etqw-demo huge slowdown from decals?

[mrplow]

I installed the phoronix test suite and I love it. Such a great idea and its implemented very well. I set it to test the universe suite last night and woke it up it still running. I was stuck in etqw-demo and it seemed to be going through the demo fine. However I noticed that there was huge massive slowdowns when there were what I can only assume are decals on the screen (rocket hit on the side of the building). (The decals were all black squares with the detail in the middle, like the alpha blending isn't working.) So slow to the point where it was 1 fp/30sec. I tried to force quit etqw through ttl6 with htop but I ended up just killing my xsession with ctrl-alt-backspace. I reran just the etqw-demo benchmark and first noticed the slowdown he jumped off the motorcycle and went up the hill, then a large black square emerged in the sky which slowed it down completely and eventually the black square looked like it was suppose to be a lens flare from a shot perhaps? I killed my xsession again and returned to the desktop. I couldn't find any similar problems on any etqw forums however.

My question is how to I run the demo without running the timedemo to see if I can find any terminal output?

9600xt with ati propriety 8.5 drivers on Ubuntu 8.04 32bit.

[mrplow]

reverting to 8.3 drivers didn't help

[Dandel]

mind saying what screen resolution your trying to play this game with, and also did you also try the 8.4 driver? ( the 9600xt should be played at 800x600 or 640x480 for the best results on linux)

[mrplow]

640x480, haven't tried 8.4 its getting late, I'll try it tomorrow after work

[mrplow]

it turns out it was 800x600, 8.4 drivers don't help either

[Dandel]

have you tried changing the detail settings in game yet? ( try the lowest possible settings disabling most of the graphical goodies.)

[damentz]

I have a radeon 9600xt 256mb too and the game _would_ run pretty well, but I have a serious CPU bottleneck on that game, so it's unplayable for me.

Though, I never experienced the glitched rendering of decals, not sure what would cause that.

[mrplow]

Hmm, found out that if I disabled soft particles the explosions rendered properly. Gotta do more research.

[mrplow]

according to this page http://qwtracker.com/faq/help/readme.html soft particles don't work on ati cards and the option should be grayed out? its not but if I enable it it kills the speed and rendering is messed up

[bridgman]

That page was last updated just before we released our new OpenGL driver on Linux. Wondering if that might explain why the soft particles option is not greyed out...