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Steam - Windows Linux - i3 Window Manager Poor Performance

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SylvesterInk

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Parasoul Squigly
When running Skullgirls through the i3 window manager, I'm getting low framerates and stuttering. It looks like the game is using up a large amount of CPU, which is probably the cause of the issue.
I know Skullgirls works fine on my system, as I've run it through the XFCE and Fluxbox window managers. I have also been able to run several other games of various types (from Dota and CSGO to Shovelknight and Guacamelee) smoothly in i3, so I'm fairly certain the issue is specific to Skullgirls.

i3 is a tiling window manager, meaning it arranges and sizes the windows in a non-overlapping manner. I wonder if this window resizing/movement is contributing to the high cpu load, even when running the game windowed. (I've even set i3 so the game is in a floating window, unaffected by resizing, with no success.)

How would I go about diagnosing the issue?
 
Does the game think it's in borderless fullscreen? And what resolution did you set the game to? What are your specs?

I have an AMD APU on my Ubuntu desktop, and it performs smoothly in windowed mode or true fullscreen. Although my laptop running Intel stuff can only handle the game at 1280x720 instead of the full resolution of the screen. (Which is odd since that isn't much bigger than 1366x768.) I get stuttering like you described if the resolution is slightly too big.
 
I've tried windowed, fullscreen, and borderless fullscreen. It looks like the game starts windowed (which is standard no matter where I run it) but then instead of transitioning to fullscreen, it runs windowed. When I force i3 to run the game as a floating window, it will run fullscreen, but still have performance issues. The game is set to run at 1920x1200.

I'm running on a AMD Phenom II 955 BE, 6GB RAM, AMD R9 Fury videocard. My Linux distro is Slackware 14.2, which is equivalent to Ubuntu 16.04 (with some slightly newer packages).

Remember, Skullgirls works perfectly fine on most desktop environments I've tried (XFCE and Fluxbox), where performance is beautiful and smooth. This issue is specific to i3.
I'll try at a lower resolution, as you suggest, and see if that indicates a cause.
 
It's good to know the issue has nothing to do with borderless fullscreen. A few people were having performance issues with it a while back. (It might be fixed now? I'm not sure.)

AMD R9 Fury should be a fair step above the Radeon R7 APU I have! The max I've played Skullgirls at was 1920x1080 on the TV in the living room. (It and Ubuntu looked gorgeous on that screen too.) Very rarely did the frame-rate dip in 3D mode; a few stages were more prone to dips than the rest.

It couldn't hurt to test out various stages and see if certain ones cause performance problems at your 1920x1200 resolution. Normally, I keep the game at 1280x720 for steady performance when my PC's at the desk. (I would go higher, but my flat-panel monitor is as tall as it is wide.)
 
Nope, lower resolution didn't help. And it's not poor performance when playing, it's evident right from the start, as soon as the opening cinematic begins. (The falling leaf is choppy, rather than smoothly floating down.)
I suspect it's an issue related to resizing, or how the window is rendered, but I don't know how to debug further from there. If I enable the log, is there anything I should look for?
 
So the lag is seen across the board? Ouch.

I wouldn't know if there is something specific to look for in the log, but down-scaling anything takes more CPU or GPU time, from what I understand. Have you tried making a floating window the same size as or similar to one of the native resolutions in the game?
 
Sorry for the late response. Busy week at work.
I have tried making the floating window so that the size is unaffected by i3, but it still lags. I'm thinking that if it were a scaling issue, that should leave it unaffected. I'm not sure if it's a draw issue, or if maybe Skullgirls expects a specific set of window parameters that i3 doesn't provide.
 
What windows do you typically have open while running the game, in that case? Since I'm a Linux person myself, I sometimes have 15 open programs scattered across my virtual desktops.

This becomes a problem when playing games, though. When I left Krita, a painting program, open while playing Skullgirls once, it stuttered pretty bad until I closed Krita. Web browsers can hog CPU time in the background as well, even if they're left on a blank tab.

Nowadays I pretty much close everything but Discord, Rhythmbox, and a word processor while playing games on Steam. Sometimes I close LibreOffice too just to be on the safe side.
 
I've tried it running nothing but steam and a terminal. I ran boatloads of stuff in XFCE (browser, youtube, hd movie, another game) and it still ran fine. Again, I'm fairly certain it's an interaction of some sort with i3. I'm trying to go through other games to find any that have a similar issue, so that I can compare them, and maybe find if this is an i3 specific issue, or if it's something else that I can work around.
 
Yeah, this is starting to look less and less like an issue on Skullgirls' end. Does i3 have a mailing list or a web forum you could ask for help on finding a workaround? I spotted a Reddit that might be relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/
 
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