Games in Linux

Beelzebub

Does anyone play windows games in Linux or BSD?
Using WINE or the CEDEGA Transgaming engine.
I am thinking of moving to Linux but firstly I need to know if people find it an acceptable alternative to Windows for gaming or not.

Capt'n Midnight

Any particular games ?

You also have the option of dual boot, a clean install of windows just for gaming.

Is this on an existing machine or were you looking at a new machine without the "Microsoft tax ?"

djmarkus

i have used wine to play many popular games, most notibly HL2 and CS:S, you will get the odd bug and a 20-30% performance decrease but perfectly playable on decent hardware.

Cake Fiend

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

You also have the option of dual boot, a clean install of windows just for gaming.

+1 for this, at least until you find your linux legs. I've had reasonable success with games like Half-Life, CS and QuakeWorld, but it's been a while, so I don't remember whether I got anything else running.

Khannie

Some games run natively (anything from ID software or Epic .... Unreal tournament, quake 4, doom, etc.). Other than that, you're looking at wine alright. It's pretty decent as others have pointed out.

TBH, I tried dual booting, and you just wont bother booting linux. I always recommend just diving in. You may dive out again the first time, but you'll have learned a lot on the way.

Also, the latest kernels have support for the new hardware virtualisation technology (though no direct3d support yet) so we may be seeing windows games running at lovely speeds on linux soon.

Beelzebub

Thanks for all the advice and comments, they are much appreciated.
Games like Doom3, HL and HL2, F.E.A.R., Prey,Far Cry...mostly FPS,the list goes on...
I plan to do a dual boot as one person suggested, at first anyway and try to get games working on Linux. I've some experience of installing Linux this way.
I need the dual boot, because Linux doesn't support my TV Card(and that's my TV!), well it's apparently a pita to get it working, but I may try this too!


I was looking at the Mandriva distro with Lindvd and Cedega included...for 49 Euros(which isn't bad), but I guess it goes against the free software ethos.

The "20-30% performance decrease" is a bit of a bummer though!

Thanks again.

mick.fr

Beelzebub wrote:

...for 49 Euros(which isn't bad), but I guess it goes against the free software ethos.

Torrent is your friend :-) And this is legal.

nesf

Beelzebub wrote:

Thanks for all the advice and comments, they are much appreciated.
Games like Doom3, HL and HL2, F.E.A.R., Prey,Far Cry...mostly FPS,the list goes on...
I plan to do a dual boot as one person suggested, at first anyway and try to get games working on Linux. I've some experience of installing Linux this way.
I need the dual boot, because Linux doesn't support my TV Card(and that's my TV!), well it's apparently a pita to get it working, but I may try this too!


I was looking at the Mandriva distro with Lindvd and Cedega included...for 49 Euros(which isn't bad), but I guess it goes against the free software ethos.

The "20-30% performance decrease" is a bit of a bummer though!

Thanks again.

Are you planning on using an ATI card?

Khannie

nesf wrote:

Are you planning on using an ATI card?

Oh yeah...forgot to mention that....ATI cards are a bit lacking for 3D on linux (though their drivers have been steadily improving).

nesf

Khannie wrote:

Oh yeah...forgot to mention that....ATI cards are a bit lacking for 3D on linux (though their drivers have been steadily improving).

They are still pretty flaky with the 1000 series. If the OP has one he'd probably be better off using Windows for games tbh.

Beelzebub

Yeah it's ATI(even worse it's an All in Wonder 9800SE), I know NVidia is much better supported in Linux.
But I am not upgrading this machine anymore(though I do have a Geforce 4 4800SE, but that would be a step backwards).
NFII XP2500+
It'll be a full new system when I decide to upgrade. Which will be either late this year or early next.

nesf

Beelzebub wrote:

Yeah it's ATI(even worse it's an All in Wonder 9800SE), I know NVidia is much better supported in Linux.
But I am not upgrading this machine anymore(though I do have a Geforce 4 4800SE, but that would be a step backwards).
NFII XP2500+
It'll be a full new system when I decide to upgrade. Which will be either late this year or early next.

The support for the 9xxx series cards is meant to be better, or at least that's what I've read. Though the performance hit on that old a card could make some games practically unplayable.

djmarkus

ordinary WINE is as good if not better than cedega at this stage.

Beelzebub

Laziness is keeping me on XP at the moment...at the weekend I'll try something.
I have another machine that I might just use to experiment on first.

flamegrill

I play Max Payne 2 under Cedga regularly. It works pretty well, even though my PC is 4 years old. Most games work, especially the ones they claim to support. Those ones work very well.

My 2c.

