Batman Arkham Knight fixing graphical glitches for AMD Radeon HD6900 series

This post might seem random but I tried many ways to fix the sudden FPS drop and screen tearing, half loaded shaders and an unplayable exerience runnign this card, in HD6900 cards running this game, my particular card is HD6970 and I was able to run it with ease in 1366x768, with a card a generation older than the minimum spec.

I tried several methods like rewriting shaders in directx11 instead of 10, messing with config files, do the process below carefully.

Steps for drivers:

1. Download and install AMD 6900 series 15.7 WHQL drivers for your device, if you already have it installed skip this step and restart your pc for the driver to take effect.
2. Then download and install AMD 6900 series 14.12 Omega drivers, and install it without removing the previous 15.7 drivers. You can find the driver here. Then restart again for the drivers to take effect.

Steps for Game configs:

Config files are located in .../Arkham knight/BmGame/Config/BmSystemSettings.ini

Note: Depedning on the Game store you used the location may vary, usually you can just search BmSystemSettings.ini and edit it. Make sure to open your game once for the setting files to generate.

Set this settings as below: (save a copy of the file as backup if something went wrong.)

• Bloom=False
• MaxFPS=60.000000
• AllowOpenGL=True
• bAllowD3D9MSAA=False
• bAllowTemporalAA=False
• AllowD3D10=True

Save and run the game, set the graphic settings to Fullscreen windowed as it provides the best performance. There are no penalties for using the 14.12 Omega driver, I saw no FPS impact in CSGO, rocket league and other major games. Enjoy.

If you have more queries comment below and I'll try to answer them ASAP.

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Mounting NTFS drive (windows) in Linux

Mounting Windows drive can be hassle in Linux as windows now defaults to Hibernation rather than shutting down which will create corrupted NTFS for other OSes to boot from.
You might face errors such as:
> Can't mount, windows is hibernated

Or simply not being able to paste anything in the ntfs drive and reading it only.

to solve this boot into windows and save any unsaved files and while shutting down hold "Shift" button to force complete shutdown.

Then head over to your Linux Distro and make sure that you have ntfs-3g drivers installed. (usually they are default installed), unmount the windows partition then run this command:

sudo ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/sdxX /mount-point

Note: replace /dev/sdxX with the path to your windows partition. you can find this in gnome disks.

Note2: replace /mount-point to your default mount point, usually /mnt.

This will terminate the hibernation session. now you can access windows files in your mount point location. if you  can unmount it in  gnome disks again and remount it so you can access it from gnome files.

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Virtual camera with v4l2loopback for meetings

 Setting up a virtual camera in Linux is fairly, virtual camera makes you play a video as a video input from a webcam, or screen share, most use cases are when you want to share multiple screens but your video chat client has limitations.

To start:

Get v4l2loopback module from here.

Note: to run the module you need kerenl-devel and kernel-headers, the package name might vary depending on your distro.

unzip the tar, open a terminal in the directory and run the following commands.

sudo make 

sudo make && sudo make install  

sudo depmod -a 

Congrats, the module is now installed, if you encounter errors, do a  "sudo make clean"  and retry. Note that if you do a kernel update you should rebuild this for the given kernel.
to enable the module:

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1

Now there must be a fake webcam detected in your system, to test this run:

v4l2-ctl --list-devices

if you see devices other than the system webcam that is your virtual camera. now to run a video from it you need "ffmpeg". install it from your package manager then to input a desired video to the fake webcam run:

sudo ffmpeg -re -i /path/to/Video -map 0:v -f v4l2 /dev/videoX

Note: you should put the rename the videoX device as the fake dummy device name in previous list command. (for example for me /dev/video0 is my webcam and /dev/video1 is the fake camera so I rename X to 1)

To cast your screen use the following ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 15 -s 1920x1080 -i :0.0+0,0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/videoX

Note: Keep the module and the ffmpeg running or the video chat app won't detect it and it will not work!

Note2: change the screen resolution to the one you are using. And it is preferred to use Xorg as your window manager!

Tested Clients for usage: 

• Zoom
• Google Meet
• Jitsi
• Bluejeans

Others might work to but I haven't tested them. Comment below and I answer your issues ASAP.

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Using Tor system wide in Fedora

Tor Project

 If you like to be anonymous and not be visible by hackers and much more, you will like Tor, the concept is that your data travels through nodes and encrypted layer by layer, this can be achieved by both Tor Browser and system wide Tor.
 If you have apps that are not very secure you can try tor system wide to get a layer of protection.

Installation:

The required Packages are "torsocks", and standalone "tor" bundle from dnf.

sudo dnf install tor

sudo dnf install torsocks

Running: 

When the required packages are downloaded and installed you can now start tor by running

systemctl start tor

But we are not done yet, you need to assign a proxy in order to make tor function, so we head over to settings => network => proxy => set to manual

and use the configuration as shown:

Well done, check if tor is functional by visiting "check.torproject.org"

To revert back to local network, run

systemctl stop tor

and revert your proxy settings back to disabled.

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Analyzing and measuring Linux boot time in detail

The grub menu

 My boot times were slow so I tried a quick method to measure the boot time and boot services through systemd, this method works on most distributions including Fedora and Ubuntu, you just need the Terminal to start the process.
 Just type in the command:

systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg

Almost instantly the report will be generated in an svg file in your home partition, here is mine:

See this in action:

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