A Company of Heroes 2 Linux Test Profile

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 29 August 2015 at 08:13 PM EDT. 14 Comments
LINUX GAMING
This week marked the launch of Company of Heroes 2 for Linux and this game is benchmark-friendly!

Back on Thursday's launch day I delivered some basic benchmark results using the in-game benchmark option while today I spent several hours working to get it fully-automated and into shape using the Phoronix Test Suite with an OpenBenchmarking.org test profile.

It's now up on OpenBenchmarking and via phoronix-test-suite benchmark coh2 will drive an automated benchmark of it with your range of visual quality settings plus resolution. It's here on the OpenBenchmarking.org site. However, there's some caveats. First, you'll want to be running the Phoronix Test Suite GitHub code otherwise you might run into a result parser issue / indication that the test failed to run properly when in fact it did. The second caveat is still being explored and it's an issue with the command-line-driven benchmarking results being significantly different than when running the game via the in-game performance/stress test mode.


The performance testing from the CLI is driven via passing the "-perftest pts.csv -autotest performance_test.lua" arguments to the CompanyOfHeroes2 binary. However, the frame-rate results as a result of using this benchmark end up being sharply lower than even the frame-rates reported from the in-game stress test of the same workload. This is when confirming the same settings are used for both benchmark modes as their CSV result dump also indicates all relevant settings. So right now I'm a bit stumped why the CLI-driven benchmark is much slower than running this same test from the in-game menu, but hopefully Feral Interactive or others will be able to shed some light on the situation. Feel free to try it for yourself with the Phoronix Test Suite.

Here's the raw test profile. Another issue that I overcame but ended up making this test profile development take a lot longer was figuring out the settings handling of the game on Linux. All settings are stored within configuration_system.lua on Windows. Under Linux, changing the in-game settings does update the values in that Lua file, but it appears they're not read from there... After coming to that realization, there's a redundant preferences XML-based file in a different directory for the game on Linux and that's where the settings are redundantly read from on Linux before then being written to the Lua system configuration file.

Anyhow, if the difference in performance between the in-game performance testing and the CLI-driven scenarion can be figured out, I'll certainly be running many Company of Heroes 2 Linux benchmarks on Phoronix with different GPUs/drivers in the days ahead. When run via the command-line right now, while the CSV output does indicate the settings are applied, there's also almost no performance difference between the minimum and maximum visual quality settings as part of this perplexing problem besides being lower than when running the same configuration from within the game's menu.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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