I love games, but gaming on Linux is, correct me if I'm wrong, difficult and very involving. You can spend days getting something to launch, and then it won't even run correctly, usually crashing.

My conclusion is that I think we are supposed to have a VERY powerful computer and video card to run anything with Linux, unlike in windows, where a lot of games just happen to run -- like diablo 2 or worms world party -- these games run on old crappy computers without special video cards. I have 2 games on my computer, and they both run terribly: Enemy Territories (which I tried for months to launch, install correctly) and Nexuiz, which launches and allows me to look at the attractive menus before it all goes black and makes me reboot.

I can play online with Enemy Territories, but it's rough -- not smooth at all. Then if I'm playing for about 20 minutes it will just close mysteriously.

Please, Linux Gamers, tell me: Does my computer suck for gaming? Also, is it true that you all have spent time to optimize your computer's hardware for games? Since I mostly play chess and Halo 3, I don't think buying extra hardware is worth it. I just want to buy/download games that I loved when I was forced to use windows 98 back in the day on old computers with a new computer that runs linux.

video card: 07:04.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev c1)

Ram: 1024mb

Processor: intel core 2 duo

I know I probably shouldn't get Doom 3 with these specs, but these specs are higher than what is required by Enemy Territories, and it seems like the rest of the world has fun with this game (I loved it on Xbox long ago).

PS: I love Linux and love configuring my system. I just don't understand why the most involving, technical, difficult, strenuous, tedious work has to be done before even considering a game you would like to play.

I almost for got to give credit where credit is due: Ltris works great on my computer, as does Google Earth Oh, and xboard with fics

My experiences are that on Linux I get better performance than on Windows when running software that uses hardware 3d accelaration, but that means the appropriate drivers need to be present for the hardware. More specifically it usually means you need to have the manufacturer's proprietary drivers (for example ATI's or nVidia's) installed and functioning before anything "works" in that area..but when that's solved, performance shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Installing and running games is then a whole other story. Most games are not desiged to be run on Linux, and therefore you're pretty much alone with them -- as bad as it sounds Wine and/or Cedega may or may not run some games, but it's still about the same as running emulated games - it's up to the game how well it works. Games that are officially desiged for Linux should work well, but that too depends to some extent on how well they were designed. Then there's this distribution thing; if the game was designed to install and launch without trouble on a specific Fedora version, on Ubuntu some things might not work in an expected manner and thus lead to a situation where the user ends up doing some dirty work to get the game playing, instead of the developers. On Windows this is not an issue, since there is only one "distribution" of Windows (note: if a game is designed to run on XP, it might not run on 98 or Vista, and so on!)

I think the main reason for gaming to be "difficult" on Linux is that it's still a young thing. Some time ago it was a wonder if one 3d game ran on Linux; nowadays it's a little better, but still not perfect. And probably it never will be, because
- gaming consoles are the primary interest of most companies
- Windows has been used as a platform for long, so it's more natural to many companies, and a lot of people still compare Windows to Linux in this matter even though that's not the key point
- Linux, not being controlled by one company, evolves a lot faster than any commercial-only, closed operating system, and thus doesn't provide a static place for game designers to work on
- Linux comes in many flavours which don't work 100% the same way (if they would, they wouldn't be different from each other), which means software designers need to care about several more things than they need on, say, Windows XP; that alone scares part of them off

In the future I personally expect the gaming industry to move more off from PCs and more towards gaming consoles; PC games might not fully die of extinction, but gaming consoles just provide a more clear and controlled place for game companies to work on than any PC operating system (it's not just about the hardware..)

EDIT: oh yeah, there's a big difference in clicking "Tux Racer" (or whatever it's called nowadays) in your package manager and be able to play it in a minute, and buying a today-released copy of some commercial game and try to get it work on Linux, especially if you don't happen to use the very same distribution version the game designers/packagers used.

This has not been my experience. With all the games I've tried, they have run perfectly. I'm using a notebook with Debian Lenny, Intel Core Duo, 1gb of ram, and a 128mb integrated intel video card.

I have successfully installed and played Warcraft III, Starcraft, Diablo II + LOD, Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament 2004, Openarena, and Nexuiz. I don't actually currently play all of them (still play Diablo), but they have all worked for me. For all of the windows games, I used wine. I ran Unreal Tournament natively, and of course Openarena+nexuiz natively.

You just need to work it out. Maybe there is an issue with your drivers. The weakest point of your system is the GPU, but I still think you should be able to run your mentioned games.

Hey, Rehumanize! I'm in Tampa, too! Small world.

I'm surprised to see your success with all of those games, but it excites me. Thanks for the replies. I agree with b0uncer about consoles being on top one day -- even now, perhaps, but I just want to use the mouse for headshots sometimes. I'll just have to keep trying. I have the nvidia drivers working and glx w/ dri is on. There's probably many more tests and experiments I can run to get better results in game, I suppose.

Only problem is that when I'm in the mood to play is when I often find myself reading over ungodly-sized documents that rarely relate to my specific gameplay problems. Then I end up playing chess or 360 until the urge to game on my computer creeps up again, and those big documents of seemingly unrelated material are right there waiting for me... laughing at me

I thought you could get mice for gaming consoles as well, not just PCs? I mean, for a lot of games a mouse is a necessity, not just something nice to have..

