[ut2003io] Performance under Linux

[Daniel Vogel]

Check your log file to see whether UT2k3 successfully managed to allocate
AGP memory.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pascal Lalonde [mailto:plalonde at overnet.qc.ca]
> Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2002 5:03 PM
> To: ut2003 at icculus.org
> Subject: [ut2003io] Performance under Linux
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> after reading a few messages from the archives, I realized that my low
> performance with ut2003 on Linux is far from what it could be.
>
> I noticed some messages where people say they get ~50FPS on Linux,
> with something like an Athlon and GeForce2Pro. This is similar to my
> system, though I get only 10-15FPS, (or 20-40 when there is no action, or
> when facing an empty wall).
>
> My system is:
> Athlon 1.2gHz
> 256MB PC2100DDR
> ASUS V7100MAGIC (GeForce2 w 32MB)
> A7A266 motherboard (with the M1647 chipset)
>
> At first I thought it could be because of my AGP (because the nvidia
> driver disables AGP when faced with an M1647), which by default is
> disabled under both Win32 and Linux (according to the ut2003 logfile).
> Under windows, I didn't find a way to override this, but under Linux,
> they say you can modify a flag in the source code to enable AGP anyway
> at your own risk. That's what I did, and I managed to run the game with
> AGP enabled at 1x (2x and 4x simply freeze my system). But I still get
> 10-15FPS most of the time (in 640x480, low details).
>
> One strange thing though: they say that AGP is a crucial component and
> without it the game will be very slow. Yet, under Windows, I get
> 30-60FPS, even *without* AGP, while on Linux I get my 10-15FPS *with* AGP.
> I don't mean to do the usual apple vs. orange comparison, but this is
> such a gap that I'm thinking there is something I do really wrong.
>
> I thought it could've been because ut2003 writes some temporary files to
> my home dir, and since my home partition is NFS-mounted, it was slowing
> me down. But I get the same results using an ext3 fs.
>
> I tried playing a little with the UT2003.ini, with things like
> UseTripleBuffering, UseHardwareVS, etc. But since my performance was
> altered with barely a +2-3 FPS, I set everything back to default.
>
> Any success stories with a similar system?
>
> (I run the demo, for now. I use kernel 2.4.19, with agpgart builtin.
> I run Debian-testing, with libsdl 1.2.4-1)
>
> Thanks,
> Pascal Lalonde
>