WINE is pretty much where it's at as far as gaming.
You can check the compatibility of titles you want to play from their database.
http://www.winehq.org

Keep in mind (might have changed in the past few months, not sure) that nVidia are generally more widely supported and reliable under Linux.

 

Linux is a good environment if you do alot of desktop suite/internet use.

outside of like Quake Wars, Doom 3, there are not any good native Linux games.

 

I've had pretty good luck with Linux gaming. I run Mint, it's an offshoot of Ubuntu, and with wine, crossover and winetricks I can play most games just fine on my system.

 

Linux gaming pales in comparison to Windows. (AFAIK because DirectX is proprietary and some anti-cheating programs aren't compatible with Linux.)
WINE can get some games to work.

 

So, what I am hearing is, while it may work fairly well in most cases, its not a be all end all yet and if I were to use it as my only OS I could very possibly run into a situation where a game I want to play I may not be able to, especially online because of some anti-cheat software not working. About right?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by sLowEnd Linux gaming pales in comparison to Windows. (AFAIK because DirectX is proprietary and some anti-cheating programs aren't compatible with Linux.) WINE can get some games to work.

I wouldn't say it pales, it's more like you don't get the games as early.

http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/...added-cod.html

OP: It can work, I haven't had any Radeon experience but I know Nvidia cards work like a champ. I usually just play Urt though, and even when I get a new card it'll probably still be just Urt. The only really popular game I haven't gotten to work is BAC2, for some reason I get the black screen issue that seems to be plaguing people. All the COD games work, Crysis/Warhead... Ummm, what else is majorly popular atm? Idk, don't really care much. lol

 

Greetz
You know, I don't hear too many people complaining that gaming sux on phones, pads, or any other handhelds or even consoles for that matter even though graphics and framerates are superior on Desktop PCs.

Also I don't hear anybody who has played it for more than an hour complain that Minecraft sux because it looks kind of like 8bit graphics. Everybody loves eye candy but who hasn't wasted money on a game that looked awesome and played awful?

So with those points in mind I will point out that I do 80-85% of my gaming in Linux and with a high performance, low latency kernel orders of magnitude more responsive than any version of windoze can even dream of, I am happy with the native games I play. They're really fun and that's primarily what I game for. That Linux version can often be tweaked for competitive edge moreso than the windoze version is just frosting on the cake.

That said, I also became totally addicted to Orange Box for almost a year. BioShock was pretty cool too. So what has happened for me is that I can pick and choose only the best of the best that won't play on Linux with my hardware in Wine at a reasonable rate and the lousy 30 seconds it takes to reboot to windoze for those is a small price to pay IMHO for all I get from Linux.

 

From my experience, if you want to game on Linux, you're going to want to use an Nvidia card. Something about the Radeons not existing in the unix world or something...

 

I played portal by installing steam and running it through wine. It was playable at 1440x900.

Worth a shot.

 

cool thing about linux...

most the games i spend hours and hours and hours online playing are native

id software games such as the wolfenstein franchise, the doom frachise, and the quake franchise, have always had native support in linux

plus unreal tournament games as well, just not ut3 i dont think...

in the end, you can get just about anything running in linux, but you may have some bugs and it might be a nightmare and unplayable and blah blah blah.... if you game really hard core and play a lot of new releases and stuff, stick to windows, but if you are cool spending a few hours tweaking stuff to make a game that might be a couple years old run good then youll be fine in linux most likely

if you are aiming to play very popular games on a very popular distro such as ubuntu, then most likely it wont be much trouble finding guides on how to make them run with a quick google search

gaming really is the only downfall of linux... if linux got the gaming support from all devs like its had from id software over the years, it would smash windows like nothing with absolutely no competition

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by EntTheGod cool thing about linux... most the games i spend hours and hours and hours online playing are native id software games such as the wolfenstein franchise, the doom frachise, and the quake franchise, have always had native support in linux plus unreal tournament games as well, just not ut3 i dont think... in the end, you can get just about anything running in linux, but you may have some bugs and it might be a nightmare and unplayable and blah blah blah.... if you game really hard core and play a lot of new releases and stuff, stick to windows, but if you are cool spending a few hours tweaking stuff to make a game that might be a couple years old run good then youll be fine in linux most likely if you are aiming to play very popular games on a very popular distro such as ubuntu, then most likely it wont be much trouble finding guides on how to make them run with a quick google search gaming really is the only downfall of linux... if linux got the gaming support from all devs like its had from id software over the years, it would smash windows like nothing with absolutely no competition

still a few more hurdles than lack of "gaming" before a linux distro is ready for the desktop for the masses.

 

To do that it will need DirectX or have opengl get a lot better.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarec To do that it will need DirectX or have opengl get a lot better.

