So Can you actually play videogames on Linux?

By eric zed
in Linux

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Experienced

Whiffle

Posted
Posted

Of course you can. The selection is more limited than Windows, but you can. If you're a heavy gamer that has to have all the latest games, I would recommend keeping windows around for that though. The games that do work in linux generally work extremely well though.

Mentor

Spielo

Posted
Posted

*Technically* Video Games are by definition not on computers, but on consoles.

Pedanticness aside:

Many games written in OpenGL include linux support, such as UT2004, Doom 3, Quake 3 (and 4?) and a couple others.

DirectX games don't, though there is a directx wrapper of some sort available, but i've never really looked into it.

Experienced

llbbl

Posted
Posted

Yea cedega kicks ass lets you play all your windows games. Some work better than others, but hey I'm not that picky. The games I play are officially supported by transgaming which is why I am going to switch completely to Linux. I didn't know such a program existed till a couple of months ago. Oh and the price isn't bad only $15 or less for 3 months. The guys at transgaming hard hardworking at making gaming under Linux better so they deserve every penny!

Mentor

SaguratuS

Posted
Posted

Yea cedega kicks ass lets you play all your windows games. Some work better than others, but hey I'm not that picky. The games I play are officially supported by transgaming which is why I am going to switch completely to Linux. I didn't know such a program existed till a couple of months ago. Oh and the price isn't bad only $15 or less for 3 months. The guys at transgaming hard hardworking at making gaming under Linux better so they deserve every penny!

You might also want to check out Wine (winehq.org)

Cedega was built off an extremely old version of Wine, before they changed licenses. The Wine dev's have been working hard at adding DX support, and it's been progressing very nicely. Many DX games will now work under wine, which is a much better & faster solution than Cedega (And it's free).

That said, you can expect a minor FPS loss for games that you have to run with Wine or Cedega, however I've personally had the graphics quality end up being significantly better. Games like World of Warcraft don't even compare - It looks 5x better (No blur), and it's actually faster, even though it's being run under Wine. I probably notice this a bit more than most due to my resolution, but try it out, you won't be disappointed. WoW running at 1920x1200 with a 6800 Ultra, running max quality @ 30-40fps via wine.

Experienced

pdog

Posted
Posted

Transgaming has a program called Cedega that lets you run DirectX games on linux.. supports a lot of games, only bad thing is it's a paid monthly. Link below

http://www.transgaming.com/

Its GPL so they can't charge for the code. You can download it for FREE from the CVS server.

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsect...hp?articleid=45

^Tells you how!

Grand Master

Gerowen

Posted
Posted

Its GPL so they can't charge for the code. You can download it for FREE from the CVS server.

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsect...hp?articleid=45

^Tells you how!

Hey thanks for that link!

Grand Master

markwolfe Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

Its GPL so they can't charge for the code.

Yes you can charge for GPL code.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#D...heGPLAllowMoney

The "GPL Quiz" link in my sig might be an interesting way to check your knowledge of the GPL. It is a tough quiz!

  • 3 weeks later...
Proficient

madd_matt

Posted
Posted

The restriction is just that you need to provide the source code isn't it?

There are a good number of games for linux. I'm not a big gamer, so quake 4 and unreal tournament 2004, plus some other small dumb games (professor fizzwizzle is pretty fun =). there are also many free games for linux, like crack-attack.

Most older games run perfectly under wine, some newer ones (and some old ones too) might not work; so you'll have to use cedega. Although I haven't personally used it. (Linux native applications are fine for me, 90% of the time)

Proficient

LaNcom

Posted
Posted

Cedega is _not_ GPL, just like Wine. Wine is LGPL (which allows linking of closed source applications), and was MIT-licensed a few years ago. The MIT license, just like the BSD license, allows closed-source modifications. Cedega is based on old, MIT-licensed Wine sourcecode, and even though Transgaming licensed a few of their improvements under the MIT license for a few more months after the fork, pretty much all major improvements on Cedega are closed source since 2003. The Cedega/ WineX from CVS is extremely outdated and doesn't come with most of the interesting features (D3D9 and copyprotection support, DIB engine, new scheduler...).

Grand Master

markwolfe Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

Just a note, and it seems to be newly announced on transgaming.org's site as of 12 Dec 2005, that Cedega has a 14-day free trial of the full version available here: http://www.transgaming.com/products_linux.php

You can see for yourself the gaming difference between wine & cvs to the commercial version of Cedega.

  • 2 weeks later...
Community Regular

NeoLojik

Posted
Posted
That said, you can expect a minor FPS loss for games that you have to run with Wine or Cedega, however I've personally had the graphics quality end up being significantly better. Games like World of Warcraft don't even compare - It looks 5x better (No blur), and it's actually faster, even though it's being run under Wine. I probably notice this a bit more than most due to my resolution, but try it out, you won't be disappointed. WoW running at 1920x1200 with a 6800 Ultra, running max quality @ 30-40fps via wine.

I wish I knew how people achieved this. I've had fairly intensive experiences with Linux over the past year or two, various distros and the such, but until nVidia released the 1.0-8xxx drivers I couldn't really use any because of a very annoying hard-crash when closing X. With the newer drivers though, I get a significant decrease in framerate under Linux. I play WoW at 1600x1200 with max settings on Windows and normally run between 40 and 60 FPS, under Linux I'm lucky to hit mid 20's with the same settings (literally, running the same copy of WoW).

There's nothing I'd like more than to ditch Windows totally, it's just a shame I can't seem to get the performance that others seem to :blink:

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