Heroes of Newerth performance

[curaga]

I know this is the blob area, but what kind of fps do you get with the open driver? Is it actually better in HoN now?

[Schmaker]

I dont have OSS drivers, so i cant really tell (they didnt worked well for me). Anyways, for S2Games there were already a tons of threads regarding bad fglrx performance with HoN in their forums, but it works well with nVidia, so they answered its issue of poor ATi Linux drivers. So im trying the second end of the line.

[Tares]

125fps on start, ~60fps durning normal game and ~10 around big teamfights. C2D 3,15GHz, GTX275.

[Naib]

ATi blobs are nasty unfortunately - they have vastly improved but still have issues

A couple of things you can try

#1

cat /proc/mtrr 
reg00: base=0x000000000 (    0MB), size= 2048MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x080000000 ( 2048MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size=  512MB, count=1: write-back
reg03: base=0x100000000 ( 4096MB), size= 4096MB, count=1: write-back
reg04: base=0x200000000 ( 8192MB), size=  512MB, count=1: write-back

Generally you shouldn't have any un-cachable entries.

#2

newx() { DISPLAY=:1.0; xinit $* -- :1; }; newx /opt/HoN/hon.sh

and redo those ingame tests

#3 disable the composite xorg extension

[bongmaster2]

20-30 fps in laning tutorial. all effects and maximum settings at fullhd with hd4850.
i can easily reach 60 fps by deactivating some extra effects like post processing etc.

running opensource driver. use oibaf ppa and at least 2.8 or better 3.0 kernel from mainline paa.
disable swapbufferswait and enable colortiling.

if u dont need opengl 4, compute, minimum power consumption or ultra fast performance use oss driver.
they are at 50- 90% performance of catalys. with hon its more at 80% i guess.

[xpander]

60 fps most of the time
some big action drops to 30 or so
all max graphics except shadows.

1280x960 windowed

amd 6000+ 3ghz, 6gig ddr2 800mhz, ati 5770 (fglrx 11.5-11.8), Linux Mint 11, compiz on

no probelems noticed with performance

[tball]

So this is what I do to get good fps in HoN with my 4650.

I am running Ubuntu 11.04, but it should generalise well.

1. You have to deactivate vsync completely through amdcccle. (3D -> more settings -> set vsync = performance)

2. You will get a fps boost if you make compiz/kwin to use "undirect rendering when fullscreen" or even better, deactivate compositing.

Thats it. I get good fps with highest settings.

[Schmaker]

New Xserver thingy was one of first ideas i've tried .. composite suspend as well. Im not using OGL composition at all, i use Xrender (and disable it on demand while gaming). Vertical sync and tearfree is disabled, still - framerate suck. If you guys say it works on HD5xxx, couldnt it be just R700 (and older?) issue?
Can you guys try to change effects to see how big is impact on framerate (if any)? In my case framerate changes from low to high is like 10 FPS (if there is any change at all).
Its interesting as lot of people reported same behavior on HoN forums but here it seems to be otherwise. Any more ideas what could be wrong?

[allquixotic]

New Xserver thingy was one of first ideas i've tried .. composite suspend as well. Im not using OGL composition at all, i use Xrender (and disable it on demand while gaming). Vertical sync and tearfree is disabled, still - framerate suck. If you guys say it works on HD5xxx, couldnt it be just R700 (and older?) issue?
Can you guys try to change effects to see how big is impact on framerate (if any)? In my case framerate changes from low to high is like 10 FPS (if there is any change at all).
Its interesting as lot of people reported same behavior on HoN forums but here it seems to be otherwise. Any more ideas what could be wrong?

How about: you have obsolete hardware?

Seriously, come on. If you're a real gamer, you should at least have a Core 2 system, if not a Nehalem. 2 gigs of RAM is obsolete these days. It's time to upgrade.

Unfortunately, GPU drivers need a lot of system memory bandwidth, and a game like HoN also eats a lot of CPU. Your graphics card should be sufficient to get good FPS, but your core system paths (FSB, RAM, CPU) are going to be ass slow on a dual-core Pentium 4. You're probably still using DDR2, aren't you?

I can get solid 60 FPS in HoN with Catalyst, with tear-free and VSync enabled and all settings maxed out, no problem at all. And I don't even have a crazy high-end system with a $1000 CPU and 32GB of RAM. No, I just have a merely average gaming machine: Core i7 920, 6GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz, and a Radeon HD5970. The GPU is a bit of overkill, but only one of the GPUs gets used on Linux anyway, so think of it as a HD5850 (the cores are clocked at the same speed as a 5850).

The reason I can get that FPS is that I have the bus bandwidth and memory bandwidth to move huge amounts of data. The game demands no less.

And don't go saying that the system requirements for HoN says this and that. The system requirements are what you need to start the program without crashing. They imply nothing about getting performance that is actually enjoyable. These days, system requirements are almost always lowballed to the point that, if you have a system that's at the Recommended level, you will get about 10 FPS. For the requirements that most game developers list, you have to significantly exceed the Recommended requirements to get smooth (consistent 30+ fps) gameplay.

That said, I have noticed that I can get smoother (but not necessarily higher) FPS with an up-to-date r600g than Catalyst. YMMV. On the flip side, the top-end framerate you can reach with Catalyst is much higher than r600g, because there are some bottlenecks in the open source graphics stack. If you have fast, recent hardware, you can easily top 100 fps with Catalyst and VSync off -- not true with r600g.

[curaga]

Unfortunately, GPU drivers need a lot of system memory bandwidth, and a game like HoN also eats a lot of CPU. Your graphics card should be sufficient to get good FPS, but your core system paths (FSB, RAM, CPU) are going to be ass slow on a dual-core Pentium 4. You're probably still using DDR2, aren't you?

FYI, the e2180 is an Allendale (a Core 2 with less L2 cache), not a P4.