Found a really effective way to speed up frame rate

[GFree]

Disable Compiz/Beryl!

Yeah, I know you might be thinking "well DUH!", but I gotta say, this was much more effective a way of speeding up the frame rate than I thought it would have been. I play many games in Linux, a lot of Quake 3-based stuff and even things like Doom 3/Quake 4, but I've never seen quite such a difference in before and after as I saw with Penumbra. I've never bothered to disable Beryl prior to running a game because the frame rate gained was insignificant, but this one is vital, and finally matches what I saw with the Windows demo.

Maybe the reason there's such a difference is because Penumbra's the most graphically advanced game to date in Linux? I dunno. Just thought I'd share the observation. Also helped alleviate a small number of audio issues at the same time.

[Jeremy-Bailey]

what sort of audio issues? I get this audio issue every once in a while. It lasts for about 3-5 seconds, it's sort of a hard static low sound. be nice to fix it. and if disabling that will solve it, how is this disabled? I use mandrivalinux 2007.1 Spring

[GFree]

For me it's the occasional crackle or brief interruption in the audio. It's nothing really major but it does manifest itself when things slow down, that's why disabling Beryl helped because as things sped up, the amount of audio artifacts reduced. Don't have anything lasting as long as you though.

You can try Urkle's OpenAL replacement in the stickied thread, but that didn't do much for me except make things worse. To disable Beryl I just run

metacity --replace

but that's with Ubuntu, so I don't know what you'd have to do.

[Urkle]

metacity --replace should work on all distros with beryl/compiz. If you are using the "beryl manager" in gnome, there will be a gem in the panel that you can click on and choose another window manager other than beryl or compiz. (compiz has a similar application as well, not sure what the icon is however).

[aidanr]

I usually make simple scripts in /usr/local/bin/ such as:

#!/bin/bash
killall beryl &&
cd /path/to/game/directory/
./game &&
beryl &

or

#!/bin/bash
killall compiz.real &&
cd /path/to/game/directory/
./game &&
compiz-manager &