How to improve your client performance on Linux (with some hints useful also on Win)

[platyna]

Well lag is obvious design flaw of the game, however it can be relieved by the following steps, that allows up to 2x performance gain comparing to default setup.

1. Captain Obvious: newest drivers from producent's site (Nvidia), in case of Intel cards - newest Mesa3d, newest Xorg drivers, newest libdrm - those that comes with your distribution are usualy old.
For Nvidia (especialy Ubuntu users, since their packaged nvidia driver sucks badly):
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Intel users:
ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/individual/driver/
http://dri.freedesktop.org/libdrm/
http://www.mesa3d.org/

WARNING for Intel users - recompilling those to not screw up your OS is easy, but requires some knowledge how are original distro packages built (configure options), when I will sexy enough, I will write some howto.

ATI: Sorry guys, never touched this sh!t.

2. Get rid of eye candies in your setup - compiz etc. has to go - refer to your distribution documentation.

3. Renice 19 game client, so it doesn't fight for resources with other things, after getting char screen open a console and paste in it the following command:

renice 19 `ps axu | grep game | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}'`

4. Use your native resolution.

5. Close all currently not needed resource hogging programs - use htop to see what is going on your system ("yum install htop" or "apt-get install htop")

6. Use safe mode, however turning it on has some bugs (eg likes to wear off between logins), plus turn off unnecessary eye candies (set your options exactly like on pictures below)

First set your options like that:


Then set advanced options like that:


Now set safe mode:


Mind that "advanced options" button is inactive now. And this is how it should be when safe mode is realy set.

But sometimes it looks like that:


You need to check it every login, then unset and set safe mode again. When safe mode is correctly set then eg. you can't see paint on armours.

Also make sure your in game options looks like that:


Ok, now some nvidia stuff:




7. Few notes about sound: as several people pointed out - turning off the sound is also performance gain, however keeping the sound on (at least for me) improves game play, so I am leaving it up to your consideration.

Let me know if it helped you. ;-)

Regards.