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Best Configuration for Linux Gaming?
werjman asks: "I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming. What I really want to know is what distro, graphical environment, Window Manager, and so forth are low on the system resources and play games great (and by games, I mean 3D accelerated memory hogs). Does anyone out there actually use Linux as a gaming platform?"
I use Gentoo GNU/Linux and fluxbox as a WM. Works great.
... rogue runs on Linux.
Damn young whippersnappers, anyway.
I heard that WINE does a lot of windows program emulation... Can't really give you more insight about it but maybe someone else can.
If it's a fullscreen 3D game that you want to devote as much of your resources as you can, you can change your runlevel so that you login on the console. Then just use xinit. I personally use fluxbox on Slack 10 though, on an older P4 2.0GHz and a Geforce3 Ti200, and I get decent play with most settings between medium and low on UT2k4.
www.xfce.org xfce is my favorite (of course this is an opinion). It doesn't seem as barebones are fluxbox yet is light and fast.
Fire up X with nothing in your .xinitrc or .xsession except for the line to launch your game. X is stopped when your game terminates.
Stop sshd, inetd, any web servers, any mail serers, reschedule any cron jobs for while you are at work or sleeping, and absolutely do not use gdm or other login display manager.
If you are the sort of person who wants to get every last fps possible, then I suppose you could use Gentoo and compile everything with all optimizations for your platform (Gentoo is the easiest way to accomplish this). You just type exactly what each step tells you in the Gentoo installation manual, and it very easy (just don't try this for anything more important than your gaming machine).
Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a PS2 or Gamecube, I am pretty sure you can get them second hand on Ebay for good prices.
Stop making excuses for your Windows partition. You don't need it, remove it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As far as graphics cards go it seems as if nvidia, although not open source, still has the lead as is noted in this review
Self-promotion: blixtra.org
First set your system up without graphical login, which most distributions configure by default. /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel to 3, this means find the line /usr/local/games/doom3/doom3
To do this edit
id:3:initdefault:
which will normally read 5 and change it to 3 (like mine is), Fedora inittab files are well commented and explain what to do, others are probably similar.
To go into X (the windowing system) you type startx after logging in, this gives you your regular desktop, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever.
When you are bored with email quit out of X and run your game with (I think)
xinit
I read that here
I've been wondering this myself. I've gotten CS to work on most distro's, but after getting burnt out for years of trying to get other games working on linux, I've just used my linux boxes for either servers or desktops that needed X.
Gentoo has some nice patched kernels for gamers, and the gentoo forums are the best forums out there. And then use transgaming to complete it.
As for a desktop wm, depends on how much functionality you want. The barest wm is twm. But then whats a 150K or so, might as well run IceWM which has a nice taskbar.
The easiest out of the box setup is Mandrake for gamers, less configuration and config time.
Just my 2 cents.
I heartily recommend twm-gl for your desktop. It has all the lightness of the original twm window manager but some of the best use of OpenGL acceleration on the desktop you've ever seen.
What's really amazing is that you can eke out a boost in 3D game performance by using it. Really, one of the best, but lesser known, free software projects. (And since it's free software, I hear that a Windows and MacOS X version is in the works. Awesome!)
Give it a try.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I took this chance to actually put some cash in m$ pocket when they've been getting "better" on the security, etc... front. Sure, mod me down or whatever for saying these anti-opensource things here. Not like i actually did anything for linux or open source. ;-)
I've found that this works the best (aside from my PS/2) for my needs. YMMV depending on what you need.
Gentoo has a few dozen different kernels at your disposal. There used to be a gaming-sources kernel that was based on ck-sources. The other popular kernel in portage for gaming is mm-sources by Andrew Morton (the guy Linus lets go hog-wild with the kernel).
Kernels not in Gentoo portage but compatible and designed for speed are:
nitro-sources (ck-sources + reiser4 + framebuffer + other stuff)
love-sources (community maintained kernel to optimize desktop performance and test "unstable" patches)
speedy-sources (love-sources w/ reiser4)
Oh, and looking at the forums nearly everyone uses an nVidia card. So far, nVidia plays nicer with x.org than ATI.
