I recently found an article claiming to be able to speed up X games (especially Wine) by up to 50% - and gave it a try. What can I say?
It works! 🙂
Here's the article:
http://dl.fullcirclemagazine.org/issue25_en.pdf
Full Circle is a Linux PDF magazine that focuses on Ubuntu.
First you have to do some preparations, like allowing anybody to start an X server and adding youself to the audio group. Read the article, everything is expained there! After you've done that, log out and start Cedega with this little script. Just save it as a text file and make it executable:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
X :2 -ac -terminate & sleep 3
DISPLAY=:2 nice -20 cedega
As mentioned, there may be a few issues. It took me while to realize that I needed to add me to the audio group. Another setback I encountered is that I didn't have any sound with my onboard soundcard which doesn't do hardware mixing. If now use an old Audigy card which is able to HW-mix. To find out if your card is able to mix streams in hardware, look it up in the ALSA sound card matrix. If it has the tag HWmix you should have no problems.
Maybe there is a way simple around this. If anyone knows one, I'd like to know it too.
As said, this works.
All games work faster. From formely 30 fps it went up to 50 fps. This is 67% more!
Now I am wondering why Cedega is so slow on a standard desktop. It is said that you should disable Compiz, but for me this has no effect. With or without Compiz, I am stuck at 30 fps in my favorite game.
Here's my system spec:
agp_aperture_size: 256
cpu: AMD Athlon(tm) Dual Core Processor 5050e
cpu_ghz: 2.60
distro: Ubuntu 9.04 jaunty
kernel: 2.6.28-11-generic
machine_bitness: 64
memory: 3895
soundcard: Audigy 1 [SB0090] (rev.3, serial:0x511102) at 0xdc00, irq 16
soundcard_driver: ALSA Version 1.0.18rc3
videocard_direct: True
videocard_driver_version: 3.0.0 NVIDIA 185.18.14
videocard_manufacturer: NVIDIA Corporation
videocard_ram: 1024
videocard_type: GeForce 9600 GT/PCI/SSE2
x_version: X.Org X Server 1.6.0
GUI version: 000141