I'm using Mandrake Linux 10.1 and I've noticed that a lot of my games actually play smoother in Windows. Games that normally play excellent and smooth in Windows such as Windows pinball or Unreal Tournament lag horribly if I try to run them under Linux. Even yahoo pool has a significant amount of lag compared to when I try to play it in Windows. I checked my system resources and after Linux has loaded I only have 24 MB of RAM available to use, could this be the problem? My computer is a custom machine that I built to upgrade from a 133 Mhz system with Windows 95. It's got an 850 Mhz processor, 32 MB on board video card and 256 MB of DDR SDRAM. I really like linux, better than Windows, but I thought it was supposed to make a lot of things work better than they do with Windows?

You are already at the edge of what can run UT, and running Linux with Wine or Cedega drains some resources. You should also look for native programs whenever possible (e.g. FooBillard instead of Yahoo Pool). There are many excellent games like Maelstrom ("Asteroids on Steroids") and Supertux (SuperMario clone with a twist).

And you can always junk the bloated GUI of Gnome in favour of fluxbox. That would free up memory.

I wouldn't fancy running XP SP2 on only 256M RAM..would be a sloooooow biatch. And only a 32M video card? For UT? in 640*480 in 8bit mode maybe.

Linux does work better than anything out of Redmond but it ain't so good at running Windows apps or M$ software written for windows like DirectX which is hardly surprising really.

just got a question !!
if Direct X games does not run as good as you say ... what abt games in OpenGl ?
and which games have u tried to run on linux ?

please do tell me cause im also like dudeman41465
but with a really good system and am unsuccesful in running a single game on linux :S

From what it sounds like you dont have video card drivers installed. Could you run glxinfo(in console/terminal) and post it here please.