Is 2.6 good for gaming? [MAIN]

[plonka2000]

I am SERIOUSLY considering installing 2.6 stable but i mainly use my PC for gaming. I have a separate dual boot machine for all my office stuff.

The main reason I havnt tried it as yet is because I dont know if the 2.6 is any good for gaming.

This isnt one of those 'convince me to do it!' threads i've seen about, i really just want to know what other peoples' experiences with linux 2.6 gaming is and if they thought it was worth it.

I looked around many forums including this one for some time and I havnt seen any threads on this vein.

Anyone?

[mrBen]

Changing the kernel will almost definitely have no impact at all upon you're gaming. That's not how it all works.

Recompiling _any_ kernel and stripping it down to only the hardware you have, may speed things up a little.

2.6 includes some new fixes for certain pieces of hardware, but not necessarily anything that will make gaming better per se.

[hard candy]

I used to get "pthreads not enabled" from winex Point2Play system tests. Since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.0, the results are "pthreads enabled". Some games seem to install faster and smoother, like Morrowind, Halflife. Is this due to the kernel upgrade?

[bwkaz]

2.6.0 isn't a ton better if you're using nVidia's drivers.

The VM improvements, or something, seem to have helped game startup times -- at least, the second time you start them up. But nVidia's drivers are pretty severely broken still. The patches at www.minion.de allow the drivers to compile, but they don't fix the "sleeping function called from invalid context!" debug messages that you get. And when you get one of those, the entire game seems to slow down for at least 5 seconds (I mean like to 2 FPS in Descent 3, which is normally running at whatever its maximum is).

These messages seem to get logged a lot more when a normally-sleeping process wakes up, too. I run the Chessbrain distributed computing client, which sits there listening on the network until it gets work to do from the master server. When that happens, it starts up in a flurry of activity. The nice thing about the new kernel is that when that kind of thing happens (a sleeping process wakes up), the new process gets near 100% CPU for a couple seconds (even when another idle-priority process is also running), then its priority gets ramped down slowly over the next 15 seconds or so.

The problem is, either this ramp-down or the 100% initial usage seems to cause problems with the nVidia driver -- it calls some function that sleeps, while it's holding locks. Usually the function that it calls is in mm/page_alloc.c (the driver's allocating memory for some reason). I don't know why the game slows down so much at that point, though.

Anyway, the workaround, for me at least, is to disable the Chessbrain client while I'm playing a game. Nothing else seems to suddenly take that much CPU, and I haven't seen anything like this scenario happen since then.

[u3mike]

Ya, suprising NVidia didn't support 2.6 in the lastest driver. Although I haven't noticed any of the errors at all with the minion.de patches. I'm on gentoo and have been using the 2.6-test kernels for over a month, I just updated to 2.6 final and the new nvidia driver today.

[plonka2000]

Thats interesting.
So whats the big deal about 2.6 for the gaming public?
I gotta ask cuz I work in the worlds largest games publisher so, by rule, I game a lot (A LOT!!!). :D

Of course better stability and the apparent faster game loading, plaus misc fixes like the above mentioned Winex fix.

One of the reasons I was waiting for 2.6 after using MDK9.1 was support for my on-board Promise RAID controller. But then that came in MDK 9.2! :rolleyes: Oh well. :)

To be honest, its quite a dissapointment that there is practically nothing for the gaming public to enjoy from the new kernel.

I am happy for it, especially when the main distros start migrating to it, because it will mean once again by the wonders of Linux my games will run faster. :D

So what about performance IN-GAME? Has anyone noticed any noticable difference, speed-up or slow-down in anything? Anything strange?

I want to updgrade my MDK9.2 machine to 2.6 at some point because I believe it will yield some performance boost and give me better support for various hardware in my machine.

On a side-note... Is bluetooth working in 2.6? ;)

Thanks for the feedback peeps. :)

[hard candy]

Why not install the mandrake prerelease 10 with the 2.6 kernel as mentioned in this forum earlier. Then run some games and report back to us with the results? It's make a nice Christmas present. All you need is 5 GB or less.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by plonka2000
So what about performance IN-GAME? Has anyone noticed any noticable difference, speed-up or slow-down in anything? Anything strange? The only strange thing is related to the elevated priority that other processes get when they initially wake up. It slows down games that normally take a large CPU percentage by quite a bit. The game comes back to normal after a short time, but the initial lag is annoying.

The fix was to disable the process that was waking up and slowing everything else down. I suppose that getting another processor and running SMP wouldn't hurt, except that my motherboard won't do it... ;)