Okay some updates here! Just trippled the fps!
After modifying the Owl (misc/trade/zat..trader.ltx, supply section) ammo to have all sorts constantly present, and always 20-30 boxes; and scientists to buy artifacts and mutant parts for 3x price (2.5-3.5x from 1.1-1.5x) - I found the game playable again.
I have done following:
- installed Ubuntu HWE kernel
- installed Ubuntu HWE Xorg
- installed oibaf PPA (and turned DRI3 on via xorg.conf.d snippet, as on PPA page).
- installed the gallium nine-enabled wine to system from ppa listed on oibaf page. Also set /etc/profile.d/wine.sh with string(without single quotes): ' export WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winemenubuilder.exe=d" ' globally, which prevents system wine from trashing menu with its entries. It can be checked with "env|grep wine", reboot required before using system wine.
- also added oibaf and wine ppas 800 priority in /etc/apt/preferences.d, as I always do, to prevent linuxmint trashing ppas.
- upgraded, pulled wine, reboot.
after reboot and launching playonlinux, set Misery wine from 2.3 to "system" and launched winecfg to enable gallium 9. Reason why I didn't use PoL version of Wine with gallium9 patches, is because the latest version there is 1.7 when using pol "manage wine versions", where in wine ppa its wine-2.4.
The result payed off!
In the same spot as in above posts, I now get 120-140 fps (instead of 30-40)!
Through out the game, I get overall 130-310 fps now. The lowest value I observed was 30!
Before the values were 20-40! With lowest - 5 fps!
Also, in gamedata/configs/alife.ltx, set "switch_distance" to "150;". This does not boost fps, but seems to fix the stuttering for good, which is most observant when walking around skadovsk and seem to be bound with how Stalker:CoP works. Apparently anything 200+ requires 4+ghz CPU with singlecore IPS performance higher or equal to Ivy bridge(or higher). My poor 3.5 ghz westmereEp finally breathed easier.
So if you have AMD hardware, you should really really give gallium9 a try! Wine classic implementation seem to be very badly optimized on mesa (even with CSMT)....
Edit:
This is also a very good thread about gallium9, even if its about measuring performance in another game.