Review of Linux Gaming Using WineX 2.0

Ceyx writes "Toms Hardware ist running an Interesting review of DirectX Gaming under Linux using WineX. An interesting point is that the native Quake3 Arena runs faster with Linux then with windows." I had the good luck to play Jedi Knight Outcast and Return To Castle Wolfenstein at my friend's house, and it was really pretty good. The numbers show just how good the Linux drivers from nVidia are, so mad props to Mark V and his co-workers ...

Comments

Real benchmarks!111

[Time Doctor]

http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=541

Re:Just think of it this way

[NanoGator]

"Would you rather play Nintendo games through an emulator, or that NES attached to the TV in the corner?"

In that case, I'd rather play the emulator. Every time I turn on my NES, it just sits there blinking at me.

Re:Just think of it this way

[swankypimp]

Would you rather play Nintendo games through an emulator, or that NES attached to the TV in the corner?

The nice thing about the emulator is that you don't have to blow air on it for twenty minutes before your game works correctly.

Re:but WineX vs. Windows

[Permission Denied]

I must be an idiot, because deCSS makes it sooo easy to pirate DVDs, and I can't even get the SOB to play them

By no means are you an idiot. DVD playing under Linux isn't quite there yet. I recently ranted about this elsewhere. Do a search for "linux DVD playing" on google, and you end up with the so-called "Linux DVD Playing Howto" which tells you to use livid/oms. Oms is dead. The "Linux DVD Playing Howto" is completely misleading, but you won't realize this until you've invested at least three or four hours getting the latest oms CVS and then figuring which decss plugin to use (as there are at least three but only one actually works). If you manage to finally get something that can read DVDs and output to your monitor, you'll find that oms doesn't do sound sync, so you still won't be able to watch movies.

So your next step is to complain on a forum like slashdot (this is what I did). You will then get replies telling you something to the order of "you are a fucking idiot, oms is dead, you should use xine/mplayer, it works better than in windows for me." So then you try xine or mplayer. But first, you must update your kernel, then update to XFree86 4.2, then update your SDL and maybe even update your gcc and binutils as mplayer won't even compile (well, actually it fails at the assembly step) with older versions of binutils. If you choose xine, you then have to figure out which decss plugin to use as there are quite a few to choose from, and only one or two that work (I understood dvdnav was the one to use, but an anonymous comrade just pointed out a different one in this thread). If you choose mplayer, you're in for a treat: here are the installation instructions. It took me about an hour and a half to go through those instructions before I was finally able to run mplayer's configure script. And if you think you can download some pre-built binary, you're wrong: all the mplayer asm optimizations are determed by your CPU type, which is determined by the configure script, not through run-time detection. Fortunately, mplayer does not require a separate decss plugin, so you don't have to go hunting through mailing lists and online forums to figure out which decss plugin works and which decss plugins are crap.

So, once you've compiled mplayer or xine and you've sufficiently frobbed your /proc to turn on DMA on your CD drive and get your MTRRs set up, you can actually run these programs and see if you get DVD output. Unfortunately, this is the point where you find out that the XFree86 4.2 ATI Rage 3D driver claims to support the XV extension, but, in fact, does not work correctly, causing xine and mplayer to fail on startup. So, now you have to use some "output plugin" that does not require the XV extension. The only output plugin capable enough to play DVDs would be the SDL output plugin, so you try to use that (you did remeber to enable SDL support at ./configure, didn't you?).

My suggestion: forget it. Your time is expensive and you have better things to do. There is a very vocal minority of Linux users who claim that DVD playing under Linux works beautifully: I can't argue with them. Linux DVD playback works well for them, but not for the rest of us. Look at it this way: you can spend one or two days figuring out if DVD playback will even work with your hardware, or you could go to a temp agency and get some crap job for a weekend, make $150 and buy a dedicated DVD player to hook up to your TV. Now, cut out the crap temp job which was only meant to demonstrate the value of your time, go buy the damned player, and be absolutely 100% certain that you'll be watching DVDs by the end of the weekend.

Re:but WineX vs. Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG LOL LOL LOL u said Windoze!! mad props!

Re:Just think of it this way

[kenthorvath]

Actually, I here there is a NESticle plugin for that!