Direct away from face when opening.
How about a windows machine configured right next to your linux box. Seriously, it has the pro over a dual-boot at least in that you don't have to reboot to switch operating systems. I recommend a monitor switch to let you use the same monitor for both computers (and of course, allows you to instantly switch). Make sure you get a good one though or your will have some funky artifacts on your screen...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Get a seperate machine and run Windows.... And if you hate windows and feel oppressed just reading the name, steal/burn a copy from someone, you'll feel better...
One thing that bugs me is the limited audio enhancements in gaming. No EAX support since CL doesn't make Linux drivers nor share it for driver creators. Even with Transgaming for old Diablo 2, I could not enable EAX/3D sound for my old SB Live! card.
Has this been improved yet? I don't play games in Linux these days.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Cedega is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here.
Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions.
There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs, flightgear, tuxracer are some examples.
Projects like libsdl are making cross-platform game development easier.
Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.
In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian unstable for amd64.
As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears to run, give ut2004demo a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.
Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a PS2 or Gamecube
Windows and Mac games are not the same as console games. You might just as well recommend he buy a chess set or get a stick and can.
I am pretty sure you can get them second hand on Ebay for good prices.
Nobody asked for your shopping recommendations, you condescending, arrogant asshole.
Stop making excuses for your Windows partition.
Psychologizing is fun. For my part I'll add that you should stop reinforcing your inferiority complex. It's okay that you run Linux; you have to find inner peace with the fact that you have less and worse-quality apps available (and no games of any better quality than a PS2 or Gamecube - apparently), before you will be able to make peace with others.
You don't need it, remove it.
If only the doctor had emphasized this more strongly to your mother at Planned Parenthood, the world might be a better place.
I don't consider myself a "PC Gamer", I generally prefer console games, though I do have a few PC games that I play occasionally (Neverwinter Nights, UT2k4), I ran Linux exclusively for quite a while (I have a mac now as well, though I've never used it for games). I have to say that, in my experience with a few different distro's (pre-fedora versions of redhat, Mandrake, Debian, and Suse), I've found that Suse is really a nice distribution for 3D support- if you use an nVidia card. You can choose at install time if you want open source 3D drivers, or the official nVidia drivers, and if you update your system, getting the drivers working again is as easy as refreshing the install from YaST.
As for a window manager, Window Maker seems to be pretty light weight, or if you really want to get fancy, you can write a script to drop you out of a window manager completely and just run the game on top of plain ol' X. To be completely honest though, I run KDE most of the time, and have never found it's memory footprint to be a problem even when I'm running rather resource intensive games or applications. I have a buttload of ram though, so YYMV.
Others have mentioned Cedega, which is not free, though you can get the source free from CVS if you feel like messing about with configuring it and compiling it yourself. AFAIK their licensing doesn't prohibit this, it only prohibits you distributing it to anyone else.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
For the love of WINE, don't do an LFS system if you want Cedega to work at all. Between my dillying and dallying with RC kernels, nVidia drivers, supporting libraries and GCC versions, I can tell you that every time I do something, I've gotta fix something in Cedega :S
So make sure your distro is 'non-volatile' before you take the plunge with Cedega.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
I've been using/gaming in linux for years now and the only distrobution that's given me (too much) grief has been Fedora Core 3. I had this little ditty installed a few weeks ago and I couldn't even play my collection of Loki ports (SmacPack or SimCity 3000) they just segfaulted. WineX didn't work either so I didn't do much gaming done at all. Aside from that single bad experience I've actually had more luck with games like steam under linux rather than Windows!! StarCraft, Steam, Diablo II, most everything works great!!
