I was wondering, before I install Linux, can I play games on it?

Like Battlefield 1942, Quake III, Black Hawk Down? Just naming a few of my favorite games...

There are a bunch of games that you can play depending on your 3d card capabilities and driver support for linux ! I have a Linux box which has nvedia geforce 2 ultra and they work very smoothly ! I play UT , Q3 , Sof 2 , Counter strike ,HL , Doom 1,2 and almost all dos based games ! I get around 100 fps in 1024x768 when I play UT in linux ! Thats like 88% difference !

Ofcourse the graphics look a bit different as the gpu sub system in linux uses a different 3D engine !

But all / most games are supported !

and the Online gaming is fast even on dialup !


Avinash Shankar

A.K.A : Fragmaster[India]

I have a Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB video card.

You could use WINEX to play games. The website is here .

If you really really really really really need all your games to work, otherwise you dont want to run linux then you better check out the winex project before you install - not all games can be run (smoothly) - it's one of the major reason a lot of people dual boot.

I have installed linux a couple of times as a dual boot system, and found I'd give up on linux within a few months - too tempting to go back to what you know. Now that I've gone all linux, I'm learning heaps more.

You'll have to choose!

I'm really curious how you get all these games running. I haven't been able to get WineX (cvs) work correctly yet.

Unreal Tournament and TuxRacer work perfectly with my ATI Radeon 9000 card. UT2003 uses some extensions that are only supported by NVIDIA. off course, I've sent ATI an e-mail about this issue, just to let them know there is another Linux user out there.

Im running RedHat v9 with XP dual boot, why mess with the headaches, I didnt install RH to play games on it, but that is just me. I suppose I might install a game to see what its like, but thats about it.

on the winex site there is a game listing about what games work and how well.

yapp: This may sound stupid but it stalled me up. If you did get the cvs to compile correctly and rpm -i it, then use winex3 instead of "winex".

Once you get the basics running the games on linux isnt really a headace, alot of games still dont work that id love to see work. If i could find like an emulated registry then it would be alot easier.

nope unfortunately that didn't work. I've downloaded the cvs source directly (cvs checkout), and ran "wine -v"; is returns "WineX CVS". did you did you use a source-rpm install?

hehe, im trying to make wine/wineX run games just for the challange, and i was sick of wincrap crashing every two hours.. plus i get a huge preformance gain in linux for some reason, prolly because its not running all of XP's services... just my 2c's

maybe I'll try Wine with Rainbow Six/Eagle Watch, see how it performs sometime.... It'll have to wait a few more weeks, though, with my schedule getting more packed.

hehe I can image. I'm trying VMWare now, but perhaps I have more luck with wine from gentoo; they seam to set-up some things already after a simple "emerge <programname>"

I've noticed that Linux really works faster with games, but I think this is because the kernel is quite small and efficient, it has a nice OpenGL library, and the other graphic-layers are modular (like xfree-dri). Because Windows starts to become one monolithic system, it's hard to improve single modules. Stuff like DirectX was invented to circumvent the bloat of the Windows GDI layers. (which makes it insecure too)

Things like switching back to your desktop, running an OpenGL UT window, and switching back just happens instantly with Linux. Windows always blanks the screen for 2 seconds, something I cannot understand anymore.