[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rick B wrote:

> Hi all,
>    I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for the optimal settings 
> for Linux and gaming? Shortly I will be doing a reinstall and that 
> would be a ideal time to start from scratch with building a highly 
> optimized Linux gaming machine. I am not talking about tweaking 
> UT2004, I am talking about the OS. Things that I have in mind are, 
> switching the partition I keep my games on from Reiserfs to XFS as XFS 
> is supposed to read larger files faster, since UT2004 seems to have 
> large files. I have learned to tweak bdflush to write to disk more 
> often in smaller chunks of data rather than to store data in memory 
> and write large chunks at once thus causing the scheduler to not be 
> able to supply the video card with the information it needs to keep 
> your framerate stable. These are just two examples of things that can 
> help make Linux a great gaming OS, surely there are many more tweaks 
> out there that I dont know about. Links are welcome too.
>
>                Rick B
>
>
I'd also mention some of the tweaks you may do to your kernel. For 
starters the use of -mm or -ck patches will definitely help here, and 
since the integration to the kernel (as of 2.6.8) of the new Staircase 
Scheduler, that will mean even better system responsiveness. Just out of 
curiosity, which distro will you be installing, you may want to go 
Gentoo or LFS due to the degree of optimization those let you achieve. 
If you have an Audigy or SB-Live class card, you can use the Accelerated 
OpenAL from this page http://www.lost.org.uk/openal.html, I've seen an 
acutal increase on FPS with UT2004 and my ATi card when I used this 
instead of the default openal from UT2004, I still have to do some tests 
(like VoIP), but I can tell you the difference is worth having it.