ubuntu Ubuntu for Gaming

[Shaun N.]

So, Seeing as Steam is pushing hard on the gaming side of Linux now I decided to get Ubuntu back on my PC as the main OS. I use it a lot at work so im OK with using it.

I got it installed last night with the ATI 13.2 beta drivers, got Steam installed and Wine. I decided to see how the graphics would run so I ran Warcraft and the frames were sat about 16. I knew it would be slightly reduced but that was bad. I added opengl as the gfx in WTF.config and it gave me a worse performance with less graphics options so i left it at d3d9

My hardware is below;

CPU: Intel i5

Graphics: ATI 7850HD

Memory: 8gig

If anyone can help me on maybe tweaking the set up to make it run a little better I would be hugely grateful.

[pixelpixel88]

Best advice you can get: for gaming use Windows. Simple as that.

[Haggis Veteran]

Pointless post the above one really is

Orangekiller is prob your best bet on here

Have you looked in the ubuntu forums?

I dont use Ubuntu so cant help as much sorry

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

Have you tried the FPS fixes on the wine page about WoW (assuming you're talking about WoW of course)?

Check this page out and search the page for the words "Bad FPS". There's a few hints there that might help. Notably it does mention better performance in OpenGL mode, although given what you said in your OP, that might not be helpful to you, but it's still well worth trying.

[Shaun N.]

Best advice you can get: for gaming use Windows. Simple as that.

That is the easy way out and I'm not looking for that. I'm trying to make this work. Gaming on Linux needs people to get things working there needs to be a lot of hard frustrating times to finally break it through to it working correctly.

[fmanchu]

I found this today. Not sure if it'll help.

"Ubuntu?s Unity desktop uses desktop compositing. Windows draw their contents off the screen and the desktop compositing manager draws them back onto the screen. This allows the Unity desktop (and other desktops such as GNOME Shell and KDE 4 with compositing enabled) to provide slick, 3D effects.

With most applications, you won?t notice any slowdown. However, if you?re playing a game, this adds additional overhead, slowing down the game. Some people have reported the redirection can reduce performance by up to 20%.

With the latest updates, both Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04 now have the ?Unredirect Fullscreen Windows? option enabled by default. When this option is enabled, full-screen games will run at maximum speed, skipping the compositing manager and its slowdowns. Ensure you?re updated using Ubuntu?s Update Manager so you can take advantage of this improvement."

[Shaun N.]

I found this today. Not sure if it'll help.

"Ubuntu?s Unity desktop uses desktop compositing. Windows draw their contents off the screen and the desktop compositing manager draws them back onto the screen. This allows the Unity desktop (and other desktops such as GNOME Shell and KDE 4 with compositing enabled) to provide slick, 3D effects.

With most applications, you won?t notice any slowdown. However, if you?re playing a game, this adds additional overhead, slowing down the game. Some people have reported the redirection can reduce performance by up to 20%.

With the latest updates, both Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04 now have the ?Unredirect Fullscreen Windows? option enabled by default. When this option is enabled, full-screen games will run at maximum speed, skipping the compositing manager and its slowdowns. Ensure you?re updated using Ubuntu?s Update Manager so you can take advantage of this improvement."

Interesting, thanks. I'll do some reading

[Rablet]

It seems odd that your performance went down when using OpenGL as mine went up quite a bit after changing.

Did you double check that it properly got set to OpenGL? The dropdown where you would usually be able to change between DirectX9 & 10 should change to say "Custom" (or be blank, I can't remember which one, I'll check when I'm home). I'm using the 13.1 driver, maybe there's issues with the 13.2 beta?

[Shaun N.]

It seems odd that your performance went down when using OpenGL as mine went up quite a bit after changing.

Did you double check that it properly got set to OpenGL? The dropdown where you would usually be able to change between DirectX9 & 10 should change to say "Custom" (or be blank, I can't remember which one, I'll check when I'm home). I'm using the 13.1 driver, maybe there's issues with the 13.2 beta?

There was an update to the driver released yesterday which I'll try later.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwNTM

[mjcity]

New Alienware X51 Gaming PC Now Available in Ubuntu OS Version http://techmymoney.com/?p=1810

[Growled Member]

Best advice you can get: for gaming use Windows. Simple as that.

I have to agree. Linux still has a lot of driver issues. Frame rates for most games are much better in Windows.

[Circaflex]

I have to agree. Linux still has a lot of driver issues. Frame rates for most games are much better in Windows.

not always, if you remember back to when steam was first being shown running on ubuntu it actually had much better performance and FPS than its windows counterpart, thus the devs took some of those ideas and implemented them into the windows build and gained performance.

[ingramator]

I have to agree. Linux still has a lot of driver issues. Frame rates for most games are much better in Windows.

Linux has always had driver issues, just ask Linux what he thinks of Nvidia... hahaha. As someone already mentioned if you are actually serious about gaming then you will pretty much have to use Windows. Sure have some fun with Ubuntu and all but you don't really think its going to help this futile Linux gaming movement do you? There are so many problems that have to be ironed about in the kernel itself before progressing to hardcore graphics output. Linux has never been engineered around objects and so doing tasks like intense HID to GUI is pretty strenuous on the hardware. Pair that with OpenGL and a lack of games and you have a non-existent gaming platform. Then there is all the overhead in distributions especially Ubutnu. They use some adhoc method of screen drawing to software render frames- pretty much no hardware acceleration so your $500 GPU will be just crawling along.