[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games
Rick B
zajelo3 at cfl.rr.com
Fri Aug 6 19:07:02 EDT 2004
Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> 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.
>
I use CCRMA's version of FC1 that is optimized for low-latency audio
work. They still are using the 2.4.26 kernel because tests on the 2.6
kernel have revealed that the low-latency charactaristics are not yet as
good as the 2.4 kernel, but I don't know if this is the best kernel
(2.4) for gameplay. That is, I don't know if just because it is good for
low-latency audio work means that it is good for gaming. It seems to
perform very well though and I know that it does include some of the -ck
patches. I *was* going to wait for CCRMA to come out with their version
of FC2 and the 2.6 kernel, but I'm kind of undecided. I have looked at
Gentoo and I do have enough disk space for installing two different
distros. I have heard about Accelerated OpenAL but I use ALSA with the
onboard Nforce2 Soundstorm sound on my mobo.
Rick B
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