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[sipior]

Greetings, all.

I run Starsector (0.95a-RC15, although the issue that plagues me has been a problem for at least a year) under Arch Linux on a Radeon RX5700, with version 21.0.0 of the X.org amdgpu driver. Window manager is i3, although the issue persists in Gnome 3/4, and appears independent of any compositor that might be running. I've also experimented with windowed versus fullscreen, various display resolutions, &cet.

The issue, in short, is a substantial slowdown (~60fps -> ~8fps) observed only when the "terminal static" effect is in evidence. This can be seen most simply when selecting the "Missions" tab from the main menu, and selecting individual missions therein. The slowdown ends immediately once the static effect dissipates. Outside of this effect, the game runs perfectly smoothly; a consistent 60+ fps. Even large fights are no trouble at all.

I don't see the same behaviour under Windows 10 with the same hardware, also with the latest drivers.

Is there a way to disable this effect? Has anyone else seen this issue on their own machines?

Many thanks for your time.

[pairedeciseaux]

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17640.0

Hardware, OS and symptom looks the same. So the workaround might also work for you.

Otherwise: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=19328.0 (and other related posts in the Bug Reports section of the forum)

[sipior]

Sincere thanks for the very informative pointer; whilst the UI fade speed doesn't fix the problem in the Missions tab, it seems to mitigate the issue everywhere else. Much obliged!

[kosshi]

I suffer from this same trasition noise issue, but I have a few other linux-specific problems I've not seen reported on these forums.

One of the remnant fighters/bombers drops my FPS to around 5 when just a few are visible on screen. Can't name it though, sorry. Otherwise have zero performance issues in battles.
The starscape cloud map lags massively when zooming in or out.
Dual-monitors once caused everything but the UI to be horizontally stretched double the size of normal, which was hilarious. I'm unable to replicate this now though.
Launcher liked to crash when display geometry wasn't what it expected, I don't remember the specifics when it happens either, sorry. I vaguely remember it had something to do with which monitor was set to primary, if any.

I'm running an RX480 with 5.13.10 kernel (latest stable) on Gentoo Linux. None of these happen in Windows.

[Alex]

One of the remnant fighters/bombers drops my FPS to around 5 when just a few are visible on screen. Can't name it though, sorry. Otherwise have zero performance issues in battles.
The starscape cloud map lags massively when zooming in or out.

Hi - these sound like driver issues, unfortunately. The starscape issues in particular, zooming in and out causes certain rendering calculations to be done more often (they're ... "cached" isn't quite the right word, but close enough, otherwise), and the card seems like it's unable to keep up - probably due to drivers.

Dual-monitors once caused everything but the UI to be horizontally stretched double the size of normal, which was hilarious. I'm unable to replicate this now though.
Launcher liked to crash when display geometry wasn't what it expected, I don't remember the specifics when it happens either, sorry. I vaguely remember it had something to do with which monitor was set to primary, if any.

I'm running an RX480 with 5.13.10 kernel (latest stable) on Gentoo Linux. None of these happen in Windows.

This could either be a driver issue, or a configuration issue, but I'm not sure what specifically to suggest on the config side of things. If you do run into trouble again, though, the game has a number of settings in data/config/settings.json (just open that up in a text editor and search for "Override") that should let you tweak its behavior with respect to the resolution, aspect ratio, and so on.

[kosshi]

Hi - these sound like driver issues, unfortunately. The starscape issues in particular, zooming in and out causes certain rendering calculations to be done more often (they're ... "cached" isn't quite the right word, but close enough, otherwise), and the card seems like it's unable to keep up - probably due to drivers.

Which is strange, otherwise AMDGPU OpenGL drivers are awesome, much faster than on Windows in many games, with the only exception being Starsector. It's also the only game I'm aware that uses immediate mode OpenGL! This massive of a performance problem absolutely is partly a driver problem, but this stuffs also depricated long before AMDGPU drivers even existed! I put half the blame on you! Fix it please, I love the game!

[Alex]

Ah, this isn't something I can reasonably "fix"; there are some advantages to using immediate mode and the fixed function pipeline in  general (in particular related to modding, and making the rendering code more easily adjustable and just faster to write), and regardless, there's too much code to easily change it over.

There's also no guarantee that the massive effort this would require would actually resolve the issues you're encountering, other games not encountering those issues notwithstanding - from some experience with this very thing, there are too many variables for that to be a meaningful data point, unfortunately.