TF2 - Performance problems with the latest 2 Steam updates

steamclosed MOVED: Team Fortress 2reviewed

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#1137 · opened 2013-02-01 by ghost · updated 2013-02-06 · 7 comments · github

?ghost 2013-02-01 github

Up until the 2 latest Steam updates, TF2 worked great for me. I got 150-200 fps all the time.

After updating Steam yesterday (and breaking it. The second update fixed it), TF2 slowed down to a crawl. My FPS now fluctuate between 15 and max 40 fps.

Since TF2 was not updated, I guess it is a problem with Steam itself.

I tried different window managers (Awesome, Openbox, i3, herbstluftwm and fluxbox).
I did not update my system.

OS: Arch Linux x86_64

Processor Information:
Vendor: AuthenticAMD
Speed: 3200 Mhz
4 logical processors
4 physical processors
HyperThreading: Unsupported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Supported
SSE41: Unsupported
SSE42: Unsupported

Network Information:
Network Speed:

Operating System Version:
"Arch Linux" (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 3.7.5-1-ARCH
X Server vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server release: 11302000

Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GTX 560/PCIe/SSE2

Driver Version:  4.3.0 NVIDIA 313.18
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
VendorID:  0x10de
DeviceID:  0x1201
Number of Monitors:  1
Number of Logical Video Cards:  1
Primary Display Resolution:  1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 18.78" x 10.55"  (21.54" diag)
                                        47.7cm x 26.8cm  (54.7cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 1024 MB
Supported MSAA Modes:  2x 4x 8x 16x

Sound card:
Audio device: Nvidia GPU 16 HDMI/DP

Memory:
RAM: 5970 Mb

Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
Microphone: Not set
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 704177 Mb
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 638955 Mb

Installed software:

Mmikesart 2013-02-01 github

Can you disable the steam overlay and see if that helps the framerate? Thanks.

?ghost 2013-02-02 github

Sadly it does not make a difference. Still the same FPS problems.

Is there additional data you need? Like the console output?

?ghost 2013-02-02 github

After testing around I came to the conclusion:

Every time the game tries to display a motd the FPS go down to 5-20. After deactivating/activating HTML motds in the options menu the FPS jump to the 150-200 I am used to.

EDIT: It happens every time the game tries to load something. Even if I attack people while having hitsounds enabled or if I have custom huds installed. I don't think that my hard disk is the bottleneck.

hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb1 output:
Timing cached reads: 7666 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3834.73 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 232 MB in 3.02 seconds = 76.74 MB/sec

Also it worked fine until Steam runtime was introduced.

EDIT2:
I installed iotop and let it run in the background and yes: Every time the slowdowns happen, Steam loads a file at very low speed (200kb/s-2 MB/s) or hl2_linux writes a file.

EDIT3:
I managed to capture a screenshot while one of the slowdowns happened:
http://i.imgur.com/gLxDta9.jpg

Sscottlu 2013-02-02 github

Try this: exit Steam, open a terminal window, and start steam like this:

STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam

This turns off the runtime. Do you see the speed decrease then?

Thanks.

Sslouken 2013-02-02 github

Also, can you tell what file is being read/written when the slowdown happens?

?ghost 2013-02-03 github

After wiping my hard disks and reinstalling everything from scratch, the game works fine. Sorry for wasting your time. I am going to close this.

?ghost 2013-02-06 github

I guess they are not gone after all.
Now I got the same problem in CS:S: Every time the game loads something, it stops for around 2 seconds or the FPS are reduced to 20-30. I tried different hard drives and no difference. Overheating is out of the question as well.
I disabled every service but the necessary ones and the games still have the same problem.

I tried to disable multicore rendering but the performance is reduced even further.

Is there a tool I can use to monitor for file reads/writes?

EDIT:
@mikesart same problem with or without STEAM_RUNTIME. I tried it before the current update.

EDIT2:
In the end, it was a simple problem: CPU was stuck at 800 mhz. Setting the CPU governor to performance solved the problem for good. I don't know why it stopped working before.

Nothing extracted yet.