Best GPU for Linux (WINE) Gaming?

Bob Wya Jnr · 4 Dec 2009 at 13:56

Hi folks,

What do you reckon is the sweet spot GPU for gaming under Wine (Ubuntu)? My flatmate is looking to buy a GTX 260. I tried to persuade him a GTS 250 would do (as it can be had for >50.00 GBP less). It's a difficult call because he does play mainly older games at low res. but he wants to be future proofed (i.e. if he gets a larger monitor). Obviously most newer games won't run under Wine anyway.

I presume that a more powerful card will help overcome the inefficiences in using Wine a bit as well?

He's got a nice oldy-worldy rig I built for him with a socket 939 AMD board and a 2.8Ghz OC dual-core Opteron (2x1Mb).

Our mutual feeling is that AMD is out of the running (although the 4870/90 are really nice cards) because of driver issues. Can you get games like HL2.0 running under WINE with full HDR DX9.0c on a newer ATI card (using the proprietary driver)?

At least with AMD open-sourcing their hardware API we will eventually get a decent open source AMD driver... But I guess not anytime soon (unless you only need video acceleration and Compiz). :cool:

Bob

OrphanBoy · 4 Dec 2009 at 13:59

I thought AMD driver support on Linux was much better than it was years ago?

JRS · 4 Dec 2009 at 14:03

OrphanBoy said:
I thought AMD driver support on Linux was much better than it was years ago?

Better, yes. Still pretty sucky though.

bledd · 4 Dec 2009 at 15:28

Much better off just dual booting Windows

Bob Wya Jnr · 4 Dec 2009 at 16:40

bledd. said:
Much better off just dual booting Windows

Well yeh I would agree to some degree. But although I use Windows 7 myself just now but I must say there is a bit of a thrill to getting a game like HL2.0 easily working in WINE under GNU/Linux (especially since it only supports DirectX 9.0c unlike say Far Cry). Using WINE, and further improvements to WINE, are the realistically the only longterm way the Global monopoly held by Microsoft will be broken.

Anyway my flatmate has gone a bit more hardcore Linux than myself and doesn't own a 'valid' (

) licensed copy of Windows. I should add that he can't really afford one either...

Bob

Roland0 · 4 Dec 2009 at 17:00

Any nVidia really, i have a GTX260 216 and it works great on Linux

PermaBanned · 4 Dec 2009 at 17:46

Newer ATI cards have good 'enough' drivers, discounting the 5***'s... so far.

.walls · 4 Dec 2009 at 18:11

Bob Wya Jnr said:
Well yeh I would agree to some degree. But although I use Windows 7 myself just now but I must say there is a bit of a thrill to getting a game like HL2.0 easily working in WINE under GNU/Linux (especially since it only supports DirectX 9.0c unlike say Far Cry). Using WINE, and further improvements to WINE, are the realistically the only longterm way the Global monopoly held by Microsoft will be broken.

Anyway my flatmate has gone a bit more hardcore Linux than myself and doesn't own a 'valid' ( ) licensed copy of Windows. I should add that he can't really afford one either...

Bob

Top tips for wine gaming:

1) Make sure you have the best drivers - the latest are not necessarily the best, neither are the proprietary drivers in your distros repos. A quick and completely not-definitive test is to run glxgears for about 60 seconds for each driver you try.... problem drivers will be spotted rather quickly once you have a baseline (lower performance than the rest, performance tailing off, etc)
2) turn off compositing (if you use it!). Things like xcompmgr/compiz/kde desktop effects will *really* impact your gaming.
3) Create different wineprefixes for different games (so you don't muck up the settings for one game whils installing another). A useful tool to make this easier than it sounds is playonlinux or cedega (the latter you have to pay for, but I understand it's pretty good)
4) Install directx 9 redistributable (winetricks makes this easy). You'll very often get much better performance using the native windows binaries rather than the wine ones.

There's probably more, but that's it for just now!

Also - I use a g92 8800 GTS and I get very decent performance for most games that I play (inc source games).

Bob Wya Jnr · 4 Dec 2009 at 19:09

.walls said:
Top tips for wine gaming:
3) Create different wineprefixes for different games (so you don't muck up the settings for one game whils installing another). A useful tool to make this easier than it sounds is playonlinux or cedega (the latter you have to pay for, but I understand it's pretty good)

I never quite understood the advantage of this myself. Perhaps you could enlighten me what benefit this system gives??

I did play around with downloading all the WINE source code and using Git to unlock different versions. Quite interesting really.

.walls said:
Also - I use a g92 8800 GTS and I get very decent performance for most games that I play (inc source games).

I just wonder though. What about newer Source games like L4D? I don't know if my flatmate would want to play stuff like that but it's quite demanding on the ol' GPU.

Thanks for the tips

Bob

.walls · 4 Dec 2009 at 19:51

Bob Wya Jnr said:
I never quite understood the advantage of this myself. Perhaps you could enlighten me what benefit this system gives??

Basically - it allows two major advantages that I can see. The first is it (as I mentioned above) it allows you to have settings that will benefit one game in one prefix, which could adversely impact other games (like mouse warping). The other is it allows for very easy uninstallation: instead of using wine uninstaller, you just delete the prefix (if you've used the wine uninstaller, I'm sure you'll have noticed that apps don't always get removed).

Bob Wya Jnr said:
I just wonder though. What about newer Source games like L4D? I don't know if my flatmate would want to play stuff like that but it's quite demanding on the ol' GPU.

Sorry - but I can't really say! The latest Source games that I have played are the contents of the Orange box (which all run very well on my rig: 8800GTS, 720BE @ 3.6, 4GB RAM)... and I assumed they are all similar because they use the same engine!

