Slashdot Mirror
42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games
LinuxLinks writes "It is true to say that the number of commercial games released for Linux each year remains small compared to other platforms. Nevertheless, we faced lots of difficult choices compiling a list of 42 of the best commercial Linux games. The selection we have finally chosen covers a wide range of different game genres, so hopefully there will be something here that will interest all."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK there is no VM that allows native access to the graphics card.
All the VMs I worked with (Virtual PC, VMWare and QEMU in the past, VirtualBox today) emulate a card on par with an S3 Trident or some other limited card.
You can change the video memory size (and remember that this means regular memory speeds! no GDDR3!) but no pixel shaders and other "modern" technologies.
I designed (and run) A Tale in the Desert, one of the games on the list. About 3.1% of paid players currently use Linux. Also, 7.3% use OSX, and the rest use Windows.
Of all trial accounts, 7.3% of Linux users go on to pay for at least one month of the game. Of OSX users, it's 6.9%, and of Windows users it's 11.8%.
For some reason the Linux number has dropped significantly over the years (used to be around 10% IIRC), though the other two numbers have remained about the same.
VMWare has some limited 3D support you can enable in version 6. It isn't that complete, but 3DMark 2001 does run and gets a respectable score, for older hardware. VMWare 6.5 has much more complete 3D support. It is still in beta and I've not tried it (I use VMWare in a production environment) but I've no reason to believe they are lying. It claims to be DX8, more or less, as in Pixel shaders up to v2.0 and actually makes use of the hardware in your system.
You are still going to get slowdown, of course, but I imagine they may make it workable. When it goes final, I'll get the upgrade and see what happens.