I have been playing Star craft 2 (SC2) and it was working well when I first loaded up Manjaro a year ago but now it has been having huge spikes where the Video just freezes. Game is still going on so 5 seconds will pass and the video will resume and I will be dead.
I am unsure how to troubleshoot this problem. How can I begin investigating this issue?
Is there something akin to events in windows? seems like the closest thing in Journalctl and I couldnāt find anything of importance to the situation there.
The game is launched through Lutris+wine, I tried 2 different versions of the game and still run into the same problem.
Iāll see if I can record what is happening. I canāt seem to find an FPS overlay that will work with what I have. Iāve tried messing with the settings in Lutris to reduce any strain and turn off features that arenāt needed for the game. I donāt know if its a dropped connectionā¦like maybe its causing the game to glitch, normally though a dropped connection pauses the gameā¦I am just unsure of what I can do from this point to try and figure out why its doing this. Any help would be appreciative.
If you wanted a wild guess, this sounds like the issue from 4-5 years ago experienced on older/failing HDDs.
To that the general āsolutionā was trying another HDD or move the game to an SSD.
I could see thatā¦but how can I verify? If I were a windows user I would pull up Performance monitor and see my HDD working overtime for little transfer. Is there a way for me to double check this on Manjaro?
Look for tools for HDD health status, like on Windows. GSmartControl for example. Check the SMART status, and perform tests on the HDD too, short, long, or the other one, if short doesnāt spit errors or if you want deeper info.
I ran hdparm and compared to online specs. If I am understanding correctly it looks like it is inline. But this test doesnāt feel as thorough as say a SMART test. But i havenāt been able to get GSmartControl to work yet.
I also found a tool I want to try called MANGOHUD and see if it helps determine the issue.
sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 19712 MB in 2.00 seconds = 9870.60 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 454 MB in 3.01 seconds = 151.05 MB/sec
Below are the standard specs
Spindle Speed
7200 rpm
Features
Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Seagate AcuTrac technology, Seagate OptiCache technology, Seagate SmartAlign technology
Hard Drive Type
internal hard drive
Form Factor (Short)
3.5"
Form Factor (metric)
8.9 cm x 1/4H
Form Factor (Short) (metric)
8.9 cm
Storage Interface
Serial ATA-600
Interface
Serial ATA-600
Max Seek Time
9.5 ms
Data Transfer Rate
600 MBps
Internal Data Rate
210 MBps
Internal Data Rate (Write)
156 MBps
Buffer Size
64 MB
Bytes per Sector
4096 Hz
Non-Recoverable Errors
1 per 10^14
Load / Unload Cycles
300,000
This is what I am getting when I attempt to run gsmartcontrol
error> [gtk] _g_io_module_get_default: Found default implementation gvfs (GDaemonVfs) for āgio-vfsā
<error> [gtk] setenv()/putenv() are not thread-safe and should not be used after threads are created
<error> [gtk] setenv()/putenv() are not thread-safe and should not be used after threads are created
<error> [gtk] setenv()/putenv() are not thread-safe and should not be used after threads are created
<error> [gtk] setenv()/putenv() are not thread-safe and should not be used after threads are created
<warn> [hz] Warning: exit: Device open failed, or device did not return an IDENTIFY DEVICE structure.
<warn> [app] SmartctlParser::parse_full(): No ATA sections could be parsed. Returning.
<warn> [hz] FS warning: Error while opening file "/proc/scsi/sg/devices": No such file or directory.
<warn> [app] {anonymous}::read_proc_scsi_sg_devices_file(): Sg devices file doesn't exist.
The problem has seemed to have lessened - but I donāt think I did anything of great importanceā¦I installed Vulkan-tools - attempted to run from Terminal but I think because its a wine game it didnāt work. I tried to run journalctl -f but reporting would stop after the launch of the game I think for the same reasonā¦But as of last night it only happened once in a large series of games.