For the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of a compact manifold with nonpositive curvature, a classical result of Manning asserts that the topological entropy of the geodesic flow equals the volume entropy of the universal cover. This is true in variable (nonpositive) curvature.
For the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of a negatively curved manifold, the topological entropy is equal to the critical exponent of the fundamental group of the manifold (result due to Otal-Peigné in full generality. You just have to assume that the curvature is bounded between two negative constants).
The critical exponent of the group is always equal to the Hausdorff dimension of the conical (also called radial) limit set of the group acting on the boundary at infinity (in variable negative curvature).
I don't remember if the result in this generality is due to Sullivan (he writes in curvature -1, but the arguments are often general), or maybe to Bishop-Jones.
For general noncompact manifolds, the critical exponent(=topological entropy) is strictly smaller than the dimension of the boundary. In this situation it is not reasonable to expect an equality with the volume entropy of the universal cover, which is the common value of the topological entropies of all geodesic flows of all compact quotients.
An interesting phenomenon arises in the finite volume case.
One could expect that the result of Manning could still be true.
In fact, if the curvature varies too much in the cusps, the equality fails to happen. See here a work of Dalbo Peigne Picaud Sambusetti
For your question of normalization: I believe that when you scale the metric of the manifold, you scale also the natural distances on the boundary, and therefore Hausdorff dimension of limit sets.