I have recently installed a 64-bit Debian Sid on my Athlon64 machine and I have started to experience strange problems with Nexuiz (installed from apt).

More details:
Nexuiz v2.3-3
ATI fglrx drivers installed

When playing, the game runs smooth and clean if no bots are present; if one comes into view, the frame rate drops abruptly to 3-4 FPS and sound becomes intermittent; if the bot moves away, everything runs fine again. I have checked that no other programs are using the sound card. I would like to disable sound in Nexuiz, to help pinpoint the problem, but I don't know how to.

I did not have this problem on the 32-bit version. Any advice?

Davide

Could be caused by two things:

- ATI fglrx driver is known to be problematic, so maybe its 64bit version of the libGL makes trouble
- you may experience memory usage problems and the computer may be swapping. Note that 64bit software usually takes up more RAM than the 32bit counterpart because of data size and alignment. How much RAM do you have? You should have at least 512 MB to use a 64bit system. If you just have 256 MB, that will be it.

I have 1 GB, but I checked anyway with top and I found out that I had only 10 MB free memory; swap was actually almost completely free too (some 100 kB allocated), so I am not sure if this is the issue here. When I stopped Nexuiz the used memory went down only to 800 Mb; however, KInfoCenter shows that only 33%of the physical memory is used for application data (a conservative estimate, since now I am running a bunch of other apps, while I close everything when playing Nexuiz), while some 52% is disk cache.

Then you were not out of memory... and I now just suspect the ATI driver.

just for comparison's sake, I don't get the bug and my linux partition is using 64 bit.

My rig's info can be found here: http://www.psychdesigns.net/psych/node/13

I don't get that bug either, but I have an nvidia.

[TSA] Psychiccyberfreak wrote:My rig's info can be found here: http://www.psychdesigns.net/psych/node/13

[ot]I wonder why none of those US guys use resonable video adapters - an E6600 gettin bored with a lame 7600GS - on 1400 res[/ot]

Urmel wrote:

[TSA] Psychiccyberfreak wrote:My rig's info can be found here: http://www.psychdesigns.net/psych/node/13

[ot]I wonder why none of those US guys use resonable video adapters - an E6600 gettin bored with a lame 7600GS - on 1400 res[/ot]

well I use my computer for more then just gaming... like... I run apache with php and python... and sometimes I compile stuff... like... compiz fusion... and maps...

It looks like it is probably the driver's fault. I managed to get rid of the problem by setting "Vertex Buffer Objects" to "off", as mentioned also in the Nexuiz FAQ. Sorry for wasting your time.

If the 32 bit version of the driver works, and ATI's 64 bit versions come with 32 bit compatibility libraries, then you might simply try running the 32 bit nexuiz on your 64 bit machine.

If you have 32 bit libs for X, GLX/SDL, that is, otherwise you can get them, i think that most linux distributions have 32 bit compatibility packages, gentoo has at least ^^