My machine has something like an AMD dualcore 64-bit cpu (2x3GHz), a dx10-compliant nVidia graphics card (the weakest point, I know, but runs more than fine for the games I play) and at the moment 4G of RAM; irrelevant, but I'll say anyway I use a 22" HDMI widescreen there hehe. Well, it's not the hardware that gets in my way, for me it's just the game installation procedure and being able to run the games without crashes. Some games install fine (with Wine or natively), but some don't. A few run smoothly, most run for some time and then get nasty just when you start getting used to the flow..

Well, the bottom line is probably that though it's technically possible, it's just not as smooth on Linux than on the other choices for now. On the other hand I agree; on gaming consoles game makers don't have too much trouble on choices like I said, on Windows the installers are either exe or msi files built up using some installer software or another, but on Linux..rpm, deb, custom bin, tgz or one of the million others? How on Earth could they know what to choose as the packaging format, since most options don't work on more than a few distributions and those that might work just are more ugly (on "easy-to-use" systems I prefer native package manager format to any .bin installers).

The only problem I've had with any game I've tried running on Linux began many months AFTER I first got it working. I upgraded to FC9 and then cube stopped working reliably. It would launch fine, but after about 5 minutes of play my entire computer would lock up. I couldn't even do CTL-ALT-F1 to get to a tty. I would have to hold in the power button and do a hard stop. It turns out that it had nothing to do with the upgrade. I was just coincidental that at about the same time as the upgrade, the fan on my video card died. The heatsink was enough for the desktop, but any time something 3D took over for an extended period of time, the card would overheat and shut down. If I remove the fan from the card I can play cube a little longer, but eventually it will halt the system as well. I don't think I'll get a new video card as I am overdue for a complete system upgrade, but perhaps I'll get a new fan and push my Flintstone PC along for a few more months.

Forrest

I have also had problems getting some 3D games to work however Urban Terror was straight forward. There is even an install script for Ubuntu @
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=655355
This worked on my Debian Sid system with similar hardware specifications. (There are issues with glibc version used in Etch)


Regards,
Stefan

this just makes me think that the right choice for some one who wants a great computer, to run games without any hassle AND to run linux, is a playstation 3.

Your computer is more powerful then mine, and I have no problems gaming on it.

In fact, the only problems with any software on Linux (or BSD) that I have ever had was trying to run Windows programs via Wine. These were unstable.

I agree PS3 is the choice if you want to run Linux on the same machine you want to play games without huge problems..I understand that there are some issues with PS3 games as well, but that are (usually) fixed with some sort of upgrade to the software -- not that I own a PS3 myself, but have been reading news on the web. The major problem with PS3 is it's price of course, taking into consideration the machine price itself, game prices (the games cost more than PC games or any other games I've seen lately) and the fact that unless you have a hdmi television, you're probably going to need to buy that too (or "suffer" from worse output, if I'm not mistaken).

Running the 3d desktop on Linux (compiz-fusion for example) seems to cause some problems when playing games (or vice versa), though not on every machine/desktop/configuration. So if there are problems that come after installing and running the game successfully for some time, maybe it's a good idea to try to turn off compiz-fusion (or similar) for the time you run the games?

Btw,

this is a poor card for gaming, the GF4 MX range is slow (and does not have a vertex shader). Even the Geforce 3 is a good bit faster than the MX.

I love playing games too and for this reason i always dualboot win/linux : i use win only for playing windows games and linux for everything else except for games,the only games i run sometimes in linux are Planet Penguin Racer / Extreme Tux Racer,tuxkart /supertuxkart and frozen bobble which are all native for linux and by this way i've never experienced performances problems or spent hours in getting mad in trying to make a windows game running under wine so i simply suggest you to do a dual boot.

Good luck !

Doctorzongo: Thank you. The fact that my computer is faster than yours, yet you game nicely, makes me feel that maybe I can further configure to get the results I desire.

smoked kipper: Thank you. I really do not know much about my video card except that it's there. Haven't owned a computer with a pci video card until now.

For ET, your video card is fine. There is a linux install guide for ET on the internet, released by id, I believe. I ran it with no problem on a wide range of hardware. It runs natively on linux; you should see slightly better FPS than Windows due to the smaller number of 'services' running in the background.

I currently play World of Warcraft on linux and my frame rate is excellent -- running it on wine -- even on some dated hardware.

The issue with dual booting gamers is...you play games more than you do work, so you will end up staying in Windows...why would you log out to surf the net in linux and then a few minutes later, log back into Windows to play your game? I wasn't able to drop Windows until I accepted this. Luckily, all the games I play and have played have had pretty spectacular linux support.

It never took me days to set anything up. Maybe in my earliest days with linux when everything I did was more or less hit and miss.
If it's a windows game, I take a look at its page on winehq to see if there's a howto on setting it up - there usually is, and most of the time they work pretty well. Linux games, I usually try to get from the repository... like with all linux programs.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I haven't played a lot of games in the past years, and most worked.
Flatout, GTA3, Quake3, Prey, Nexuiz, Warsow, Spring, Max Payne.
I'm a bit behind in times. The only recent one was Prey, and GTA-San Andreas which I ran on windows.

You have chosen a distribution that has a reputation of being notoriously hard to use. I've used linux for almost a decade, and I did have a short-lived and not very successful encounter with Slackware.
If you could post about any game specifically we might see what the problem is.