[ut2004] Help? 64 bit linux client and poor fps.

[Kris Vorwerk]

> This was with Fedora Core 3 x86_64, (IE: 2.6.9 kernel), the latest
> nvidia drivers (1.0-6629), a 256mb Geforce 5950 Ultra, and 1gb of
> physical ram.


Out of curiosity, are you using FC3's default kernel, or have you
compiled your own?  While I have a hard time imagining that a pre-built
kernel could account for such a large frame rate drop, you might be able
to gain a few FPS by compiling your own.  

(Specifically, FC3's default kernel options do not exactly favour
highest performance -- they enable some options like "4 GB kernel-space
and 4 GB user-space virtual memory support" and "Optimize for Size"
which are not necessarily conducive to good speed.)


If you don't want to fiddle too much with getting udev setup in your
initrd image and so on, the easiest thing that I've found is to download
and install FC3's kernel "src.rpm", then "rpmbuild" it using ...

rpmbuild -bp --target noarch /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

For convenience, you can then symlink /usr/src/linux
to /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.9/linux-2.6.9 ... Then, copy over
the linux/configs/kernel-2.6.9-ia64.config to ./linux/.config. 

At this point, you can change a few options to suit your system via
"make menuconfig".  (Oh, and I wouldn't compile in agpgart support --
I've found that it if accidentally loads before the nvidia module, my
FPS in UT2004 drops _enormously_.)  At this poitn, it's fairly
straightforward to do a "make modules ; make modules_install ; make
install", reboot, and you're good to go.


Kris