Thursday, November 5, 2009

My Linux Gaming Experience

Arguably gaming is the one place in which Linux is sorely lacking. Very few titles release with a native installer for this platform and as such many say gaming is impossible on Linux. This is just not true. For a long time I was a "hardcore" gamer, spending easily over forty hours a week in front of my computer playing various online games. In the last couple years I have slowly moved into the "casual" gamer category. On average I spend between ten and twenty hours a week currently playing various PC games. As they are PC games very obviously I run them on my computer and my computer only contains an Ubuntu as an operating system - as such this also means all the games I play run on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is fully ready for desktop systems and for a casual (or in some cases even hardcore) gamer it is more than capable of running most of the important titles. The following are games I enjoy on a regular basis on Ubuntu (and how I run them):

Starcraft - Wine with Windows version set to 98
Warcraft III Frozen Throne - Wine with default settings
Diablo 2 - Wine with default settings
Counter Strike: Source - Wine with default settings. I set the game to run with dxlevel 81 to obtain a better FPS
Team Fortress 2 - Wine with default settings. I set the game to run with dxlevel 81 to obtain a better FPS
Left 4 Dead - Cedega using the Left 4 Dead profile.
Left 4 Dead 2 - CXGames with default settings
Borderlands - Cedega using the UT3 profile
Unreal Tournament 3 - Cedega using the UT3 profile
Killing Floor - Cedega using the UT3 profile
Unreal Tournament 2004 - Native Linux Installer
Savage 2 - Native Linux Installer
Morrowind - Wine with default settings
Oblivion - Wine with default settings
Crysis - Cedega using the UT3 profile and a few native dll over rides
Half-Life 2 - Wine with default settings
Pirates, Vikings, and Knights - Wine with default settings
Guild Wars - Wine with default settings
Day of Defeat: Source - Wine with default settings. I set the game to run with dxlevel 81 to obtain a better FPS
Dark Messiah Might & Magic - Wine with default settings.

As you can see its a fair size list of games. These are just the ones I play personally there are many more than run just fine under Linux. Check out the Wine Applications Database to see how well others fare with various applications.

~Jeff Hoogland

11 comments:

  1. Just want to add one to your list. Regnum Online is a free fantasy mmorpg with a Linux installer. I ran it on Slackware, Zenwalk and Pclinux with no problems. Only thing I could think of that someone might find a negative is its doesnt have an open source licience and requires proprietary drivers to run properly. I think the developers deserve some recognition for bothering to port this game to linux when so few others do.

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  2. Borderlands actually works? Sweet! How well does it run? (Playable, not so playable, almost playable?)

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  3. And yes, I did check the Wine database, but aside from the Gold / Silver ratings, I'd like to know what you're experiencing (like frame rates, glitchy stuff, etc).

    Keep on bloggin'! :D

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  4. Everything I listed runs at a decent FPS, other than Crysis they all average at or above 50 in combat (Crysis gets around half of this 25ish).

    Borderlands specifically runs perfectly playable under Cedega (only issue I have is water discoloration but this is hardly a large issue.) It also runs under Wine but at a much worse frame rate and it suffers from the same mousing bug as UT3.

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  5. Its sad that you have to emulate... lose performance

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  6. Ehh. When you have good hardware a performance loss is not a big deal 100 FPS VS 75 FPS or even 80 vs 50 is not a big deal.

    Also Wine Is Not an Emulator. Its a compatibility layer - there is a large difference between the two.

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  7. I play some decent games on GNU/Linux:

    Penumbra series
    Sacred
    Open Arena
    Doom3 (Darkmod Thief conversion)
    Eschalon Book 1
    AlienArena2009
    Cronkrage
    Nexuiz
    Never Winter Nights 2
    DosBox emulator (crap load of old pc games)

    World of Warcraft (wine)
    Lord of the Rings Online (wine)

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  8. what do you think about 'crossover games'?
    if it's nice i may buy it, mostly because it's cheaper than cedega :D

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  9. I like CXGames alot, I own both it and Cedega. Which one is best for you depends on what games you are going to be playing. - I gave a good break down of the differences between CXGames and Cedega here: http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2009/10/cedega-vs-crossover-games-hands-on.html

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  10. @Scott, Jeff91:

    It's a bit of a mixed bag actually. It isn't an emulator, but most of the big performance issues in games come from using 3D API emulation to run DirectX stuff on top of OpenGL-based video drivers.

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  11. all this list work in LINUX, amazing.

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