[SOLVED] Wine and Silent Hill 2: irregular framerate

[VanFanel]

Hello there guys

I'm using Wine 1.1.35 on Gentoo (2.6.30-r5), with and Nvidia 9400 (binary nvidia drivers, version 185) and ALSA sound (no PA, etc).

The problem is that Silent Hill 2 seems to have a very irregular framerate: videos are jerky and realtime graphics framerate seems very irregular, not the expected constant 30FPS this game has.

I've tried updating Wine, as you can see, without any difference. Also tried different WINE modes (win98, xp, vista...) but no success.
I'm using a 60HZ video mode, of course.

I see no strange output message on the console, either.
It just seems to list the files that are being read, etc.

Any ideas of what's happening here? Is it a known behaviour?

regards

[Hyper_Eye]

I previously played this game in Wine with all options enabled with a wireless XBox 360 controller and it all worked great. With recent versions of Wine it is not working near as well. It completely crashes my desktop sometimes and it almost never exits correctly. I would recommend trying a version of Wine a few versions back for Silent Hill 2.
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[PaulBredbury]

To reduce stutter, try:

Turn off flipping: nvidia-settings -a AllowFlipping=0
I've also seen having flipping on make Quake 4 crash intermittently, weirdly - turning flipping off fixed the instability.

Use the BFS scheduler (the pf patchset is convenient for this), because BFS showed the default scheduler to be lousy.

[VanFanel]

@Hyper_eye: I tried 1.1.29 and it behaves the same. But thanks for the suggestion. Performance regressions aren't unheard on WINE anyway

@PaulBredbury: I'm using an nvidia driver prior to the version mentioned in nvnews. but I've tried disabling the page flipping anyway. It didn't make a difference tough. But I believe scheduler is involved: I've tried running

[PaulBredbury]

Wine runs more than 1 process. Run the game, then press Alt-Ctrl-F1 and run "ps ax" and see the processes. Be sure that you're "renice"-ing the correct game process.

You're still running a lousy scheduler, and playing with "nice" won't fix that - you'll just have a slight variation of lousy scheduler behaviour. What you should do, first, is fix your scheduler.

[VanFanel]

Well, I'm now on the 2.26.32-p4 ZEN-SOURCES kernel, with BFS active.
What are your recommendations now? I've tried renice-ing to -10 the sh2pc.exe process, the wineservice.exe process, etc...but all I get is sluttering sound...
regards

[PaulBredbury]

Run "winecfg" and try changing the audio settings, preferring straight ALSA rather than OSS (which would go through ALSA's emulation of OSS).

Wine's audio code is not perfect

Don't renice to a more extreme value than -4. IIRC, some kernel processes run at -10, and I don't see the point of interfering with them.

Investigate setting up a custom ~/.asoundrc which specifies a better pcm.default for your soundcard - google for your soundcard model.

[VanFanel]

I'm almost there, and learning a lot in the process, Paul. True Gentoo style
Well, I've made the game run on just one of the cores, with

[PaulBredbury]

I doubt it'll make a difference, but you could try e.g.:

taskset -p 0x2 $(pidof X)

To put xorg on the 2nd CPU.

[Hyper_Eye]

You have the 3d sound virtualization option disabled in the game right? That option made the game quite choppy for me. I was able to enable shadows, high res textures, noise effect (if you like this), complex fog, advanced filters, and lens flare. None of those options made a noticeable performance difference. The 3d virtualization option made the game quite choppy.
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[VanFanel]

@Hyper_eye & Paul, dear "brothers in Gentoo", I've the game running perfectly now: impecable framerate, perfect sound, and with every setting on: complex fog, shadows, noise effect, and hi-res textures.

and now for the stupid solution:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor
(this reported just one core! hmm....)

..so I compiled the kernel with ACPI suport, wich I had disabled time ago, and voilá, two cores recognized.
No need for nice, renice or schedtool: two cores and the GREAT BFS made it possible.

Extra info:

[Hyper_Eye]

I'm glad you got it working. Silent Hill 2 is one of my favorite Silent Hill games and the PC version looks really good with a high resolution. I recommend hooking in a gamepad as that makes the game play even better. I use a wireless XBox 360 controller (I have also used a wired one without issues.) Any good gamepad should do.
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