[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Rick B]

Cavalaria Christophe wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>On Saturday 07 August 2004 01:17, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
>  
>
>>Rick B wrote:
>>Another thing that must be said about tweaking your distro for Gaming,
>>is about your DE and window manger. Big-fat-bloated DEs (KDE and GNOME)
>>may induce additional overhead to the machine, so using a light weight
>>WM/DE is recommendable for gaming. I've been looking around for one that
>>both, satisfies my taste in the desktop and is reasonably light
>>weighted. There are many WMs and DEs you can try (Flux, Balck, OpenBox,
>>TWM, VWM, XFCE, etc). Of the ones I've tried, I can safely say that the
>>best *for me* is XFCE4. It is both ligh weighted and VERY functional.
>>Some people call it the light weight GNOME or GNOME's little brother,
>>since it's based on GTK+. It has all the goodies from GNOME when it
>>comes to confiugrability and customizability and also is blazing fast!,
>>the downside is that if you are used to an Explorer-like file manager
>>(Konqueror, Nautilus), the XFFM is a little sour.
>>    
>>
>
>I've yet to see any improvement on framerate between KDE 3.2.2 and a 
>lightweight WM like IceWm. As long as you have enouth RAM it shouldn't matter 
>anyway. Unless of course your WM runs some task in the background but using 
>top should help you find if that's the case.
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
>
>iD8DBQFBFJ5AmqNN7QaJ/qgRAv1zAJ9m2m9uFHb5hW51bngaur0vT6+aZgCeMFy/
>hNSfjKLEgibwsebwfM5x39Y=
>=DfhS
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>  
>
    Yes, the background processes are what bother me most, as they can 
start at any given time. I don't know if anyone else has noticed random 
slowdowns in their framerates for a couple of seconds here and there but 
I have. They are not dramatic drops in fps but they still exist. The 
thing is, I don't know what causes these slowdowns, and honestly, I 
don't know how to find out. I haven't been playing in the failsafe 
terminal long enough to know if these random slowdowns occur there like 
they do in Gnome. Awhile back it used to be real bad, every couple of 
hours my framerate would drop to 18 fps and stay there for about 15 
seconds, and I didn't know what was causing my machine to do that. I 
accidently fixed that problem when I added "acpi=off" to the kernel boot 
arguments. I added that so I could have more control over how my IRQs 
are set, as I wan't my video card on IRQ 10 so it will get first dibbs 
on CPU time, but it also solved my sporadic fps drop.

                     Rick B