WINE - Work well for gaming?

[TheKittenEater]

I'm thinking of taking the plunge from Windows to Linux, but I use my PC mostly for gaming.

Does WINE or fine? Will I notice a hit in performance?

[volcanomike]

Personally i would recommend if you do plan on taking the leap to the free world. I recommend Cedega... Monthly donation of $5 and it is flawless for me. Works great.

[jdhore]

yeah, Wine works, but it doesn't work great since not all games work with Wine and Wine isn't the greatest with DirectX...i agree with Mike...go with Cedega (hint: you can also find it on the torrents for free)

[TheKittenEater]

Cool, thanks a bunch guys.

[TooDamFast]

As a Gamer I will tell you the only way to be happy with linux is to duel boot. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.

yes you can play with cedega (i do subscribe) but there IS a hit in quality (I also use an ATI card) and some game dont work at all.

yes you can find games that will run in native linux (Wolfenstien et, tce, tons of quake 2 clones, tribes clones, ect) but you might have a hard time getting your clan to jump to a game that looks like it came out in 2001.

But if you are a "gamer" dont expect to get the latest and greatest games to run like they can in windows. Duel booting will let you spend your time gaming and not tring to figure out why your in game sound/team speak wont work at the same time or why your only getting 30 fps in Half life two and you know your $300 ATI card would push over 100 fps in windows.

With 320 gig harddrives selling for under $90, it's easy to have room for two operating systems.

[bird603568]

your getting crap because you have an ati. also doom3 is native and if im not mistaken so is farcry

[volcanomike]

As a Gamer I will tell you the only way to be happy with linux is to duel boot. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.

yes you can play with cedega (i do subscribe) but there IS a hit in quality (I also use an ATI card) and some game dont work at all.

yes you can find games that will run in native linux (Wolfenstien et, tce, tons of quake 2 clones, tribes clones, ect) but you might have a hard time getting your clan to jump to a game that looks like it came out in 2001.

But if you are a "gamer" dont expect to get the latest and greatest games to run like they can in windows. Duel booting will let you spend your time gaming and not tring to figure out why your in game sound/team speak wont work at the same time or why your only getting 30 fps in Half life two and you know your $300 ATI card would push over 100 fps in windows.

With 320 gig harddrives selling for under $90, it's easy to have room for two operating systems.

See the lovely thing is that if so many people use cedega and donate they vote on up coming features that can be added. So if a new game comes out everyone can vote and get it supported. Dual booting is for weinies and they dont deserve to use linux :) I have no problems running Half Life or any other game in Cedega with a resolution of 1024x768 at about 80 fps on linux with my cheap NVIDIA card. Then again i use a slim window manager and i know a thing or two about setting priorities.

[noonebutme]

I personally dislike Cedega. Ruined native mac gaming - if they can 'emulate' the needed stuff then theres no reason for developers to port it native and give the huge speed boos that way.

[minishark]

I also vote for dual boot. Even if the games you want happen to work under Cedega/Wine, it will be at a serious performance loss. And I know if you're a serious gamer you want the highest framerate you can get. Just suck it up and play the games on the OS they were written for. Then use Linux for everything else.

[astralsin]

I personally dislike Cedega. Ruined native mac gaming - if they can 'emulate' the needed stuff then theres no reason for developers to port it native and give the huge speed boos that way.

if it already runs fine in cedega, why would developers port it? go donate $5 a month and give some love back to transgaming who is doing their best to bring gaming to you, no matter what the game companies think is 'sufficient market share'.

[BCModder]

honestly Im pro linux....as a matter of fact Im posting from my main machine thats running Kubuntu solid state no windows, however I have to agree dual boot is the best method if you do windows gaming. First of all wine yes does suck for games and well cedega is making improvements its still lacking for games that require more power like Battle Field 2 & 2142 ect. (if I am wrong on this by all means correct me an give me tips :D)

by all means explore the linux world its great, the only real drawback is the gaming side an some programs. the only game I know of though that actually has been ported to linux is Unreal tourny 2004, theres probably more I don't know about but prob not to many.

[Pikestaff]

If you do a lot of gaming, dual boot.

If you don't do much gaming and not much playing online, Wine works perfectly fine for most games (in my experience.) StarCraft and WarCraft III both run smoother for me in Kubuntu with Wine than they ever did on Windows XP.

[tadpole256]

Would you guys say that Wine or Cedega is good enough for a casual gamer? I run Linux on several machines, but my primary is still Windows... I haven't had the courage yet to take the full plunge... I really want to though.

[Icebreaker]

For a hardcore gamer Windows is a must, because 90% of the games are using DirectX and implicitly this means Windows . And if you consider playing games using DirectX 10 (Crysis from CryTek, etc) consider upgrading to Vista, because DirectX 10 won't be released for XP.

But you can find *good* games for Linux too. Just to name a few: Cube2 (FPS), Glest (RTS), OpenArena (FPS), etc.

[Pikestaff]

If you are a casual gamer I would try dual-booting first to see if your games work well with Wine. If they do, great, you can kick off Windows.

StarCraft, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft all work perfectly fine for me on Linux. But there are still some games that don't (Age of Empires II, for example, is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to get to work on Linux)

[Enelysion]

I have a separate windows box I usually game from, and I have to agree with the general sentiment that Wine/Cedega are great, but they only do so much. I play WoW, UT2k4 and WC3 on linux sometimes, along with a couple other linux homebrews like warsow(FPS) but for the most part, windows is where its at for gaming :(

Don't forget though! Last I heard, UT3 is still supposed to come out linux native!

[kungfujesus]

In my experience, even Doom3 which is compiled natively for linux, runs significantly slower in linux than windows (and also as per revealed in the benchmarks). John Carmack's explanation for this is that all the optimization flags and code was design around Microsoft's Visual C++ and not gcc :(.

Sadly the gaming platform at this time is windows (with the exception of a few cool open source games and some sourceports). I myself am writing a Galaga style game with Tux as the player with a fellow colleague of mine. Hopefully OpenGL will revamp or some third party will throw their crazy assembler coding skills for different architectures into the ring and kick the crap out of DX10. Who knows.