[/eVo/Divinity]

If you are like me and have some recent flavor of ATI (HD4870 for me), then you know how unplayable recent Linux distros have been.

I can confirm that the coming catalyst 10.10 fixes the problems seen recently (oh for like the last year or so). I have it running in an Arch install and it works great.

For me, I had this odd lag which made my game feel like it went fast/slow/fast/slow. If you've experienced it, you know what I'm talking about. In short, UrT on Linux was unplayable if you had ATI and were trying to use the latest and greatest distros.

Hopefully Ubuntu and other distros will push this update out once it is released. I found an article saying it should be later this month.

http://www.phoronix...._item&px=ODY2OA

If you want to use Linux to play right now and have a spare hard drive laying around, fire up an Arch install and get to work.

Oh, and for the record, Pulseaudio did not introduce any lag or framerate drop upon installation. I tried with and without. If anyone experiences any problems with it, I suspect it will be card/driver specific.

[warhammer4k]

Divinity, on 25 October 2010 - 04:30 PM, said:

Oh, and for the record, Pulseaudio did not introduce any lag or framerate drop upon installation. I tried with and without. If anyone experiences any problems with it, I suspect it will be card/driver specific.

PulseAudio gets thrown under the bus a lot, but in my admittedly limited experience, it's only problematic when used with half-assed, integrated sound devices. Which, unfortunately, about 99% of laptop users are stuck with, and nearly as many desktop users. Like you said, card/driver specific.

[/eVo/Divinity]

Well to be fair, it is still not at a full point release yet. I'm of the opinion that when Ubuntu first started using it that perhaps it was probably a bit too immature and it still carries perception baggage from those days.

It seems to have matured quite a bit from my experience as my hardware hasn't changed, but my sound experience with respect to Pulse has improved dramatically.

[/eVo/Divinity]

Correction: The lag is not 100% gone, but it is MUCH better. I just played quite a bit and found it is still there, just not as pronounced.

I didn't feel it as much in the initial testing because it was just me running through a map :/

[[PCC]cyrus]

Although Pulseaudio problems are far better than they were even six months ago, I find that the sound server occasionally gets funky, causing sound to skip or be delayed by more than a second. What generally fixes it for me is to kill the sound server.

pulseaudio --kill

In my Ubuntu 10.04 setup, doing this will cause the sound server to stop and restart automatically. I haven't had to do that in a while, but it has helped in the past and clears up any latency.
Note that the command is issued without sudo or root access. I believe doing that would kill the main background process and require additional commands to get it running again.
Your mileage may vary...