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Half-Life 2 Under Linux Review
as writes "TransGaming Technologies, a developer of software portability products that allow game developers and publishers to develop games for one system and deploy them across multiple platforms, has released version 4.2 of their Wine fork Cedega on 7 December 2004. The new version of Cedega 4.2 offers support for Valve's bleeding edge action shooter Half-Life 2. linuX-gamers.net has tested Half-Life 2 with Cedega 4.2 and has written a short review of the game under Linux."
My understanding is that the Nvidia 5xxxFX line runs the direct X 8.1 path in half life 2. This is mostly due to these cards being too slow at running the DX 9 path with 32bit precision (Nvidia cards do not support 24bit precision).
There is a hack for running the FX series at 16bit precision on the DX 9 path which supposedly gives much better performance in HL2.
Dropping the DX lvl to 8 or 7 will definately speed things up at the expense of some graphical niceties.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I've tried winex about half a dozen times over the last three or so years, and every time my conclusion has been that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Games generally push the limits of affordable technology. If a cutting-edge game is designed solely for windows, it usually pushes the limits of memory, CPU, and graphics to such an extreme that it's barely playable on a typical gaming PC. HL2 is no exception. If you take that barely playable game and then run it through an additional layer of overhead (winex) then it's going to be less than "barely playable." How could it not be?
Doom3 is cutting edge, yet it works great in Linux. The powers that be at Id were nice enough to devote sufficient resources to insuring that a native Linux version existed. Maybe it was done out of respect for the community that makes the high-availability servers possible that host the multiplayer doom (and quake, and RTCW) games. Whatever the reason, Id deserves the Linux gaming community's support.
The makers of HL2 seem to have shown very little desire to support Linux. They don't want the Linux gaming community's business. I can accept that, and move on. If the game is so friggin great, I'll suck it up, buy Windows XP home for $100 or so, install it on a 10G partition, and play the damn game. It probably won't take any longer to get going, or cost much less (if any) in the long run.
I'm on an Athlon 3200 and I've never had a loading time longer than twenty seconds (not counting the startup). Sounds like more of a system issue to me.
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