Linux Gaming Roundup

The latest Linux Action Show podcast has a pretty good roundup of a bunch of Linux-native first person shooters and a space combat game. Some of this stuff looks REALLY cool. I just wish my laptop had the oomph to run 'em!

http://www.linuxactionshow.com/?p=102

 

Well.. if yours can't, mine can't either. *sigh*

 

I was all stoked to try 'em out. I downloaded one of 'em (called Warsow) ran the binary... and everything worked groovy, even sound, joined a server, and I got like... 5 fps

 

Bah! Linux games...I dunno, sounds a bit cheesy. In my opinion, wanna game, get yourself Windows - or get one of those fancy new consoles.

When you press shoot in the Linux native shooter games, does it take a few seconds to respond? (lol).

 

hah... hah... hah...

sure it's not BF2, but some of this stuff looks really good. and you can't beat the price.

http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/index.php?module=media
http://www.warsow.net/?page=media
http://www.game-warden.com/bsg/gallery.html

 

Sweet! I've been looking for some games to play on my laptop lately. It seems like kind of a waste to have this GPU and no games on it. I haven't gotten around to reinstalling Quake 4 cause it takes forever to do.

 

I dunno... I've got Doom3 on my desktop, running on a 6600GT at 1680x1050, and everything is freakin' scary and fast, so I don't think so Linux gaming is actually quite good, especially when you compare it to the same hardware under Windows (within 5% performance, many times faster under Linux).

 

It's funny, if you listen to the latest episode of the Linux action show, they were talking about someone who did gaming comparisons among Windows XP, Ubuntu with Wine, and Vista. They said that there was about 3-5fps drop through Wine/Cedega from XP, but the fps in Vista were nearly cut in half. The theoretical situation he provided was if you get 55fps in XP, you may get 50fps in Linux, but you would get 25-30fps in Vista.

He summarized by saying that Linux was a better gaming platform than Vista. I'm not sure about all that (due to the lack of good Linux games), but it was interesting.

 

I'm pretty sure that part was a joke...

 

I play Open Arena (Quake knock-off) and Pool on Ubuntu sometimes. I believe Linux can be just as good(or better) at gaming if they just make games for it. Open GL seems just as capable in graphics as direct X IMO.

 

Yeah, and with the upcoming OpenGL 2.1, they should have unified shader support akin to DX10, but I'm not sure about that. Just what I've heard.

 

Yeah, and I was joking about Linux being slow with games.

In all seriousness, the very prospect of needing Windows for the major, new games would stop me from PC gaming, not that I want to PC game anymore.

 

I've pretty much set mine aside lately. In fact, I don't have any games installed on my M90 right now. I just can't justify using Windows just to play games. I'm sure my next laptop will have integrated graphics; I could use the battery life more than the GPU power.

 

neverputt/neverball and Scorched3D get installed on every 3D accelerated Linux machine I own, and they're in the ubuntu repositories Highly recommended games, fun times.

And you should stay with dedicated graphics notebook_ftw... the solution for longer battery life is to get a bigger battery, not lower the capabilities of the machine

 

You basically read my mind. My next notebook is going to have integrated graphics, and it needs to be really small.

Oh yeah, Scorched Earth. I remember playing that back in third grade on DOS.

Interesting point. But what about larger battery = more weight to lug around? (or that it sticks out of the back?) But this idea of utilizing a dedicated GPU well is neat...I'd like to look into 'underclocking' of GPUs in Linux. I don't have a clue how that would be done.

 

Well, I'm not planning on getting rid of my M90. That'll be around for a while, as I'll need a good dedicated GPU for my 3D modeling classes in school. But for every day lugging around, I don't need a battery-draining GPU to take notes and surf the web on. The lower weight and higher battery life afforded by a small notebook is what I'm looking at next, and I really think I'll go with a MacBook, but I'm waiting for Santa Rosa and hopefully the GMA x3000. If it's as good as it's shown to be so far (which is nowhere near my M90, but good for general stuff and better than the 950), then I'll be happy.

 

You probably want a ULV based machine, then. Otherwise, you won't get appreciable battery life savings... I mean, even with my powerhouse I get over 3 hours on battery, and can play through 2 DVD's before I start getting low on juice under Linux.

 

Yeah, it's an idea, but I think the LV procs are a better compromise between the sluggishness of the ULV and the power of the mainstream procs.

 

Well, what I really want too is the fact that the Intel drivers are open source (mostly). That means that not only does it support my philosophy (mostly), but I don't have to worry about all the proprietary drivers for Linux. Whether or not I would install Linux on a MacBook is yet to be known, but either way, I would like the option, and I would like to not have to worry about an ATi card. But if they release a laptop with nVidia graphics, it would be hard to pass up.

 

ftw reminded me of a question that has been bugging me. But I think I will post it on your team thread instead of here...

 

So I take it there is no App/Program that can Virtualize DirectX so you can play most games on Linux? Like wine for Windows apps.

 

That is exactly what wine does. It translates DirectX calls to OpenGL. Cedega will do it a bit better in some instances, but not always, and they're using an older version of wine that just doesn't work as well, period. The problem is that DirectX calls aren't 1:1 mappings of OpenGL calls, so there's a LOT of work that needs done very precisely. That being said, I've heard people have C&C3 running under wine, which is certainly all DirectX. And there are some strides in hardware virtualization, so that two concurrently running operating systems can share access to hardware, like the video card, but I haven't heard anything firm on that, and it's usually in the server space where it's more important and being developed heavily.

 

Yeah... VMGL is a project working on implementing hardware graphics acceleration in a virtual machine.

currently it's very early development, they don't have all of the newest OpenGL stuff implemented, and it's still slow. They have screenshots of Quake3 running in a VM, and it's getting like 18fps.

it's a start, though.

 

I never knew you can install Windows games using wine.

I not even going to try, I have enough problems trying to install most Windows Apps. So I can imagine Games.

 

Really? I've played through American McGee's Alice under Linux, it worked flawlessly. What will really kill you are the Safedisc, etc. protected games. Those just won't play correctly under Wine in my experience.