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
It doesn't make a difference whether wine is an emulator or not, but wine is still an emulator. My computer's case is black, but even though color does not affect the computer's functionality, the case is still black.
wine's emulatorness has already been debated 50000 times before; a slashdot story from many months ago features posts where a few people show that wine is naturally an emulator.
I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I've had good luck with a GeForce4 Ti that I bought last year running under Gentoo. A lot of new games are coming available for Linux (Doom 3 comes to mind -- I don't have it, but I play Quake 3 Arena and find the Linux Q3A experience to be more pleasant than the Windows experience), and for those that don't, WINE and Cedega can sometimes pick up the slack.
I have both WINE and Cedega installed on my Gentoo system (and, FWIW, you can obtain Cedega from CVS without paying for it so long as you don't need the Point2Play feature, which I don't use despite having a licensed version). Cedega tackles some games relatively well. Grand Theft Auto III, for instance, runs nicely for me, and Starsiege: Tribes is essentially flawless.
I don't have a Windows machine to use for gaming and I find that the Linux gaming options available are most sufficient for me. The nvidia drivers aren't perfect (they are the only reason I ever see crashes), but they work and perform decently, and games under Cedega run well enough that I can enjoy them. Native games like Q3A, UT2k3 and UT2k4 run flawlessly.
"Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!" -- Montgomery Scott, ST:III
If you are very familiar with Linux, you will likely be very satisfied with your experience, and even likely to have fewer problems than your Windows using friends(for games that run on Linux, that is).
So first off, you need the proper hardware. You _need_ an NVIDIA card. Don't bother with ATI, their drivers are unstable and perform terribly. With NVIDIA, you will be up and running in no time.
Second, you need a decent sound chip. If you have a laptop, chances are you're screwed, unless you're seriously willing to tinker. You will want a card that supports hardware mixing, all common audio frequencies(many newer cheap cards only support 48000). A SB Live is probably your best bet, unless you know of another card on the market today with those features that is supported well in Linux. If you use the alsa drivers, be sure to load the oss compatibility modules, and you may have to $ echo "binary 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss, to get some games to work. Google is your friend. Substitute "binary" with the actual name of the program, eg. "quake3.x86" or whatever.
Build yourself a custom kernel, do not include DRI or agpgart. The NVIDIA drivers have their own agp support, with better support for different/broken hardware.
Get yourself a gig of memory already, and you won't need to worry about your WM. Just don't have any silly CPU consuming applets running.
If you have to ask what distro to use... well, I don't know quite what to tell you. Any distro can be made to work if you know what you're doing. But since you're asking for a recommendation, I heartily recommend Gentoo. It will, hopefully, teach you a bit more about how your system works, and it is the most flexible of the mainstream distros, IMO.
Cheers, and good luck.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I personally use Fedora Core 3 with a custom built version of the 2.6.9 kernel. I have an AMP XP2100+, 1 gig pc2700, Nvidia Geforce 4 T14600, and a Sound Blaster Live 5.1. Gaming tends to be pretty smooth for me on this machine. I use/subscribe to Transgaming's Cedega. It makes dumping M$ a heck of a lot easier than any distro can right out of the box/ftp server.
Last time I checked, that arch was still unsupported; I check so often, that I dare call you a TROLL without bothering to check again.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
loki installers for linux gamers
To those of you suggesting that a lightweight window manager is the way to go, I have to ask, what exactly is the point? The last time I did this was back in the early G400 days, when things like CPU meters updating add significant X server context-switch overhead (far more than the under 1% of CPU time such apps might take). It saves some RAM, sure, but think about it:
1) RAM costs next to nothing these days - 512MB goes for under AU$100 locally.
2) Even without enough real RAM, this is a classic example of what virtual memory is for. After a quick game, is logging back in to your desktop, reloading all your apps and then getting back to your work really quicker than just leaving the OS to swap your apps back in?
For me, one of the joys of Linux is the ability to have my desktop and applications open 24/7 for weeks on end. If you're going to log out every time you play a game, you might as well just hit the reboot button in your login manager and go play in XP.
