• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Gaming in Linux?

P

plasma

Gawd
Joined
Apr 6, 2004
Messages
647
I am interested in running linux, and my only real hangup is gaming. I just did some reading, and as far as I understand it Nvidia has full support drivers, and creative has drivers so that shouldnt be an issue. I have 7800GTs in SLI, an Xfi and a 3800 X2. the cpu wouldnt be a problem in linux would it?

I like playing BF2, (and Oblivion sometimes) and was wondering if anyone plays it via linux? I know people run BF2 servers on linux, but is that a while different animal?

Also does anyone know if there are Razer mouse drivers for linux? I looked and couldnt find anything.

What distro would you recommend for gaming?
 
Good luck :p

If the game has a linux client, it's usually pretty easy to get it set up and installed. If it doesn't your going to have to try Cedega or Wine.

For a distribution.. if you've never used linux before you probably want to start out with Ubuntu, as it's the easiest to install and gets you right to a graphical environment. When I use linux, I use the Gentoo distribution. I like the emerge thing to get applications, and how I can install just what I need.

edit: BF2 and Oblivion on linux.. think your only chance would be using Cedega (Cedega and Wine are basically windows emulators..)
 
plasma said:
I am interested in running linux, and my only real hangup is gaming. I just did some reading, and as far as I understand it Nvidia has full support drivers, and creative has drivers so that shouldnt be an issue. I have 7800GTs in SLI, an Xfi and a 3800 X2. the cpu wouldnt be a problem in linux would it?

I like playing BF2, (and Oblivion sometimes) and was wondering if anyone plays it via linux? I know people run BF2 servers on linux, but is that a while different animal?

Also does anyone know if there are Razer mouse drivers for linux? I looked and couldnt find anything.

What distro would you recommend for gaming?
Click to expand...

3800 X2 CPU - no problems. Just run an SMP kernel so the system can see the two cores.

SLI'ed 7800GTs - SLI is supported by the more current nVidia Linux drivers

Creative X-Fi - sorry, Creative does not have X-Fi drivers for Linux, only for the emu10k1 series and previous (Audigy 2, Audigy 1, SB Live). They plan on making proprietary drivers available sometime in 2Q 2007.

Razer - does the Razer have some kind of special buttons or something? The mouse itself will be usable no problem, and I'm sure if you look around on the big Linux channels/forums, someone will have one running with all functionality.

Battlefield 2 - yes, there is a difference between running a server and playing the game. The BF2 server program is not the game itself, just a program that runs there and people connect to it and play and such.

That being said, Battlefield 2 can run through Transgaming Cedega, which is a piece of software (from Transgaming) that is tailored specifically to running windows games on Linux. Not sure how well BF2 runs under it though - it has a 3/5 rating for playability on Transgaming's game database.

Oh right, Transgaming Cedega requires a nominal subscription fee in order to get the latest updates.

Oblivion - it may run. It has a 2/5 playability rating under Transgaming's game database.

Distro for gaming - whatever, it doesn't really matter, though I certainly would not recommend using a more enterprise/server oriented distribution like CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise. I personally use gentoo, debian, SuSE mainly.
 
Cedega (which was originally an offshoot of the free software WINE called WineX) aims to reimplement Windows DirectX on Linux systems and remaps DirectX calls to their equivalent in OpenGL, ALSA (a sound system), OSS (legacy Linux sound system superceded by ALSA), or X11 or whatever else is necessary.

So no, it doesn't trick the game into thinking it is running on Windows, rather it acts as a compatibility layer (look up compatibility layer and compare against emulation, it's like a 'light' emulation since they don't want to start incurring performance penalties that would render games horribly slow) since it translates Windows DX calls to Linux equivalents.

WINE, the open source software, also has some directx support, but they focus on being able to run more than just games from Windows on Linux. They also try to support all the other software like Office.
 
Oblivion (using OldBlivion) and BF2 work fine under Cedega as they are both officially supported products. I'd recommend Ubuntu for getting adjusted and perhaps moving to something else when you are more familiar with the OS. If you don't want to buy Cedega, you can always compile it from source, though it's not exactly the same.
 
plasma said:
Thanks guys.

I went searching a little and read this article which mentions Cedega is the only DirectX option for Linux. Does it emulate DirectX so it thinks its running on a windows machine?

http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=984&Itemid=0
Click to expand...

Cedega (and any wine variant) is a set of libraries... not really emulation, just providing the infrastructure necessary to run Windows executable natively. With that said, I think the Direct-X functionality leverages OpenGL, so certainly an "emulation" of sorts.

VMware has experimental Direct-X support. I did play some games that cannot work with wine using VMware's experimental support.

I believe there are some other projects out there, but nothing you've heard of (yet).
 
CEpeep said:
Oblivion (using OldBlivion) and BF2 work fine under Cedega as they are both officially supported products. I'd recommend Ubuntu for getting adjusted and perhaps moving to something else when you are more familiar with the OS. If you don't want to buy Cedega, you can always compile it from source, though it's not exactly the same.
Click to expand...

how do i go about compiling Cedega? and what is the difference between the bought version and the compiled version?
 
gotfrag? said:
how do i go about compiling Cedega? and what is the difference between the bought version and the compiled version?
Click to expand...

Pick up the sourcecode from the repository:
http://www.transgaming.com/license.php?source=1
and follow the instructions.

I haven't built it in quite awhile. It used to be that Point2Play was not included, as well as a number of commercial decoders for media. Now since Point2Play has become part of the software, I think the commercial decoders are the only things missing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top