Don't get me wrong, there is a hit from running games in wine as opposed to native and it's quite a large one. If I had Windows on this rig, I could undoubtedly play all the games I have on full everything (mostly slightly older games), but unfortunately there is a definite hit, but it is very playable if you have the grunt (and sometimes the time + effort to make it work when things don't go quite so well); which introduces another good reason to use something like playonlinux: It's very easy to assign different versions of wine to an application (e.g. Steam doesn't work too well with 1.1.29 as colours are all out of whack - the games play fine, but it's just really difficult to launch the games!).

Bob Wya Jnr · 4 Dec 2009 at 20:08

.walls said:
Basically - it allows two major advantages that I can see. The first is it (as I mentioned above) it allows you to have settings that will benefit one game in one prefix, which could adversely impact other games (like mouse warping). The other is it allows for very easy uninstallation: instead of using wine uninstaller, you just delete the prefix (if you've used the wine uninstaller, I'm sure you'll have noticed that apps don't always get removed).

OK but I'm still not sold on this idea...

.walls said:
Sorry - but I can't really say! The latest Source games that I have played are the contents of the Orange box (which all run very well on my rig: 8800GTS, 720BE @ 3.6, 4GB RAM)... and I assumed they are all similar because they use the same engine!

The Orange Box version of Source is updated with extra visual goodies from HL2.0 episode 2 I believe. So I'm glad to hear your rig can cope with it.

I see you do have a very beefy CPU. I just hope my flatmates old Opteron will cope with a GTX 260.

Bob

.walls · 4 Dec 2009 at 20:17

Bob Wya Jnr said:
OK but I'm still not sold on this idea...

After using just wine for many years, I was dubious as well, but I'm utterly sold on the idea now, it really is a huge benefit!

EDIT: I though I should mention btw - apparently it's a bit of a mixed bag, this gaming on linux thing. What works really well for one distro doesn't necessarily work too well for another (due to different binaries, etc), although it's always worked well enough for me (plus or minus the odd hiccup that I've managed to rectify

)

Hairybudda · 5 Dec 2009 at 07:16

3870/4890 have been fine in wine for me so far, there is about a 10% performance hit but I doubt nvidia would take any less of a hit. Envy-ng is great for newbies who need to get display drivers installed and running free of hassle.

Bob Wya Jnr · 5 Dec 2009 at 08:42

Hairybudda said:
3870/4890 have been fine in wine for me so far, there is about a 10% performance hit but I doubt nvidia would take any less of a hit. Envy-ng is great for newbies who need to get display drivers installed and running free of hassle.

Ah interesting! I never got HL2.0 rendering in more than DX8.0 compatibility mode on my Radeon 1950 Pro (512Mb). But I wasn't about to rule out AMD/ATI because an old card isn't well supported. Can your 3xxx/4xxx cards manage any DX9.0 games?

I keep meaning to get Ubuntu/Mint installed on ASUS laptop which has a fairly decent (by laptop standards) 4650 card. See what the latest ATI drivers can do!

Bob

conscarcdr · 5 Dec 2009 at 20:54

It really isn't worth all the trouble trying to run something that indefinitely runs on WINE. Just reboot into Windows, everything works and works a lot better.

.walls · 6 Dec 2009 at 00:40

conscarcdr said:
It really isn't worth all the trouble trying to run something that indefinitely runs on WINE. Just reboot into Windows, everything works and works a lot better.

Just wow.... why has no-one seen this before? I mean... you should write to the wine devs and tell them to stop wasting their time coding the windows api for linux - they should set up a blog with instructions how to just boot into windows and run it from there! I can't believe no-one has had that idea before.... I'm going to give up linux gaming now and do just that!

Did you even read the thread?

Also. Indefinitely - I don't think that word means what you think it does.

Bob Wya Jnr · 6 Dec 2009 at 13:26

.walls said:
Just wow.... why has no-one seen this before? I mean... you should write to the wine devs and tell them to stop wasting their time coding the windows api for linux ...

Yeh +1

I think anyone who has played HL2.0 or Far Cry 1.0 under Wine you can see how much excellent work they have put into the code. What is so sickening is that M$ has dominated the OS market so completely that games developers have stopped coding both for DX and OpenGL. Naturally Windows games with an OpenGL switch will run at near native speeds under WINE.

WINE is on a very rapid development cycle. The more people using the code the faster bugs are reported and fixed.

Bob

Hairybudda · 7 Dec 2009 at 09:52

Bob Wya Jnr said:
Ah interesting! I never got HL2.0 rendering in more than DX8.0 compatibility mode on my Radeon 1950 Pro (512Mb). But I wasn't about to rule out AMD/ATI because an old card isn't well supported. Can your 3xxx/4xxx cards manage any DX9.0 games?

I keep meaning to get Ubuntu/Mint installed on ASUS laptop which has a fairly decent (by laptop standards) 4650 card. See what the latest ATI drivers can do!

Bob

I've had L4D and HL2 running in DX9 mode, out of the box with no monkeying about, that was about a month and a half/2 months ago (i've lost my crunchbang install due to a dead hdd so I could not test the most recent version).

Bob Wya Jnr · 7 Dec 2009 at 18:18

Hairybudda said:
I've had L4D and HL2 running in DX9 mode, out of the box with no monkeying about, that was about a month and a half/2 months ago (i've lost my crunchbang install due to a dead hdd so I could not test the most recent version).

Oh thanks that's really useful info - thanks!! So the ATI 4890 is back in the running!! :cool:

Bob