To answer the topic, I'd suggest an NVIDIA video card (the 6600GT is, by all indications, awesome, and NVIDIA's Linux drivers are better than ATI's), a Creative SB Live! or Audigy card (no need to knock yourself out - an older OEM Live! card will do fine), and an Athlon 64 CPU. There's no Linux-specific reason to go for the Athlon 64 over the P4 (though playing with 64-bit Linux can be fun), but they just seem to be a better chip for the money overall, and a better gaming chip in particular.
Any distro, LILO, Windows XP and a spare drive.
I created an Xsession specifically to launch the urban terror mod for quake 3. from gdm I login and select Urban terror and am straight in the game with no wm, de, any other X clients running except the game.
I Don't Work Here
a possible reason that he might remember...
From my experience, if you meet the requirements of the game you're playing, having the proper window manager or distro doesn't really matter. I use KDE which is not considered light-weight and have had no trouble. Just close every running application before playing your game if you have a resource crunch, or add more swap.
I use Gentoo, but again any distribution will work.
As other people have mentioned, this might not work as well as you hope. I've also been forced to maintain a "Wintendo" because my games just won't work, or fiddling with Wine is too time consuming.
Regardless, give it your best shot and good luck!
yo d00d, Nethack comp133tly bl0z away rougue. Get with the timz, 0ld man.
Why not just boot up a windows sesh in VMWare and then run the game from the emulated instance of windows :-P
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's not technically using your game as a window manager since the game won't manage any windows. All it will do is make it's own window full screen and run itself. A window manager manages the windows on a display, usually drawing decorations, managing focus, and possibly giving you a toolbar/slit/desktop menu/keybindings. A game (none that I know of, anyway) does none of these things, or anything even remotely similar. And, without a window manager, you have to hope that, by some quirk (bug?), your game doesn't lose focus, because you'll never get it back (although, it's more likely that your window manager will accidentally take focus away from your game).
I'm playing Quake3, Unreal, Wolfenstein, Descent3, Homeworld, Torcs and of course TuxRacer on my laptop (Dell Latitude C640). I have Slackware 10.0 with no serious modifications, running KDE 3.3.2 on my ATI Radeon 7500. All games run easy and smooth.
You must be one of those that think all you need to do is write versions of CreateFile(), GetClientRect(), etc. and then you have a "Windows reimplementation". To actually get software working correctly, many times you have to mimic Windows exactly. You are required to know details that are not documented on MSDN or anywhere, and are implementation-specific aspects of the operating system.
i meant dr. dos.
You can indeed say that dr. dos emulates ms-dos, but it's also worthwhile to say that it is a complete operating system replacement. Also, Dr. DOS had a smaller scope (compare size and scope of DOS vs. Windows XP), and DOS internals were well known.
Games are such a hog I'm prepared to dual-boot. When a game is running I consider that conputer unavailable for anything else; between rounds I use a 2nd computer.
In terms of hardware though I think same principles as other apps apply but with the best linux graphics card there is... probably Nvidia Geforce 6800? I think SCSI or fast storage is suprisingly useful too!
A blog I run for the wealth
Despite people saying otherwise, KDE is also good for gaming. I experienced no problems at all. Compared to a bare X session, UT2004 ran with the same identical performance (in terms of FPS) under KDE 3.3.1. on an AMD64 with 1024 MB.
I'm also running gentoo linux.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
...but nowhere as pathetic as you Gentoo riceboys.
Now run along and tweak your system a bit more, why don't you.
I have standards and moral judgments to make in regards who I do make business with.
Although Sony and Nintendo are by no means saints, MS has no goodwill left with me. None. Zilch.
Convinience will not impair my judgment. It is a pity so many people don't even question themselves about these matters and as long as something is convinient they close their eyes to the consequences of their actions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
1) MEPIS has the benefits of all packages Debian and apt-get 2) it is crossover office and wine ready (the kernel) 3) installation of my driver was %> apt-get install nvidia-glx and I was done 4) UTGOTY, DoomIII, and UT2K4 play friggen awesome on my setup. Using Cedega, I'm able to get even more.
