Re: Computer not running at highest possible speed
On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 01:40:24PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> Jule Slootbeek wrote:
>
> >recently I installed Debian sarge on a P4 2Ghz machine using the new
> >debian-installer. After setting up this new machine, which previously
> >ran windows XP, I started noticing that many processes were not
> >running at optimal capacity. When I play games the graphics are slow,
> >and I usually have to turn down a lot of options, for example, when i
> >play Battle for Wesnoth, during the automated sequences the scrolling
> >is not smooth, and waiting for my turn takes forever. This was never a
> >problem when it ran Windows. Even firefox takes a while to open a new
> >tab, and opening new windows in Gnome takes longer than one would expect.
>
>
> Two things that come to my mind:
>
> 1) video acceleration? I believe the "glxinfo" command should tell you
> if you have acceleration.
glxinfo is about opengl acceleration. At least battle for wesnoth is
pure 2d sdl, so it can't be the whole answer.
Are you using the binary-only nvidia driver, or the free one, or maybe
even the vesa frame buffer ?
> 2) DMA? Perhaps you need to run hdparm against your drive to turn on DMA
> or 32-bit addressing.
or in othe words, what does "hdparm -cd /dev/hda" say ? I doubt this is
the problem though, since scrolling in a game shouldn't involve disk
operations, at least not with 512 MB RAM.
Frank
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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