CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hey everyone. I am having issues with my CrossOver installation of Steam and Source games such as Team Fortress 2, Black Mesa, and Half-Life 2. The game will get a good framerate (>60 or whatever is playable for me, I don't care) but every five minutes or so of gameplay, the whole game will stutter for a whole 10-15 seconds making the game unplayable until it stops itself and returns to a playable state.

Here are my specs:
OS: Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.10Ghz (4 CPUs) ~3.1Ghz
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 (4GB VRAM)
Memory: 8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM

Here's the output of "glxinfo | grep OpenGL" if it helps.

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GTX 560/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 295.40
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.20 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
OpenGL extensions:

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
-Andrew

I wonder if upgrading your driver would help. I have the Nvidia 304.60 driver on my Arch box, and it is pretty stable. I believe the ppa is for the recent Nvidia driver is here.

Of course, since I haven't used Ubuntu in a while, I don't really know that a more recent driver will help you. But, you have to consider that even on Windows, a fresh driver for gaming is best, so I have to believe that it might also be better with Linux. The fact that you have a framerate problems also tells me a new driver might help.

Alright, I updated my drivers (I had a feeling that 295.40 wasn't the latest driver version). I'm getting even better performance but the gameplay's occasional stuttering seizure still happens just as often.

First, have you tried the Vsync option like stated here. Maybe that would stabilize your game?

Anyway, something just came to mind. When I first start HL2, the sound stutters and the graphics / interface stutters along with it. Once the sound clears up, everything else is smooth, and the problem doesn't come back in my case. The problem is absent with TF2.

Since you get better performance with the new driver, but the problem persists, I wonder if the following investigation wouldn't lie with the "sound" side of things. At this point, I never investigated the stuttering, since it was only for a few seconds at the beginning and never really interfered with the gameplay. So I guess I'll run HL2 tonight to see if I can find the origin of the problem. I don't know if I'll find anything as the problem doesn't last long on my system, and my skills might be insufficient. If I find anything, I'll post back here.

Yeah, come to think of it, I've been running it in windowed mode all this time, so maybe turning full screen on and then V-sync will work just fine. I'll post an update stating whether it works or not.

Yeah it's still doing the same thing.

I was looking on the winehq for clues and I found this following text:

Half-Life 2: Episode One - Reactor room slowdown bug workaround
In case the game experience a huge slowdown to around 0.5 FPS, most probably you had hit so-called "some other (close) place displayed on the screen" bug. First time you may hit it is in the reactor room just before raiding down on a lift to the core chamber. There would a big screen displaying various parts of the reactor core room. This screen is the bug-trigger.

It was reported that the bug occurs only in case the "Offscreen Render Mode" is set to "backbuffer". To workaround the bug simply set ORM to "fbo" (or "pbuffer", if your GPU supports it) and the FPS will raise back to a playable values.

Keep in mind that setting ORM to anything other than "backbuffer" will break the game shaders dealing with refraction (water and alike) when the AA is on. Another unfortunate effect of setting ORM to "fbo" is that the performance level when using dxlevel 90/95 in Non-HDR mode will be very low, especially in areas where there are a lot of refracting surfaces. For now it seems that the best choice would be to turn off AA, set ORM to "fbo" and switch the game to the dxlevel 81 before entering the bug-triggering area. After successfully passing it redone the changes back to gain more FPS or better quality graphics.