I have been having a devil of a time getting a game (The Witcher, run with wine) to work, and what I discovered today is that the problem has to do with kde, because in gnome, it works perfectly. I have dual NVIDIA 9800GT cards in sli configuration. When I start the game under kde, I get flickering video in the opening screens, and when it switches to openGL, mostly the SLI fails to start, I get slow and jerky movements, and weird video distortions. Only after several restarts does the game work properly. Sound works OK. I managed to crash kde some other way, and for the heck of it tried a gnome session instead of kde (started through kdm, not gdm). When I did, to my surprise, the game started and ran perfectly! And it has done so after several restarts, reboots, etc. For the record: kubuntu-9.04, 64-bit, kde-4.2(whatever is current in the repositories) and gnome-2.26.1. Both desktops are installed in the same system.
As far as I know, gnome and kde both use the same NVIDIA proprietary drivers (I do not use envy), same xorg.conf, etc. There is some difference somewhere, though. I think this is more a kde/gnome question than a wine question, as I am using the same WINEPREFIX directory.
Ideas and suggestions?
Update: I had the bright idea after posting this, that the problem might have something to do with compositing/effects in kde. Turning this off in system setting does indeed appear to help the game work. So there is a conflict between kde's internal compositing, and the video effects in this game. Strange, because other games (oblivion, return to castle wolfenstein) work fine with compositing turned on. Another issue is that gnome also uses compositing, but I believe that is through compiz, while kde uses its own system. So there is a workaround, tested on both jaunty and karmic.
Now all I need to do is figure out why the audio works on jaunty, but is choppy on karmic.
As far as I know, gnome and kde both use the same NVIDIA proprietary drivers (I do not use envy), same xorg.conf, etc. There is some difference somewhere, though. I think this is more a kde/gnome question than a wine question, as I am using the same WINEPREFIX directory.
Ideas and suggestions?
Update: I had the bright idea after posting this, that the problem might have something to do with compositing/effects in kde. Turning this off in system setting does indeed appear to help the game work. So there is a conflict between kde's internal compositing, and the video effects in this game. Strange, because other games (oblivion, return to castle wolfenstein) work fine with compositing turned on. Another issue is that gnome also uses compositing, but I believe that is through compiz, while kde uses its own system. So there is a workaround, tested on both jaunty and karmic.
Now all I need to do is figure out why the audio works on jaunty, but is choppy on karmic.