On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Jordà Polo wrote:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:24:07AM +0200, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
All those 3D apps are very slow. However they do not slow the system that
much down as to no more being stoppable. I f.ex. enjoy playing crack-attack
with minimum detail. Neverball starts and crawls along in the menu screen
(showing some 3D rendered scenes in the background) and can be killed.
However neverputt doesn't do anything visible other than emiting those
"sporadic" notes and slows the system down to a near freeze...
$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting
LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
The system shouldn't slow down like that, but it is also true that you are
supposed to play the game with a 3D-capable card/driver. Will you be able to
play the game even if there is no freeze? I doubt it, so I'm not sure if
there is something to fix here, or if it is worth it.
Anyway, I tried to reproduce your problem on a slow machine without direct
rendering (it was an ati card though). It "worked": it was _really_ slow, I
couldn't play at all, but I could see the menu and didn't notice a freeze of
the system.
Umm well. As I said, when I just start neverputt, apart from playing the
sound it does not seem to do anything *at all* as it's showing the menu
selection. Nonetheless it accomplishes to successfully "stop" the system.
That could go under "when executing makes the system unusable".
Of course it's a performance issue: someone has managed to implement a
loop that polls like a demented berzerk.
With the information provided so far, this looks more like a
hardware/driver/configuration problem to me.
In a way you might be right, most 3D games seem to boost CPU consumption
to 100% even if they're idling. However neverball is the worst I've seen
so far - were the system even a little less responsive, I would have had
to powercycle the PC, nevermind any unsaved work.
So the question for me would be: is neverball polling insanely? Or is
it below neverball? Or is it both? If it's below neverball and neverball
just somehow manages to trigger the insanity in a specially pathologic
way, then who is consuming 100% CPU? Is it X? The nv driver? The opengl SW
driver?
*t
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Tomas Pospisek
http://sourcepole.com - Linux & Open Source Solutions
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