[ut2004] Tweaking Linux for playing games

[Nathan Van Eps]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 08:59, Rick B wrote:
>
> John Nilsson wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 07:18, zybhjk at verizon.net wrote:
> >
> >>I am sure you could write a script to only run cpu intensive
> >>background tasks (updatedb etc) when the cpu usage is  <x%.  for a
> >>really ugly one off the top of my head: (just a rough outline this
> >>will not work)
> >
> >Any CPU centric performance hit could just as easily be hanled with
> >nice. The problem is with I/O intensive operations.
> >
>     That brings up something thats been on my mind. About a week ago, in 
> my effort to continually tweak my gaming setup, I stumbled on a thread 
> on a mailing list where the person had "niced" his game to get it to 
> play smoother. I thought that was odd since as a regular user you can 
> only "nice" the game to a lower priority, and that just didn't make any 
> sense. But I decided to try it with this command "nice -n +19 ut2004". I 
> can't tell that much of a difference, but it does seem to smooth the 
> game out a little. Somebody else could try it and see if it works for 
> them, then report back. Any takers?

You have to nice with a negative value to increase the priority of the
process. And you can only do it as root. I tried it but I didn't notice
a difference. Probably because I don't have that many other processes
running.

-Nathan