Insert_Ending_Here
Not as a gaming console. Get your priorities right we are only trying to change the OS other people use for silly things like work.
Configuration doesn't matter, no decent games are available for Linux. Stick with a real gaming OS like Windows or BSD.
On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.
One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.
Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.
After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.
Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.
I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.
Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.
I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.
Clickety Click
I have standards and moral judgments to make in regards who I do make business with.
Or more likely, you have ex post facto justifications to rationalize the choices you already made.
Although Sony and Nintendo are by no means saints, MS has no goodwill left with me.
MS is an amorphous collective composed of diverse individuals with varying goals and motivations and publicly traded and owned, just like Nintendo and Sony. None of the above are entities which can or should be the target of emotions or argument. Stop anthropomorphizing, you've been hypnotized by the media.
Convinience will not impair my judgment.
If you weren't so desiring of convenience, why haven't you checked your spelling more thoroughly?
It is a pity so many people don't even question themselves about these matters and as long as something is convinient they close their eyes to the consequences of their actions.
In reality, you've questioned jack shit. You don't keep track of the moral history of every coder who's contributed to the apps you run; you probably don't even keep track of individual coders at all, aside from a few "rockstars". It's easier for you to make judgments on entire collectives of individuals than it is to realize that the world isn't binary or easily separable into teams you can root for and against. You're a simple-minded fundamentalist.
Do a minimal gentoo install, subscribe to transgaming for winex, emerge winex and the minimal X/GL requirements, run enlightenment (E) as both your wm and dm, (you do not need gnome to use E in standalone) turn off all extra services and compile your own kernel from scratch with only what you absolutely need (cpu, hd controller, agp/display stuff, network)
2. this means find the line id:3:initdefault: which will normally read 5 and change it to 3 (like mine is), Fedora inittab files are well commented and explain what to do, others are probably similar.
3. To go into X (the windowing system) you type startx after logging in, this gives you your regular desktop, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever.
4. When you are bored with email quit out of X and run your game with (I think) xinit
You expect Joe Sixpack to do all that to play a game? Not a chance. You might as well be speaking Mandarin.
If you've got a computer capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog, then you've got one capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog and KDE. It's not a very noticable performance hit.
Now, if you're trying to run Doom 3 on three-year-old hardware, the case might be different, but if you've got something up to snuff, you shouldn't have much of a problem running almost anything. When I'm in KDE on my machine, I typically have a memory usage of around 200 MB, even after days, with several programs loaded up. Can Doom 3 really not handle itself with 800 MB of ram (assuming about a gig of ram is standard on a gaming machine these days)?
If you want a lightweight window manager, use XFCE or Fluxbox or something. However, don't listen to people who tell you that on a 3.5 GHz machine with a gigabyte of memory you need to use Ratpoison because anything else uses too much memory. Use whatever you like to look at. You bought a giant machine; you don't need to treat it like a pentium 90.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
I use icewm personally, but you could use whatever you wanted. Have the links to a script which does the following:
.xinitrc file. Make it restart normal X after.
-Take the startup parameters for the game, write them to an
-Write a custom XF86Config if needed too.
-Kill X
-Run startx pointing at your custom XF86Config as needed
-.xinitrc should load the game for you
Biggest issue is a little voodoo needed to have your script not die when X stops. Perhaps a file in one of the regular X init scripts that it checks for and runs after the server stops? Test -x ${SOMESCRIPTFILE} && ${SOMESCRIPTFILE}
You know what, he was asking a specific question for a specific use. I'm sure he knows about PS2 and gamecubes. I sure he knows that windows runs windows games better.
However, he wants to get decent performance game-wise out of linux. So responses such as "screw what you're doing and do entirely-different-thing-X" are not only useless, they're ignorant and trollish.
