Best GPU for Linux (WINE) Gaming?

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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).

Bob

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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.

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

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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...

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

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

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!!

Bob