What do you think?

[Tjoh311]

I'm trying to tweak my RH 8 install so my games play a little better than they are. In windowsXP (before I pitched it out the window), I was able to play the UT2003 demo pretty good with the system I have which is a:

AMD 950 athlon
ECS k7s5a mobo
384 megs pc-133
NVidia Geforce 2 Pro-vtg
Soundblaster 16 pci

When I did a fresh install I installed everything I could, then, slowly removed packages that I didn't need or wasn't using. This helped a little bit. Then I changed my HDD settings in my sysconfig/harddisks file (which didn't seem to do any good). Then I made sure that stuff that I don't use wasn't autostarting when I boot up, and that keeps the kernel from chewing up too much memory, but the system still lags just a touch. What should I do next?
I've thought about reinstalling my NVIDIA drivers from tarball instead of using the RPMs this time, but I don't know if that will make any difference!

Thanks in advance

[hecresper]

IMO, reinstalling the nVidia drivers from source might make a difference. The rpm package was probably a pre-built binary that may or may not give your specific system the performance you want. On the other hand, if you compile and build the nVidia drivers from the source tarball, the resulting driver is going to optimized for your system. At least that's how I understand it works. Someone might come along and correct me if I'm wrong.

[Gaccm]

when you use an nvidia .tar.gz file, you arn't actually getting the source. nVidia doesn't release any source for their drivers. What you do get is something that is slightly customizable. The file NVIDIA_kernel-num/os-registry.c can be tweeked to increase fps.

The best fps increaser I have found is to change the window manager. I have 2 window managers, the first KDE, is for standard web stuff, writing papers, etc. My 2nd setup is a complete bare bones blackbox display. KDE takes about 10-15secs to load while Blackbox takes 1sec, so I know that there is less stuff in memory.

And of course you could always look up UT specific stuff.