Tried to check out a screenshot
, but your hands grasp nothing except dirt and rock. You eventually touch something solid, and lift it up. As you bring it to your eyes, you squint to find that it is an electronic root kit of high-jump.
.
> look
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> find link
You stumble around trying to find http://icculus.org/projects/twmgl/screenshot1.jpg
> quit
Your score is 25 out of a possible 375. This gives you the rank of hoser.
Are you sure you want to give up [y/N]? : y
An earlier post touched on something I hadn't thought about, Soundcards. Which if any soundcards are well supported in Linux for gaming and all. I figure since I'm getting a 5:1, I want all channels enabled and clear.
They came for the Communists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Communist; They came for the Socialists, and I didn'
> Games are such a hog I'm prepared to dual-boot. When a game is running I consider that conputer unavailable for anything else; between rounds I use a 2nd computer.
While I agree that games are usually a big resource hog, it is by far not as bad as you are suggesting.
For example, I have been running a webserver on the same machine that I use for playing Enemy territory. This setup was very usable, and the game and webserver did not cause any noticable interference with eachother (webserver was also using php and jsp, so it did a bit more then serving static pages)
> In terms of hardware though I think same principles as other apps apply but with the best linux graphics card there is... probably Nvidia Geforce 6800? I think SCSI or fast storage is suprisingly useful too!
scsi or a well supported sata setup will work fine, and depending on what the machine is running besides the game, a standard ide setup might do as well. A Gforce 6800 will work very well, and might even be overkill.
Don't bother with ATI tho, their drivers are not performing very well.
I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming.
Evidently you say this bearing in mind the benefit of an infinitely better and universally-supported Windows enviornment, gaming-wise.
My main question to you is, if you want your cake and eat it too, why the hell are you subjecting yourself to the torture of completely abandoning Windows?
Don't be an idiot, even if it's in the name of some sort of elite geekdom you're attempting to secure for yourself. And in case you want to know from what my opinion issues, let's say I'm a hardcore Slackware supporter, which means I go back some time.
There is practicality and there is stupidity. You want to be a gamer, without the difficulty of an operating system that doesn't adequately support the latest titles as well as Windows, you either dual-boot or forget about Linux completely.
Take it for what it's worth.
- IP
You can almost run any game on linux.
We have run a lot of games (we have run first person shooters, but they are not really our favorite type - apparently Doom3 runs better on Linux - the minimum specs are lower)
For example Warcraft III run under Wine, but you have follow a lot of online intructions.
Other games run natively.
Games that support OpenGL run without performance loss.
We currently use Fedora Core 3 with nVidia 3D cards.
There are also lots of linux games that dont run on Windos.
It's an adjective. "play games great" isn't good English.
A good rule of thumb here is to always add 'ly' to adjectives to make them into adverbs. Such as excellently and properly. So the properly phrase would be "play games greatly". Excellently!
You can use this rule of thumb even with adjectives that end in 'ly'. For example: "He played the game sillyly". Greatly! Now we're cookin'!
I have QuakeIII,UT2004, Savage, Doom3,And many quality open source games all running really really badass framerates under Suse 9.0 pro on my system.. (Doom3 runs better under Linux than Server 2003 on my PC) Specs: AMD AthlonXP 3200+ - 1gb Corsair Twinx Cas2 PC-3200 ram - Gigabyte GA7n400-pro Nforce-2 MB - PNY-Nvidia Geforce 6800GT 256mb video card - LSI Logic 21320-r PCI-X Ultra 320 SCSI disk controller - 3 Seagate Cheetah 36gb U320 SCSI hard drives (RAID 0) - Aspire blue Superalien case 500w Power supply Extra 250w power supply for hard drives
On a side-note (and not to contradict that linux gaming has a ways to go), older games sometimes work in linux better than in windows. Especially when you consider older games for DOS... in which many work great with either "DOSbox or DOSemu as well as other projects specific to running old SCUMM or Sierra games