Quakespasm Issues

[Hipnotic Rogue]

I've been using DP for a long time now so I thought it time to try out something different.

After looking around I saw that QS gets a lot of praise. However, I've got a couple of issues that spoil it for me.

The first is the screen update. In most other source ports the game runs silky smooth and often gives FPS in the thousands. There is no tearing or juddering. However, no matter what I try in QS I get one or the other. I've set host_maxfps to everything from 150 to 1500. That causes screen tearing. If I use vsync the game judders.

The other issue is that some textures flicker quite badly. For example, E4M3 the graveyard ground around the tombstones are flickery and glitchy. It happens in quite a few other places too. Is there some OGL/Direct X CVAR or something I could switch or tweak (BTW, I'm a noob with such stuff so please be gentle!)

I know that QS is a 'faithful' engine so perhaps I can't do anything about the screen updating as I presume it's optimised for 72 FPS but here's hoping!

FYI: I have an i7 4770k CPU, GTX 780 GPU and a Benq 144Hz monitor. I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

[ericw]

Hey, yeah both of those issues are a bit of a pain.

The flickering is most likely bmodel/world z-fighting, which the original software renderer was immune to but GL engines are not. Setting "gl_zfix 1" enables a workaround which should fix the flickering, with some small side effects (you can see a thin seam around some secret wall panels, etc.)

For the screen update one, yeah it sucks; I'm not sure if there is an easy fix, unfortunately. I think vsync is broken in quakespasm, in that it tries to also throttle the FPS with a timer, which causes the juddering. it's on my list of stuff to fix. The other problem is, other engines have decoupled the rendering FPS from the server/physics FPS, which lets you run at 500fps or whatever. QS doesn't have this, so if you run at several hundred fps, physics will mess up.

Maybe "host_maxfps 144" since that matches your screen refresh rate, but I guess there's no way to avoid tearing without vsync.

[ericw]

Edit: might be worth trying these two cvars to fix juddering when vsync is on:

host_maxfps 1000
sys_throttle 0

I think I saw juddering with vsync once before, but I normally never play with vsync on because it makes mouse/keyboard input feel laggy to me.

[Hipnotic Rogue]

Thank you. The gl_zfix really helps with the flickering and the sys_throttle cvar has helped smooth things out a bit.

Yeah, I feel the lag when vsync is on too but I can live with that a little easier than I can the screen tearing.

PS: (perennial Nehahra question!) Are there any plans to add support for Nehahra to QS?