Nightvision/Flashlight lag fix

[GuskiS]

Fix lags caused by nightvision and flashlight with bad grafics cards.

[olavd]

Please read the bit about reporting bugs: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux

[johndrinkwater]

GuskiS, this is likely not a bug, but a feature of producing the flashlight… unlikely to get fixed.

[GuskiS]

Isn't a bug when your FPS drops more then a half while using nightvision or flashlight?

[olavd]

@GuskiS Not really if your GPU can't handle it. However, it would be helpful if you told us about your set-up.

[GuskiS]

Well, I'm having intels HD grafics card, I know it's very weak, but it should handle goldsource, as in source engine it doesnt lag for me.

[olavd]

I suggest you write a proper report so they can look into this.

[bdeen-valve]

Which game?

[GuskiS]

Counter-Strike 1.6, but I suppose it's in all goldsource engine games which have nightvision/flashlight.

[demencia]

I have the same issue, I believe the problem is in the graphic card. Night Vision and Flashlight drop fps to half or less, it's really annoying when someone turns on the FL.

[911r0ck]

Same here in opengl and with d3d it is fine but d3d is not good like opengl
Its not graphic card problem because in my old computer it used to work fine (without graphic card) and in my new with nvidia gfx it lags o.O
Where as in source it doesnt lags and i have searched many areas and many people have this problem in new pcs

[LevShisterov]

It is an issue with dynamic light.
Same issue exists in HLDM with any Intel video: when you shoot RPG, dynamic light from the rocket drops FPS to very low values (like from 250 to 10-20-30).
r_dynamic 0 completely removes these drops, but this is not good solution.
More to say: this is very hard issue, because on Windows, Nvidia locks their drivers to use Intel video on notebooks with Optimus (double video solution).

[agrastiOs]

This is not just on Linux, it happens on Windows too with many Intel iGPUs.

[agrastiOs]

It also happens with all GoldSrc games @kisak-valve

[SamVanheer]

See #2565 (comment) for an explanation of the cause of the performance issues.

I'm pretty sure these issues cover the same basic problem, along with #1909, #1578 and #376.

[kolcsarlevi]

I think this is the cause of the FPS drop:

"The GoldSrc engine was written long before modern graphics programming techniques such as vertex buffer objects were around. The OpenGL in GoldSrc (and all other OpenGL games of the time) were executing OpenGL instructions in immediate mode, meaning that everything to be drawn on screen must be sent to the GPU and redrawn every frame -- the GPU forgets everything when it comes to rendering the next frame. AMD (and ATI) GPU's have bad performance issues with immediate mode OpenGL, whereas nVidia GPU's handle this much quicker.
You can experience the same issue in Minecraft (before 1.8), as that was entirely using immediate mode OpenGL too. I have exactly the same issue with my AMD R9 280X, where as my (years older) nVidia GTX 560Ti handled Sven Co-op and Minecraft much faster. I did ask AMD about this but they blamed the games (GoldSrc and Minecraft), due to them not making the best use of a modern OpenGL API. I guess nVidia were just nicer when it came to retaining strong compatibility with older software."
"
First to clear things up, OpenGL is just an API to perform rendering on the graphics card. The graphics engine, "GoldSource", uses this API in an old-fashioned way ("immediate mode") which does not suit modern graphics card architectures at all. My guess is that all the state changes undergo tremendous amounts of conversions through the graphics driver to suit the average modern graphics card, turning the CPU into a bottleneck.
"
I've been reading up about OpenGL's history and they explicitly note that immediate mode is a deprecated feature kept in the API for backward compatibility only.
Hardware drivers have to implement support, but can do this however they please. As noted, nVidia implements it pretty well, whereas AMD does not."