tweeking linux for performance
 

I was wondering what ways I could tweek my system to make games run better.

I use FC2, with a GForce FX 5500 overclocked.

I know on windows that you can change some of the nvidia settings.

how do I do that in linux? plus is there anything I could tweek with Open GL to make games run better?


The main reason I want to do this is cause when I use Cedega with some games I cant run them on as high of settings as I was able to on windows.

The nvidia website readme for the linux drivers gives some options you can tweak in your xorg.conf file.

As RanDrake10 said the README of the nvidia drivers has valuable information regarding tweaking.
The driver also contains a program named "nvidia-settings" from which you can change some settings and also openGL (very basic
tweaking)

You can also try the following :

YaNC (yet another nvidia configurator) http://www.ygriega.de/index.php?id=2&detail=1
NV-online http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/nv-online/
nvclock (overclocker) http://www.linuxhardware.org/nvclock/

Just like WINE, Cadega emulates Windows, so expect reduce performance. Comparing Windows games that uses DirectX to Linux games that uses OpenGL is not a fair comparison. To see the difference use OpenGL in Windows and then compare. Use anandtech's framegrabber utility to benchmark the system for each game.

To speed up Linux:
1) If you have 512 MB of RAM or more use XFS. The default formatting for XFS is alright to test XFS, but you can do better by decreasing block size and decrease the realtime block size.
2) Use sysctl to optimize the kernel parameters.
3) Set the kernel to server mode for increase throughput but set the clock to 1000 Hz. On my computer, I found out that premptive setting is slower than people think. This has to be done before compiling the kernel. Sometimes mm patch will give you better performance.
4) Play around with different schedulers.
5) Use faster hard drives like Western Digital Raptor drives.
6) Plan on using RAID 1 (mirroring) instead of RAID 0 (stripping). If correctly setup, a RAID 1 setup give you a good boost in performance when loading game maps and everyday programs. Linux software RAID should be used instead of software RAID built-in the motherboard or other controllers.
7) Linux is multitasking which means it will do its best if running a multiple processor system even though games do not benifit to multiple processor system.
8) Use a Linux distribution that compiles every program such as Gentoo.