On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 17:37 -0600, Evil wrote:
Hi all,
I was just playing around with the Video Stress Test in CounterStrike: Source, and noted a lot of odd stuttering. The demo would run for about 15 seconds at 13fps, then completely freeze up for about 15 seconds. Then, it would start running again... only to freeze/unfreeze every 15 seconds or so.
Is this sound stuttering you're talking about? If so, I've been noticing it too since about 2 months ago. I think it has to do with DirectSound. If you run Steam in a terminal with debug messages turned off, you'll probably see a message that says something like this (taken from memory here):
"This soundcard's driver does not support direct access. The (slower) DirectSound HEL mode will be used instead."
Just for fun, I reniced all the wine processes down to +15. The result: the demo runs completely smooth (well, at 13fps... but that's on account of my low system specs) from start to finish.
Cool tip. Never thought of it. I'll try that. Thanks! :)
I did some searching and noticed a similar report last year: http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2004/08/0306.html
Yep, similar symptoms rear their heads from time to time with HL2 and related games (including CS:S) There's bug 3665 that deals with something a lot like what you're describing, with the HL2 intro video: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3665
I wasn't having this problem last year, but I've updated so many things in the last month (like moving from KDE3.4 to KDE3.5, and updating WINE from CVS), so I'm afraid I can't pinpoint the exact cause right now.
Does anyone know of another, more permanent, workaround rather than re-nicing after starting WINE? Is there anything I can do/test that might help the developers if this is a real threading issue?
You might want to try and get some traces (+dsound would probably be a good start; I suppose someone more experienced could give some others to try)
Regards, James
-J
AMD AthlonXP 2000+ ATI 9600XT w/128MB 1GB System RAM Mandriva 2006.0, updated to KDE3.5