Slowdown on big picture and some games - might be CPU

steamclosed questionreviewed

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#2759 · opened 2013-08-05 by strattonbrazil · updated 2017-08-30 · 2 comments · github

Sstrattonbrazil 2013-08-05 github

I've always had really poor performance on some games. Serious Sam takes minutes to load from launch. Bastion takes a long time even getting passed the splash screen (where it explains the saving symbol). I alt-tabbed out and see the game is taking 100% of the CPU, which seems crazy since it's just sitting there doing nothing. In DOTA 2, when I launch, there's a big slowdown showing the animated Valve logo. I've gotten into a mission once, but the framerate is in the 5's, I imagine. I even loaded Big Picture and seem the framerate is rather low during transitions like it's chugging along.

I decided to launch Portal and once I got into the game, I can play it at 1080p and it seems to have a pretty good framerate. Can anyone give me some idea what is causing my games to run so slowly when many others seem to be having so much success?

Processor Information:
Vendor: GenuineIntel
Speed: 2333 Mhz
2 logical processors
2 physical processors
HyperThreading: Unsupported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Unsupported
SSE41: Unsupported
SSE42: Unsupported

Network Information:
Network Speed:

Operating System Version:
Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 3.5.0-37-generic
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 11103000
X Window Manager: Compiz
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime-release-i386_2013-06-28

Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce 8800 GTS/PCIe/SSE2

Driver Version:  3.3.0 NVIDIA 310.14
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
VendorID:  0x10de
DeviceID:  0x193
Number of Monitors:  1
Number of Logical Video Cards:  1
Primary Display Resolution:  1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 23.62" x 13.39"  (27.13" diag)
                                        60.0cm x 34.0cm  (68.9cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 320 MB
Supported MSAA Modes:  2x 4x 8x 16x

Sound card:
Audio device: Realtek ALC889A

Memory:
RAM: 7985 Mb

Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
Microphone: Not set
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 296422 Mb
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 225950 Mb

Installed software:

Recent Failure Reports:

Ggdrewb-valve maintainer 2013-08-05 github

It's probably going to be difficult to diagnose your issue. Your CPU isn't great and that might be an issue but I would have guess it could run Big Picture. I would have said you have a video driver problem but the version info seems OK and running Portal properly means it must be working all right. Also, if you can run Portal properly I would have thought Big Picture would run OK. Hopefully other people here will have other ideas on what might be going on.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2017-08-30 github

Odds are this issue was related to the 320MB of VRAM which was available, as Big Picture mode is expected to need a bit more VRAM than the desktop client.

Closing as general video driver performance from 2013 is no longer relevant.

Nothing extracted yet.