Does Linux Have Game?

kwpulliam writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting writeup, discussing the difficulties in bringing games to Linux, and the dilemmas faced by the graphics card developers."

Comments

ATI video drivers

[IgD]

The problem I have is ATI video drivers for Linux. So far they have been a huge dissapointment. My brother has an Dell notebook with an old nVidia graphics card that works much better than my Radeon 9800.

For productivity, I'm using OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird amongst other open source applications. For games, I play Savage (http://www.s2games.com) which has a native Linux binary. I also play some other games like BattleField 1942 and Vietnam that run under Linux through an emulator.

The rate limiting step here is the ATI video drivers. It's the only thing keeping me running Windows XP instead of Linux.

Re:Direct3D on Linux?

[Ford Prefect]

Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.

Well, with Cedega (formerly WineX), they basically have...

Still, with porting to OpenGL, you get the benefit of not having to use a runtime Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator (which is essentially what Wine/WineX/Cedega uses), and you're also a step closer to the OpenGL-only Mac.

ET runs well

[bigberk]

Hmm... Enemy Territory runs quite well on my Linux system, and that's despite having a crappy low end ATI Radeon. Not quite as fast as under Windows but that's probably due to the video driver. Enable glx, dri, and do some AGP tweaks...

Section "Device"
Identifier "Radeon"
Driver "radeon"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
EndSection

Re:Direct3D on Linux?

[MBCook]

Nope.

Direct3D is exactly like OpenGL. You can argue features (vertex shaders integral or an add-on, etc.), but they are both graphics APIs.

Your point is valid, but you are thinking of DirectX. DirectX contains Direct3D (graphics), DirectSound (um... sound ;), DirectInput (keyboard, mouse, joystick, whatever), DirectPlay (or at least it used to, networking code), and others (I think).

So your right. I doubt many games use just Direct3D. If you are going to use D3D, why not use DirectSound and DirectInput too? They are much better than just programming Win32 for that stuff (I would imagine). Even Quake2/3 used DirectX for everything but graphics (I think).

As the parrent said, there is more to the problem than just Direct3D, there is all of DirectX (which WineX/Cedega/whatever is working on alongside D3D). If more games were written with OpenGL+SDL (or any other cross platform combination that may exist) things would be easier to port.