[ut2004] Tuning guide?

Peter Hoff petehoff at pacbell.net
Tue May 18 02:41:17 EDT 2004


Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:

> John Bailo wrote:
>
>>On Sunday 16 May 2004 15:55, Peter Hoff wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>>Not trolling, I'm totally serious. I haven't done a comparison on my own
>>>system, as I only run Linux. As I said, it's playable, but the
>>>performance isn't great. A friend of mine dual boots and performance is
>>>significantly better on Windows. IIRC, he has:
>>>
>>>Athlon 3000+
>>>either 512 or 1024M RAM
>>>GeForce FX 5900
>>>SuSE 8.2/Windows XP
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>Ok, so you have a faster machine with more memory.
>>
>>But you have a different vid card and you are using an older version of Suse.
>>
>>I guess I have to take the challenge and install UT2004 on my Windows 
>>partition.  I've been meaning to do it any way since the whole thing is half 
>>for fun and half and experiment to see if Linux can handle gaming.   My 
>>personal experience obviously differs from yours.
>>
>>As far as GeForce vs Radeon -- does GeForce supply it's own Linux drivers?  Or 
>>do you use drivers from the Suse distribution ?  
>>
>>Can you play the other OpenGL 3D games that require acceleration ( tuxracer 
>>and neverball for instance ) which are part of the Suse distro ?
>>
>>One configuration change that you might want to look at is your disk DMA 
>>setttings.  In Suse 9.0 you can see these in the control center under the 
>>hardware settings.   My hard drive is:
>>
>>UltraDMA100
>>
>>I know that when I was trying to play DVDs in my DVD/CD ROM, the DMA setting 
>>made a huge difference !   
>>
>>  
>>
> nVidia provides propietary drivers for the GeForces, just like ATi 
> does (in fact they tend to be faster than ATi's in Linux). What I 
> think is the key in particular discussion is the kernel and system 
> specific optimizations. I know from first hand experience that a 2.6.x 
> kernel improves DRAMATICALLY the game experience in UT200x. And I say 
> this with this system:
>
> CPU AMD Athlon XP 2200+
> 512 Mb RAM PC-2700
> ATi Radeon 9500 128 Mb NP
> Fedora Core 2 Test 3 (stock kernel is 2.6.5-1.327)
> custom built 2.6.6 kernel (with bootsplash).
> ATi drivers version 3.2.8 (3.7.6 are a LOT slower in UT200x, at least 
> with my config).
> ALSA drivers (instead of OSS) and OpenAL selfbuilt and symlinked to 
> the ut2004 directory.
> Stock UT2004 libSDL (for me did not provide much of an advantage to 
> link to my system's one, contrary of what happened with OAL)
>
> Only problem so far: I can't paly on-line, but *only* on-line games, 
> SP works great and with good frames.

I just built myself a new system and installed Suse 9.1 on it. I haven't 
got UT installed yet, though. Hopefully I'll see as much difference as 
you have.





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