OpenGL in terms of graphics and performance is equal to DirectX, though I'm sure your not entirely sure what DirectX is. It's an api suite, it has D3D and audio, it's a nice little package for some of the basic things programs will need to interface. OpenGL is an api strictly for video, mainly accelerated video (2D or 3D).

So what you should say is that linux needs to either get DirectX or a package similar to DirectX allowing companies to freely code for the system without having to worry about updating their code every time the system updates.

 

I know one of my favorites runs on Linux, X3 Terran Conflict and Reuinon.

You can get some games to work in WINE though I haven't tried on my main rig.

 

If you're really interested in gaming, you'll probably be disappointed, but it isn't to say that you can't game. I would say try it out. You can always switch, since linux is the free choice.

As far as multimedia, you'll have no problem.

 

Have you ever used a PS2 emualtor on a PC?

Well it's kinda like that a lot of tweeking and you aren't assured that it will even work then.

 

for what linux/wine is able to do, its amazing. to run an integrated enviroment kinda (windows), inside of linux enough to be able to run programs ,and especially execute directx/opengl and what not (games), its pretty amazing.

definetly check out wine, the beta, tricks, and google each game. many times wine hq may saysilver or bronze for whatever reason, but theirs workarounds to get it working flawlessly.

ie. once you installed fonts, css/tf2 ran perfect

 

It really depends, once you install ms fonts TF2 and Steam (Not sure about the rest of the source games) work straight out of the box with no tweaking, Minecraft has a native version, The Sims 3 with expansions works great for me and Sins of a Solar Empire took some tweaking (Documented on the appdb page though), as did Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3, but other than that all those games work flawlessly.

 

Greetz
Keep believing that gaming on Linux bloze goatz and whatever you do...
whatever you do
Do NOT
under any circumstances
even try
Minecraft
......
since the one thing it doesn't have
is
12 step rehab centers
for wasted MInecraft addicts!

 

Stay away from Linux if your goal is gaming unless you're really knowledgeable on the OS or you're gonna have headaches (literally)

A few years ago I tried it and it took me 5 hours to figure how to change from 60hz->120hz (crt). I searched the forums and there were like 100+ threads with my same problem. I didn't even want to think of the road ahead.

Windows for gaming.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by woodyfly Stay away from Linux if your goal is gaming unless you're really knowledgeable on the OS or you're gonna have headaches (literally) A few years ago I tried it and it took me 5 hours to figure how to change from 60hz->120hz (crt). I searched the forums and there were like 100+ threads with my same problem. I didn't even want to think of the road ahead. Windows for gaming.

The above quoted post is prima facie evidence that the only way to become "knowledgeable on the OS" is to actually use it.

 

Well, somehow, after the loud noise the HDD made, what appeared to be the puff of smoke along with the lack of boot, I was able to repair the install...its back up and running. I guess my linux experimentation will wait until I get a netbook as I had planned.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by woodyfly Stay away from Linux if your goal is gaming unless you're really knowledgeable on the OS or you're gonna have headaches (literally) A few years ago I tried it and it took me 5 hours to figure how to change from 60hz->120hz (crt). I searched the forums and there were like 100+ threads with my same problem. I didn't even want to think of the road ahead. Windows for gaming.

I don't know much about Linux, honestly, all I really know is how to follow tutorials, usage of su and sudo, pacman -S/-R program name and pacman -Syu, but I didn't find it hard, honestly most games "tweaking" stuff is just "Download winetricks and use it to download x, y, z and then tell winecfg to use the native versions of the dlls you just got", not any harder than tweaking a .ini file for better performance or the like.

But that's the thing with Linux, everything seems really hard (Just as it would for someone who has used Mac OS or Unix all their life going to Windows and doing the same tweaking stuff) but it takes a few weeks of using it (And googling for help whenever you need it) and once you've got all your issues sorted (I had to deal with WiFi, games, MSNP18 and a few other issues here and there), you get a better OS than any other OS on the market, at least for general usage and gaming depending on what games you play.

 

has anyone tried reactOS for gaming purposes?

it is designed to be a NT clone, and it uses a lot of wine code in its base. so it is sorta like a wine OS. i haven't used it in a few years, the last time i tried it, i got a generalized page fault in its kernel, and it caused a BSOD in the vmware, i found it amusing, cause they "duplicated" windows bsod, so they aren't able to make it a 100% binary compatible with NT yet, but they sure been able to duplicate its debugging process

.

i know that project has been plagued with problems, like the accusation of reverse engineering and decompiling windows files to copy its code, and at best it will only ever be XP compatible, but it is still nice to check it out everyonce in awhile to see its progress, its still in alpha, and might not be a good idea to run as your primary OS, but it is more windows-like than linux+wine is.

 

Lindows tried the same thing I believe, turned into Linspire, then burned and failed?

I swear this has been tried time and time again, why won't they just learn we have Wine and it's a valid solution. =P