Left 4 Dead 2 Forum

After rating the app I realized that I was the only one that gave it a gold Rating. I figured I should explain why. It's pretty simple really.

The game runs really well, really fast and with very few bugs for me. But most importantly it runs as well as it does on Windows. I have the graphics cranked to high, no -lv option and it runs, without crashing at decent framerates. This is all on a Linux maching with a Core 2 Duo 2.3Ghz, 2GB RAM and an nVidia 8800 GT card. There are a few graphical glitches here and there, BUT I get very similar or the same graphical glitches in windows. In fact, the game stutters and has performance issues in windows and has some pretty major graphical glitches every once in awhile. For instance, in the elevator - my characters frequently fall through the floor in windows.

So, I figure most of the glitches and minor bugs that I'm seeing are Valve's Fault, not Crossovers. Willing to discuss if anyone cares.

Other than that we should organize an evening/day of non-windows zombie killing at some point. :)

It just played pretty damn well on an ATI X1600 card, in fact much better than I had even hoped given the power of the card. I'll see about becoming an advocate considering I am able to test most apps on two different machines (although they are both iMacs with ATI cards - X1600 and 2600HD).

I'm definitely down for some CrossOver L4D2 action!

I wish I could say the same. I am running on a Mac Pro dual 2.8 Gig Quads with 10 gig ram and a 8800 GT. Mine is slow at responsiveness. I have a windows machine that is a dual core 6600 and a 8800 GT with 4 gig and it plays much better there and at a full 1920x1080. I can't figure out how to get it to run better under crossover. Any suggestions.

Thanks

Can you guys enable multicore rendering in your machines? Mine's greyed out, and thus the game runs at pretty weak FPS in comparison to how I imagine it'd run on windows. (I have an Athlon 64 X2 2.6ghz and a 8800GT, and can only get about 20~30fps in most areas, with the settings in high/medium)

Then there's also the random crashing, scavenge mode issues, etc, that some of us (and some windows users) are having. That's not CrossOver's fault, but calling a game fully functional in that state might be a tad deceiving.

Rick Bousquet wrote:

I wish I could say the same. I am running on a Mac Pro dual 2.8 Gig
Quads with 10 gig ram and a 8800 GT. Mine is slow at responsiveness.
I have a windows machine that is a dual core 6600 and a 8800 GT with
4 gig and it plays much better there and at a full 1920x1080. I
can't figure out how to get it to run better under crossover. Any
suggestions.

It's probably not going to be as smooth or have as high framerates as under Windows, no matter what you do. That's something we continue to work on, but part of the issue is a mismatch between Direct3D (the API the game is using) and OpenGL (the API we have available to us).

Things to try:

• Reduce the in-game video settings. Not a pleasant option, but the most effective path to smoother gameplay.
• Set the VideoMemorySize registry setting to the number of MBs of VRAM your GPU has. CrossOver/Wine may be guessing right, but it might not.
• Try fiddling with the useGLSL registry setting.

For the registry settings, select Run Command from CrossOver's Programs menu. Select the bottle with Steam in it. Use the command "regedit". In the registry editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D. If that last key doesn't exist, create it. Then within there, create a string value named VideoMemorySize and set its value to, for example, 512 if your GPU has 512MB of VRAM. You can use System Profiler to check your GPU's VRAM.

The useGLSL value is similar, except I recommend putting it into a slightly different place. It's the sort of setting that you want to keep specific to each game. So, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/AppDefaults. Create a new key named left4dead2.exe. Within that create a new key called Direct3D. Then, in there, create a new string value called useGLSL. Experiment with the values "disabled" and "enabled" to see which gives you the best performance.

Yama wrote:

Can you guys enable multicore rendering in your machines? Mine's
greyed out, and thus the game runs at pretty weak FPS in comparison
to how I imagine it'd run on windows. (I have an Athlon 64 X2 2.6ghz
and a 8800GT, and can only get about 20~30fps in most areas, with
the settings in high/medium)

I don't think it's the inability to enable multi-core rendering that's causing your performance issues.

First, multi-core rendering just doesn't work properly under CrossOver. It's one of those Direct3D/OpenGL mismatch things. So, it's just better to leave it off, anyway.

Second, our 3D guru says that most games don't do the right sorts of things with multi-core rendering to get much performance benefit from it, in any case. They tend to try to render different parts of the scene on different CPU cores. The problem is, all rendering has to go through the GPU, so the CPU cores end up queuing up in a line waiting for access to the GPU, which is the real workhorse.

Does toggling multi-core rendering really make much difference on a Windows system?

Oh, my mistake. I'm not sure the difference it'd make in windows, since I haven't used that OS for years. I was just speaking from my experience with the first L4D, in which I can( enable multicore rendering.

I just did a quick test to see if it effectively affected performance as much as I remember, and it does. As far as I know (again, please correct me if I'm wrong) mat_queue_mode is the convar related to multicore rendering, so I went ahead and tried setting it to 0, 1 and 2. 0 and I 1 made the game run at ~20-30 FPS, while 2 bumped it up to 40~50. Enabling or Disabling the option "Multicore Rendering" under video did the same.

Was hoping I'd get a similar boost in L4D2. But... well =(

What is your average FPS like? Regardless of the settings I use I cannot get mine to break around 30ish... And my hardware would easily do twice-three times this well running the game under Windows (2.8ghz dual core with an nVidia 260m graphics card).

Regards,
~Jeff

My fps varies mostly between 30-60, sometimes a bit lower or higher... With 3ghz core2, nvidia 8800gts.
edit: without multicore rendering turned on.

Hey, I don't see a way to post it myself so could someone post Ken's direct3d registry advice as a tip for this game? It has been very useful to me in getting my frame-rate up.

Good idea. I made a tip about general performance tweaks and added those. Would be great if everyone also pictches in with whatever tricks they may know about. =D