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Doom 3 - Linux, Multi-Monitor, DirectX 8 Solutions

Posted by simoniker on from the alternative dept.

nukem996 writes "While the official port of Doom 3 to Linux is still not complete and we still do not know when it is going to be out, other then 'in a few days after the Windows release', Linux users can finally play Doom 3 on Linux with the help of Wine." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader points to a post on the GideonTech forums explaining multi-monitor Doom 3 play, with the caveat: "Doing this with only 2 monitors completely sucks. You want atleast 3, or 5.. or any odd number of monitors (so your center of playing field isn't split between two monitors)." Finally, toasted_calamari explains: "We have written a guide to optimizing Doom 3 for DirectX 8 systems, particularly older ATI Radeon cards. This guide should assist owners of older hardware in running Doom 3 more effectively without upgrading."

9 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what's the point of emulation? by cyberkreiger · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're missing the fact that Wine(X) Is Not an Emulator. Doom3 under Wine(X) runs directly on the hardware.

    --
    Stumbling in the dark
    I hear slavering of jaws
    Eaten by a grue.
  2. Re:what's the point of emulation? by Satertek · · Score: 1, Informative
    Wine Is Not an Emulator

    With that said, there is usually only minimal to no decrease in performace when using Wine.

  3. While you're waiting... by ZorinLynx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Play some classic DOOM! This is a beautiful port of classic DOOM to Linux:

    http://prboom.sourceforge.net/

    You'll need original WAD files, of course.... But this port can play at high resolutions using OpenGL, has nice sounding music support (something fairly lacking in most DOOM ports) and is fairly accurate to the original.

    I've been playing these past few days and have rediscovered what a great game the original DOOM was! And the soundtrack was great too!

    -Z

  4. Doom3 on Wine experiences by pp · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've played it that way on my athlon 2000+geforce 4 ti4200. It's quite playable, most notable problems are that it's _SLOW_ for about 15-20 secs
    after loading a game. Going to the menus and using the PDA for a while and it goes back to a reasonable 20-25fps or so. Also I end up having to restart the game completely after dying, trying to load a game at that point just gives a black screen.

    After a hardware upgrade and a native client it should be great, hardware upgrade for the speed
    and native client to get rid of those glitches ;-)

  5. Linux solution didn't work for me... by DoktorSeven · · Score: 2, Informative

    I saw this a few days back and gave it a try, but no such luck - the game refused to run at all, giving me an "unhandled exception" right away. Strange thing though, is that plain wine (20040615) ran the thing fine... well, if you call "fine" looking very washed out, textures missing/wrong, etc. However, everything was very bright and you could actually see where you're going without a flashlight! :)

    --
    This is a sig. Deal with it.
  6. Re:what's the point of emulation? by cjpez · · Score: 2, Informative
    Wine is naturally an emulator.
    Actually, no it's not. Wine merely implements the Windows API. Emulation, with relation to computers, generally involves taking machine language instruction-per-instruction and emulating the physical environment, so you can do things like run arcade games a la MAME, x86 envrionments a la Bochs, or other architectures. Wine doesn't do any of that. It merely allows the Windows binary to be executed in a non-windows environment. Prior to Sorenson support in mplayer, I used Crossover to play Quicktime videos, and they ran fine. I don't see any difference in performance between native Windows/Wine on Half-Life, GTA3, or GTA-VC.

    I'm sure you could find some examples where performance did noticeably decrease because the Wine implementation of a particular API wasn't optimally, er, implemented. But that's got nothing to do with actual hardware emulation.

    --
    Al Qaeda has ninjas!
  7. Related note... by ajservo · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's an ATI fix floating around on a board somewhere... It's mixed as it working for people. Although it seems to work for many, on my system, when I applied the fix to the code, rebooting to the game, I had lost all textures on ALL surfaces, and could only see lighting sources and my weapon's indicator readout. BACK UP YOUR FILES before attempting... I'm glad I did.

  8. performance increase by DiniZuli · · Score: 2, Informative

    You have propaply allready seen this, but anyway here goes (don't know if it works on Linux though - but cannot see why it shouldn't):

    The following commands control the image cache, which if enabled and set correctly can help smooth FPS and may also boost performance:

    image_useCache [0,1] - If set to 1, uses background loading to cache image information. This may not necessarily improve framerate performance, but it does assist in smoothing out frame rates and reducing loading pauses. Note that the image_cacheMinK (see below) size must be raised from its default otherwise the game will crash when using this setting. Once this setting is enabled, the actual cache value is set in the image_cacheMegs setting below.

    image_cacheMegs [Megabytes] - Determines the maximum amount of system memory to allocate to temporary loading of full-sized precompressed images if the cache is enabled by setting image_useCache to 1. Note that since this caching only applies to precompressed images, using the Ultra Quality setting will render this setting useless, since at Ultra quality no texture compression is used. Since a cache is only a temporary holding area, and not the place where the entire game is meant to reside, do not raise this value to something extremely high as that will simply reduce the available memory for the rest of Doom 3. Try a value of 128MB for those with 512MB of system RAM, and if you have more than 1GB of RAM, you can try a higher value like 196MB or 256MB for example. Do not set this to half your system RAM or some other monstrous amount.

    image_cacheMinK [KiloBytes] - This setting determines the minimum size in KB for precompressed image files to be loaded into the cache. To make sure most image files can be loaded, and to also prevent a system crash when enabling caching, select a value like 3072 to start with. Raising this setting may improve caching, but it may also hinder caching if most textures are below the size you specify, so don't just raise this value for the hell of it.

    got this from here

    and if you have some extra space on your hard-drive go look here

  9. Re:what's the point of emulation? by cjpez · · Score: 2, Informative
    Debate continues!
    ... instead of just painfully slow.
    Well, you appear to have had different experiences than I have, because like I said, I haven't noticed any difference in speed.
    ...but the performance never comes close to fooling anyone.

    In my own video-game tests, a 500mhz Celeron with an NVidia GeForce2MX with WinXP beat an Athlon 1700 with GeForceFX5700 using Cedega on Linux, by sometimes 60% FPS. (Other versions of Wine were even slower)

    Again, we seem to be having different experiences here. I've never seen any difference in speed on the programs that I've run under Wine. Any program that's sufficiently supported under Wine for me works just as quickly as it does over in Windows-land. I guess there's not much more to be said about that, as there's really no way for me to prove that to you, or vice versa.
    Linux systems are split into more different processes than Windows, so an function that a Windows app expects to have serviced immediately instead takes at least 3 process time-slices as we wait first for the separate server to wake up and respond, and then wait again for the app to reactivate and proceed onward.
    Sure, of course Linux is more compartmentalized, after all, it's constructed as a multiuser system from the ground up. Perhaps we've been running differently-optimized kernels or glibc versions or something, though, because as I said, I've never noticed a performance hit because of it.
    Yet, as you mention, Half-Life still doesn't work decently. That's a lesson as to how useful Wine is likely to be.
    Perhaps I overstated the issue with Half-Life. The menus merely run more slowly than they do on Windows. Everything else runs just as well. I think it was a matter of the Winex developers getting it "good enough" and then moving on to make sure that other applications got good enough. I've spent many, many hours playing Half-Life through to conclusion via winex, in addition to (as mentioned) GTA3, GTA-VC, watching Quicktime movies, and as I didn't mention before because I haven't used them in awhile, all of the usual MS Office applications (using Crossover again, here). If you don't consider that useful, then I guess it's just a difference of opinion, because for me it's been immensely useful.
    --
    Al Qaeda has ninjas!