[ut2004] Tuning guide? (One idea)

[David Krider]

On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 20:51, Jason Paque wrote:
> This whole toppic polutes the list.  you can find tunings guides all
> over the web.  dont bother asking in here.

Lighten up! I think that's exactly the sort of thing this list ought to
be about. Yeah, you can find tuning info on the *game*, but there's a
lot of things going on with Linux that you won't find covered. (Heck,
there's a lot of details about tuning in Windows that isn't common
knowledge either, but I digress.)

Here's my system: dual Athlon 1200, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4600Ti, all SCSI
disks (which eliminates the recurring DMA oversight). Obviously, not
bleeding edge (but I just got "permission" from the wife yesterday that
I could upgrade to 2800's and 1 GB of RAM next month. Woot!). What I
want to point out is that I am CPU-bound here, so this trick doesn't
help me much, but it may help someone else. I only run at 800x600, with
a lot of the extra details shut off. (I'm a competitive player, and, for
instance, I find that leaving "foliage" on obscures part of my view.
Likewise, again for instance, showing my weapon. I'm glad to give up
such things for the framerate boosts.)

/proc/driver/nvidia/agp should contain three files: card, host-bridge,
status. List each file. From this, you can see if both your card and
your motherboard support AGP fast writes and side band
(something-or-other, I forget). If both support one or both of these
features, you can try turning this on, and see if it helps. These are
not enabled by default by NVidia due to the risk of making the system
unstable. If you do this, your system may lock up. (So far, mine hasn't,
but I haven't played much yet.)

You'll need to edit your <modules.conf> file. On SuSE 9.1 (and, I'm
willing to bet, any other 2.6-kernel-based system), my file is actually
/etc/modprobe.conf.local, and the edit looks like this:

options nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1

After making the edit and rebooting (you can do this on the fly, but you
have to shutdown X and reload the nvidia driver), you can look again at
/proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status and make sure that both tweaks are
working.

Run the benchmark (that's already been covered in the list) before and
after, and see if it makes a difference. Again, on my CPU-bound system,
it doesn't make a bit of difference in my benchmark scores, BUT it does
make the system *seem* much smoother. Obviously, YMMV. I'm hoping that I
do get to upgrade, and then I will test again to see if these things
will ever make a difference in framerates, or if it's just an impression
sort of thing. Before I ran the numbers, I could have sworn I was
getting at least a 50% improvement, so it is very noticeable.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that while UT2003 was slower in Linux, I'm
finding (based only on the demo, I haven't installed the full game in
both) that UT2004 plays exactly the same on both Linux and Windows, and
better in both overall (though I've commented on this before).

Obviously, I'm very interested in hearing about anyone's results from
trying this tweak.

Regards,
dk