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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 ...
Because the real reason we all have multiple boxes at home is because one computer setup or another will be inheriently more efficient at a given game than another. Thus a reasonable (to my mind) excuse for why my house is littered with redhat, tinylinux, w2k, and 98 boxes. I suppose it would work even better if most of them were running at the same time. . . .
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unfortunately, wineX doesn't see the same performance boost (windows2000 beats it):
d ows_gaming-05.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/02q2/020531/win
funny how the frame rate is capped at 50 for all resolutions though. it seems more like something is artificially keeping it there.
_f
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Wine and its a derivatives are a neat hack - but using this stuff is like having sex with 4 condoms on. We want good performance for Linux games - BUY THE LINUX VERSION.
Neverwinter Nights is a perfect example of how a game should be (er, will be) published - cross-platform, same box. I've prebought it already.
We should be supporting the game companies that port to Linux instead of trying to get games working at 50% of the performance of Windows.
... we'll have producers, that make multiplatform games (ID for example). However Most producers will stay away from Linux. Why? They are in bed with MS
You are delusional. Even Id has publicly stated, Game Developer Magazine, that Linux games do not make business sense, that they support various Unix platforms because they think it is cool to do so.
The primary reason companies do not target Linux is that there is no new market, no new sales. Linux gamers are already buying the Win32 version and dual booting or emulating. Porting to Linux would not generate a new sale, it would replace a Win32 sale with a Linux sale, no point in doing that.
The "Linux game market" only consists of those people who refuse to dual boot or emulate, and that population is too small to consider. There is no anti-Linux sentiment, there is no Microsoft control, there is only developers following gamers to whatever platform the gamers use. If there was money to be made from Linux gamers developers would be there.
In my experience Quake 3 would run about 4% slower under Linux (native linux client) with the same settings as under Windows 98. It would run faster if I compared it to 2000 (didn't have XP at the time).
I did this over multiple trials with an Nvidia card. Nothing terribly scientific just a real world test.
Does anybody else think its kinda weird that two of the games (Quake3, RTCW) are not DirectX games, but OpenGL?
:)
For all we know, vanilla wine does just as well for those games, and you don't have to pay $5/month. Of course, you could also download
the linux binaries, and get better performance, withouth paying $5/month
Umm, can I submit a response later?
Geforce 3d performance is great, but the 2d quality is just too awful for me.
I've tried many cards, and returned them all !
I'm waiting for a card that has good 3d _and_ 2d quality at the same time. The new radeon doesn't seem to have good drivers yet, I wonder what the matrox parhelia will be like.
I "upgraded" to 2930 yesterday. Glxgears was 500fps down and winex refused to run Jedi Knight.
This was solved by going back to 2880.
Hope that helps out some people whose games suddenly stopped working.
I have a Riva TNT2 based card in my gaming box (a 1.4GHz Athlon /w a Tbird core). This box, running Windows, could never give me decent frame rates in Unreal Tournament or Quake III with resolutions above 800x600 with decent texture quality. Now, under X, UT is silky smooth at 1024x768 with maximum detail. Quake III is only marginally better, but there is definitely an improvement. The only downside is that I have to clock the memory speed of my card down using NVclock otherwise I get random crashes (such that the mem and core speeds are the same). (But it's still faster than Windows.)
:\
Anyway, the point is that Linux turns out to be a powerful gaming platform (duh). It's a shame that there isn't more commercial game development taking place for it. TransGaming is doing a great job, but this bit about only supporting nVidia at this point is frustrating. This line, "This could change if other graphics card vendors improve their Linux drivers, but for now Nvidia is the only game in town" seems silly to me. ATI Radeon support under Linux is pretty solid (maybe not as good as nVidia's, but it is open source and that makes a huge difference) and so more attention ought to be paid to it. Besides, what's the point of restricting development to nVidia? We're dealing with OpenGL here, which is a common interface to all 3D hardware. What difference does it make, so long as X has proper GLX support? Does TransGaming get funded by nVidia?
Seems I shouldn't upgrade my TNT2 for a while.
Why bother.