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Review of Doom 3 on Linux
yamla writes "Doom 3 was released for Linux sometime last week. LinuxHardware.org decided to test how well it runs compared to the Windows version. Read the article here, including some technical information from the id Software employee who did the Linux port, Timothee Besset." AnandTech has a similar review available.
That's it folks. For more boring details, well RTFA :)
You forgot to mention that a large part of this performance difference is likely due to the lack of SSE2 instructions in the linux version. This will be fixed as he finishes porting the ASM from the windows source.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
No, they use OpenGL on both platforms
but they use DirectX for input and sound on Windows.
They look quite different on the different platforms anyway (in general the Linux version looks worse)
Maybe you should look again.
From the article:
The final graphics point we'd like to point out may be the most important, especially when comparing the Windows to Linux benchmarks. Going back to the full-size screenshots shown above, when comparing the Windows to Linux images, you can tell that at both low and medium quality settings the images seem to produce comparable results. When moving to high quality though, the Linux output does not match the Windows output. If you pay attention to the rock area highlighted by the flashlight, the image is much improved under Linux. When looking at the Windows output, the high quality image is indistinguishable from the medium quality output. This may explain some of the speed differences between Linux and Windows at high quality. It is unknown why the two operating systems are treating this setting differently.
So not only does the linux version look better, but that's part of the reason it's running slower.
As others have mentioned, this is not true: Doom3 uses OpenGL on both platforms. At the same time, Doom3 is also often mentioned as an example of 'Direct3D 9.0c' graphics performance. That's because it is one of the first, and right now arguable the most important, game using all the new nice features in the last DirectX. But without using Direct3D.
Confusing, eh?
Jan
1) That I don't know, they have always lagged a bit, but typically they eventually catch up to near what the windows release does.
.rpm/.deb/.pkg or anything.
2) There are 64-bit versions of the nVidia drivers for amd64, they work great, I'm using them right now. The rest of the kernel has been 64-bit capable for many, many moons so no worries there. There are a bunch of amd64 distros out there, Gentoo, SuSE, and I'm using an unofficial port of debian to amd64, which by the way works great.
3) Again, no info.
4) There is a little installer, they package a few libs in with it, but with a small change to the installer, it worked great on debian/amd64. But it's basically just a raw binary, no
You can play Doom3 on fully Open Source system (without any binary drivers).
./doom3
All you need is:
- Radeon with R200 chip (8500, 9000, 9100, etc)
- latest DRI driver (from Mesa CVS)
- S3TC library (you can find it with google)
Just compile Mesa, copy file r200_dri.so to your X modules, make sure hardware acceleration is working, then... run Doom3 (with following env set):
LD_PRELOAD=libGL.so.1 R200_NO_TCL=1
(if you see no textures, make sure you have installed S3TC library!)
I have it working on my computer. Please don't repeat that nVidia and binary drivers are required. It is not true.