Neverwinter Nights also has a Linux version.

In general software will run better on operating systems configured specially to run that specific software (having minimum hardware is of course necessary).

My suggestion would be to configure your old machine to run the games you want to play. On the Windows side, there is a LOT of crap that you can cut out. One example is to create a services profile that you can select for gaming. This essentially turns off all services that you don't need while playing your games. There are MANY other things you can do to Windows to speed it up. You'd actually be amazed at what can be done with even a PII 400MHz 288MB laptop running XP.

That being said if you know what you are doing in Linux you can make it even more resource conscious. Some come out of the box very fast, but the usual trade off is the learning curve to setting them up to exactly how you want them.

It all depends on how much work you want to put into this. Eventually, the minimum hardware needed for some games may exceed what even a master hacker can compensate for and so you will still have to cough up the dough for that new graphics card.

Finally, there are a lot of really good open source games that Linux users enjoy. Some, such as Battle for Wesnoth, are on Windows as well.

Open Arena is also a good one. (Though old)

I've tweaked the settings according to the FAQ on their website, and it looks pretty amazing at 1680x1050 (native res) with an NVIDIA 6600GT.

I had no idea that Neverwinter Nights was available in linux... I bought it from direct2drive a month ago for windows. I wonder if they'll give me the linux version...

I have to second UT (original) GOTY. I play in 3 assault clans and there is a linux version of teamspeak that works great.

I also have UT2004 which has a native linux installer on the DVD.

i play ut2004 on slack runs great i also have the linux ts and i have ventrilo working fine under wine here are a few sites that may help u

http://happypenguin.org/ - search FPS there s bunch of free fps games

http://linux-gamers.net

http://www.linuxgames.com/

http://www.tuxgames.com - this site u can order linux versions of games

take a look at true combat:Elite it is a wonderful replacement for counter strike

X2: The Threat is released by LGP for linux
http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/info.php?id=23
If you wish StarCraft2 to be released under gnu/linux may be youu will be interested in this http://www.petitiononline.com/ibpfl/petition.html

And lets not forget Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, its free too.

For NWN (not NWN2!) you can download the linux client from here :
http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html

You may need to do a lot of tweaking to get it working. You will have to disable the old version of SDL that comes with it. It may not even work with the files from Direct2Drive as it needs a CD key.

It's really wonderful!

Thanks,

I realize now that I have NWN2 ...
Oh well.

I've (quite easily) gotten Urban Terror, Quake3, Doom3 and Quake4 all working natively under slackware. The games run HEAPS better on linux than they ever did on Windows, (especially Quake4).

Under wine, I have gotten Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne working as well.

Then of course there is Bzflag native for linux which is a lot of fun too

All of these games link quite happily to other linux systems or simultaneously to windows systems, and all can play online with no hassles.

All I can say is ... Slackware Rocks!

Cheers

Orbit

I do all my gaming under Slackware.

You just need to open your mind a bit. There's heaps of stuff out there for Linux these days.

I like the seamless way this 3 years old thread have been bumped.

I don't know the behaviour of natives Linux games compared to their Windows equivalent but it seems WINE begins to work properly with some games. For example World of Warcraft is doing pretty well if you don't mind the strange way the antiliasing works and some other glitches such as the absence of fog (and then, a terribly ugly clipping) and a good performance loss coupled with strange freezes solveable with alt+tab.
I think this is wonderfull to run a Windows program using advanced 3D API in Linux so I don't ask a lot but I think this is still far from being perfect.

For me, Windows is still the platform of choice to play games on a PC.

I've had no problem playing Enemy Territory on Slackware. Since I only have a very slow dial-up connection to the internet, I use Omni-Bot to create players for my team and my opponents.

I'm not a serious gamer, but I recently tried Nexuiz on Slack 12, and its a pretty neat game. It runs natively on Linux, so you don't even need to bother with Wine: just unzip it and run the executable.

I saw it in this nice list:Top 21 games in linux. Have a look, there are quite a few FPS's there.