ubuntu ??

[racerjosh]

hello, i have recently been looking at downlaoding and installing ubuntu...

ive heard from mates and from people in the I.T side of things that this platfrom is very good and a lot quicker than windows, which im all for

since i have my games on a different paritition on my hard rive then it makes it easier for me as i dont have to install my precious gaming again :worship:

what i really want to know is, will ubuntu have any compatability problems with my games ? (cod 4, avp2, motogp2007, mohaa, crysis, test drive unlimited)

i dont really want to do dual boot as il end up not using ubuntu as i mostly use the pc for my games and browsing the web which is all good at the moment

so; compatability problems, any?

heres the website http://www.ubuntu.com/

regards

josh

 

[FarFarAway]

Linux is a good platform but for gaming you'd have to run an emulator, unless the games are linux compatible

 

[JN]

If you play a lot of games then tbh Windows is the better option (as much as it pains me to say it).

 

[equk]

It's a brilliant OS and if you like unix/linux it's really nice.

For new games tho, you'd be better with windows unless there's a native binary for the game.

I used gentoo & ubuntu for years to play quake3 with no problems, so if there is a native binary it's ok. Also ubuntu and gentoo benchmark'd a lot faster than windows on quake3 (around 100fps on timedemo)

You can play windows games using WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator). There are loads of versions of wine aswell, including cedega which is made for games. You won't get as good performance as you would on windows tho. Altho on WoW I found the load times were amazingly different.

As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor. It will thus not be as slow as Wabi which, since it is not running on a x86 Intel processor, also has to emulate the processor. Windows applications that do not make system calls will run just as fast as on Windows (no more no less).

 

[racerjosh]

ah okay ... cheers for the help :worship: il prob stick to XP due to gaming .. wouldnt want to mess up Call of Duty 4 now would we and i doubt Crysis will run on Ubuntu even with emulators lol

 

[equk]

i doubt Crysis will run on Ubuntu even with emulators lol

You don't use emulators for games in linux

people keep calling wine an emulator

 

[FarFarAway]

You don't use emulators for games in linux

people keep calling wine an emulator

It may as well be tbh, it hardly performs well compared to modern gaming in dowz

 

[equk]

It may as well be tbh, it hardly performs well compared to modern gaming in dowz

It performs ok, look at what EA are doing on the mac. Shipping windows games with custom darwine (ie - Cider) with a huge markup.

Those games are modern (BF2142, NFS Carbon, C&C3, Tiger Woods '08, Madden '08,Guitar hero 3 etc..)

OK, it's a bit slower, but look at what there is to work with. The games are coded for a completely different platform (also coded on DirectX - linux has OpenGL). So it's understandable that it wouldn't be quite as fast. (some games have bench'd faster on wine than on windows tho).

If you have a game which is native, the comparison is a lot more fair and also more accurate. (in comparing the performance of the OS)

 

[FarFarAway]

Agreed with the native thing, it's just not very likely many will make it there.

I never said Linux wasn't good, it's fantastic, just not for a gamer

 

[equk]

Agreed with the native thing, it's just not very likely many will make it there.

I never said Linux wasn't good, it's fantastic, just not for a gamer

Yer

unfortunately that is true, when I played quake3 I was happy and used linux all the time. But as soon as I started playing CS:S I had to dual boot with XP again

Something which is sort of on-topic with gaming + linux/windows:

Screenshot showing comparison of DX10 with OpenGL 2.1

 

[FarFarAway]

Some nice shots of OpenGL

I do quite enjoy the way they've picked some properly dodgy shots of DX10 though

The UE3 Engine looks stunning in whatever DX version it plays in, awesome