm

bobbens wrote: EDIT: i see you posted the .driconf at the end, sorry, looked like a gigantic signature

hehe, got any other tips?

it runs pretty good here from 10 - 50 fps, real dogfighting may get problematic, but it's good enough for trade missions and exploration.

do you also experience hickups when the music loads?

bobbens · Post by **bobbens** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 10:13 am

pheldens wrote: hehe, got any other tips?

it runs pretty good here from 10 - 50 fps, real dogfighting may get problematic, but it's good enough for trade missions and exploration.

do you also experience hickups when the music loads?

Not really, i get around 40 fps i think it was with my radeon x550 and experience no hiccups that i know of because the entire jumping (activate a jump and it'll lag really bad so all I hear is the noise and *BAM* in another system).

I find the game to be very playable with the frames i'm getting, and I'm playing with pretty high settings at 1280x1024. When the radeonhd driver is flawless I'll switch to an r5xx based card and they it'll all work.