Steam Linux Games have slow FPS

Question

Any tips on improving FPS? It's rather sad that it's 2013 and I'm still getting fps down to 50 in HL1 mods (with my laptop[1]). I've been playing Day of Defeat for a few days and the low fps is pretty irritating. I don't know how many decades it takes to run a mod from the year 2000 perfectly. I'd like the fps to be constantly 100. The fps is slow for all the games I've tested. The issue exists for native and wine "emulated" Steam. I'm currently sticking with native Steam.
I'm using 1920x1080 resolution, but other than that all the couple of graphics options are set to low quality. I tried to use a lower resolution but the impact on fps was pretty miniscule. I tried to use the Nvidia card according to the Wiki's instructions with primusrun, but the fps didn't improve noticeably. VSync is off. I'm using the libraries bundled with Steam. My desktop environment is Lxde (which is apparently one of the lightest desktop environment's out there).
1. My laptop was bought in early 2012:
Intel® Mobile Core i5 2430M / 3MB L3 Cache, 2.40GHz - 3.00GHz
Memory: 8 GB - 2 x 4096 MB - DDR3 SDRAM, 1600 MHz
Graphics: nVIDIA® GeForce® GT555M 2GB
Hard drive: 120 GB SATA Solid State Drive
Last edited by nawitus (2013-08-15 18:49:45)

Answer 1

LyCC wrote:
nawitus wrote:1. My laptop was bought in early 2012:
Intel® Mobile Core i5 2430M / 3MB L3 Cache, 2.40GHz - 3.00GHz
Memory: 8 GB - 2 x 4096 MB - DDR3 SDRAM, 1600 MHz
Graphics: nVIDIA® GeForce® GT555M 2GB
Hard drive: 120 GB SATA Solid State Drive
this should rock ... i have a core2 with a GF9800GT, 4G ram and have stable 60fps at 1280x1024 (yes, net_graph shows that), everything full (with vsync of course, above 60fps, you just waste the power) in games like portal, counter-strike: source, etc., so both valve and source engines.
You can narrow down the issue with:
1. try without any sound
2. try a different window manager too (if possible something lightweight), to rule out a faulty setting.
3. i'm out of date with the new i5 CPUs, but acording to ark.intel.com the CPU has an integrated Intel® HD Graphics 3000, if so, are you sure you are running the games on the nvidia card and not on the integrated intel?) - you can make a simple test, use a software render setting in any valve (half-life 1) engine at 640x480 or 800x600, the cpu should run that fluently, and compare that to OpenGL setting inside the game.
I'm using LXDE which uses Openbox, that should be light enough. I'm sure that I'm using the Nvidia card, because the game doesn't start if I don't manually start bumblebee service (which incidentally is another unsolved bug). I might try disabling sound if I have the time..