Paul

wayne040576

I used cedega\wine to play half life 2 for about a year. Complete waste of time. Everytime I started it up it was hit and miss. Most times, it would crash then I'd spend about an hour looking on message boards trying to find out how to get around the latest steam update. By the time I'd get it working, I wasn't in the mood for playing anymore. Even when it did run it was very unstable had a poor frame rate and some features like the torch wouldn't work. This happened with most games that I tried this way. The best performing game was knights of the old republic 2.
I eventually gave up and just use a small XP install on the machine for games.

xbox-face

I play games in linux yes, it works with installing required games before trying to play games

Red Alert

For gaming (or direct rendering in general) are you better off using the ATI Proprietary driver or the X.org one? Do features like TV out / dual monitor work on either? Is 3D accelerated on the Xorg one?

I've got an ATI Radeon 9200 working with their drivers on Gentoo linux. It's good for playing RTCW. Also got a dell laptop with an ATI Radeon Mobility chip, currently doesn't run linux.

ancapailldorcha

Hi, I just installed ubuntu on my system as a dual-boot and it doesn't recognise my nvidia GPU. Can anyone help as I'm terrified to do anything in case I do some permanent damage?:(

Khannie

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Hi, I just installed ubuntu on my system as a dual-boot and it doesn't recognise my nvidia GPU. Can anyone help as I'm terrified to do anything in case I do some permanent damage?:(

Software cannot really permanently damage to hardware. Have a google for ubuntu install nvidia drivers or something like that. Plenty of guides available.

sobriquet

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Hi, I just installed ubuntu on my system as a dual-boot and it doesn't recognise my nvidia GPU. Can anyone help as I'm terrified to do anything in case I do some permanent damage?:(

You probably want the Restricted Driver Manager, it installed the drivers perfectly for my NV card. It's in the System/Administration menu (or should be). Try this and this to start off.

The first link looks very verbose but just skip down to the section marked 'Ubuntu 7.04 using 'Restricted Devices Manager' which applies to the latest Ubuntu (7.10) as well. The second link details the same thing, but with screenshots. He uses the older Ubuntu release, but I think things have stayed the same.

Now, a few people suffered from a thing called the Black Screen of Death, myself included, upon rebooting. I solved it by modifying a line in the boot menu, but apparently some people have needed to uninstall the drivers. This happened in the second link above, but here's a set of search terms you want need to try in case it happens.

Orion

For the nvidia card install Envy and let it install the driver for you - takes the pain away

As for gaming - I play WoW and the HalfLife series (Orange Box) in Wine. WoW is as good if not better response than windows tbh. HL2 does take a slight performance hit but not much.

Dorsanty

Khannie wrote: »

the latest kernels have support for the new hardware virtualisation technology (though no direct3d support yet) so we may be seeing windows games running at lovely speeds on linux soon.

PCI express 2 will bring with it Input-Output Virtualization or IOV. So in theory in the very near future virtual machines will be able to access your GPU properly.

While pcie 2 is out now I don't think any virtualization solutions are out there to take advantage yet. Might be end of the year start of next before we see it.

Naikon

I am using WINE to play stuff like the half life 2 episodes,portal, S.T.A.L.K.ER, Prey and Call of duty 4(which runs poorly compared to windows).
WINE is a very nice tool, Perfect for most office apps etc.I use it for running the compiler we "have" to use in College at the moment and it works flawlessly.

Gaming however is hit and miss, Half life 2 and the very new shader intensive games run pretty crap in comaparison to Windows.
Prey ran at a constant 60fps so it's on par with windows.
CS:S and HL2 run very well in Directx 8.1 mode but very poorly in DX9 mode
The source games in general are very playable despite the performance issues.

Any Windows game with an OpenGL path runs very well in wine for obvious reasons, but the all out Directx game engines take a hit.
I play the doom and quake games nativly and they run perfectly.
We need more native games

Orion

Naikon wrote: »

Call of duty 4(which runs poorly compared to windows).

I was actually coming back to this thread to ask this. How bad is it - I'm downloading the demo atm to try it out.

Naikon

Macros42 wrote: »

I was actually coming back to this thread to ask this. How bad is it - I'm downloading the demo atm to try it out.

I was running it on a single 7600gt with a AMD X2 4400 and 1 gig of DDR2 5300.
Not the best Gfx card but it's served we well up to now.
It ran which was interesting enough, but no matter what resolution the performance was the same at 10-26 fps.

In Windows it ran at about 35-40fps constant for the most part.
Try it out though, as the latest version of Wine has apparently includes new Directx specific improvements.

Orion

I will - have the demo downloaded. GFX is 8800GTS on a E6600 Core 2 Duo w/ 2Gb PC6400 (another 2 gig coming on Thursday ) - I'll let you know what fps I get.

Naikon

Macros42 wrote: »

I will - have the demo downloaded. GFX is 8800GTS on a E6600 Core 2 Duo w/ 2Gb PC6400 (another 2 gig coming on Thursday ) - I'll let you know what fps I get.

Cheers:), you should have no problem with that setup.