Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Wine, Cedega
Linux has taken excellent strides in becoming a full Windows desktop replacement operating system; advances in Open Office and Mozilla being two of the most notable. Unfortunately, the decision to buy new hardware constantly goes hand in hand with the decision to play some new game - and if it's a gaming machine you want, then Linux isn't the operating system that you need. Fence sitters end up being the people who lose. For example, you may wish to buy a new Linux rig for some CAD tool, but are forced to dual boot the machine in order to play FarCry. Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica "virtualization" technologies may make dual boot and emulation a thing of the past, but today, we are stuck emulating Windows instead of running multiple instances of it.Maybe emulation isn't the right word. "Wine Is Not an Emulator", as they used to say. In fact, the Wine project has very little to do with emulation. Wine acts very similarly to the AnandTech FrameGetter program - running a binary while replacing and linking libraries at run-time - but on a much more complicated level. TransGaming describes the basic implementation of WineX (Cedega) below:
"Cedega loads a game's binary into memory on a Linux system and then dynamically links to code that provides an implementation of the Win32 APIs that the program is using. The APIs that Windows games are mostly built on top of are primarily based on Microsoft's DirectX system. These APIs include facilities for handling 3D graphics (Direct3D), mouse and keyboard input (DirectInput), audio (DirectSound), and so on. TransGaming works to create Linux compatible versions of these APIs that work on top of the Linux equivalents such as OpenGL, X11, and the OSS and ALSA sound APIs." [2]Wine continues to make an impression on the Linux gaming community. For large, major releases, Cedega provides some really great support and nearly flawless gameplay. We subscribed to Transgaming's Cedega program (previously known as WineX) several months ago and have met some limited success.
FarCry
Of course, we just laid out extensive praise for Wine and then we ran into a game like FarCry. We wanted FarCry to be our focus Wine benchmark game, but we immediately had problems when the game would not load. We were constantly greeted by "EXCEPTION: Attempt to read from NULL at 0x00000000" in the splash screen. We actually vaguely remember this same exception error from Mechwarrior 4 several years ago (on Windows). Part of us thinks that the attempt an unusual read like this may have something to the NX stack protection on Athlon 64 3800+ testbed.Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Jedi Knight: JA actually runs very smoothly and flawlessly on Wine. We cannot use our FG utility on Cedega (yet) unfortunately, so our benchmarks are based on numbers obtained in the game FPS averages.
Check out our very recent Windows analysis of JKJA. As you can see from our benchmarks, there is a definite performance hit with Wine. Derek Wilson, our GPU Editor, uses a slightly faster processor in his benchmarks, but not enough to account for a 15% lacking difference that we see in our tests. Cedega is slower, but for those of us who are trying to ditch Windows, the performance levels are acceptable.
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mczak - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"On our MSI nForce3 board, this should have been the nvidia_agp module. However, try as we could, we could not get nvidia_agp and fglrx to play well with each other."This is a mistake, you do not need (and it will not work) the nvidia-agp module. For all A64 based boards, no matter if the chipset is from sis, via, nvidia or someone else, you need the amd64-agp module instead. It might have just worked with that - suse 9.1 loads it automatically for K8T800 chipset, but I think for some reason it doesn't get automatically loaded for nforce3 chipsets. It might have just worked loading it manually, saving you some time :-).
"We are not entirely sure why, but even after completely removing the NVIDIA kernel module, we still had persistent errors installing the ATI drivers correctly."
Removing the kernel module will do nothing. Nvidia drivers replace some of XFree/Xorg libraries, which are incompatible (I think libglx.a is affected by that, but there might be more), and ATI does not have its own version of these files. Uninstalling the nvidia driver with its own installer (which has an uninstall option) should get the original version back in place afaik.
directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Oh, and a note on some SDL games on SUSE. On games like UT (original) and many other games using the same old installer, you need to create /mnt/cdrom and mount your cdrom there, as the installers don't tend to look for SuSE's /media/dvd nonsense, and it will often keep asking you to insert the CDROM.directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
I can't belive noone's mentioned it yet, but Warcraft is an odd example of a game that tends to run better emulated under Cedega (SuSE 9.1) than natively on Windows. Blizzard has a decent relationship with Transgaming. While they won't do a native port of Warcraft III, they are willing to help Transgaming make their game compatible.I would definately like to see AnandTech take a look into this and why various Cedega games run better than others.
Ardan - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Gaming in linux doesn't take hours to achieve. If it took you hours to properly install something like, say, Enemy Territory, then you are doing it all wrong.I have set up gaming in linux on both an ATI and an nvidia card lately and neither are hassles. ATI's Linux development team has been making great strides, so don't sell them short. I fully expect them to start rolling along with new features and better support. Comparing them to when I used nvidia's older linux drivers to what they have now, it took a VERY long time to achieve. However, ATI is making strides in a shorter amount of time. Don't worry about that:)
I loved the article a lot as well, but I would like to point out that the latest ATI drivers are 3.14.1. I do not think that everything has to be open-source to be good in linux. ATI and nvidia are clearly capable of engineering great cards and great drivers, so I am okay with closed-source. Surely it must be an even bigger benefit to them to be able to see the source of the OS they're programming for.
Anandtech, keep up the good work on the Linux articles! They keep getting better and better.
ballero - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Great article.you can use "nvidia-settings" (the control panel) to set up both AA and AF
Pannenkoek - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
UT is not a SDL game, but an OpenGL game in Linux. SDL is a library for making graphical applications easier (made by Epic, open source) and is comparable to DirectX excluding Direct3D.Graphics is a weak spot in Linux, mostly due to the fact that NVIDIA and ATi are paranoid to open their hardware spec so no open source cutting edge video drivers can be made. Stable video drivers, now that would be refreshing.
A stable Linux system will never lock completely, but insert proprietary closed source drivers and redirect all input to X and you get pretty close to the Windows experience.
Fortunately there is finally fast development in the X compartment now that Xfree is dying and with Xorg.
Illissius - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Nice article. Mostly mirrors my experience - I haven't been able to get ATi drivers to install at all (this was a few months ago) on either Mandrake, Knoppix (disk install), or Xandros, which was the point at which I gave up and got an nVidia card, and moved to Gentoo at the same time. Installing the drivers was pretty damn easy as far as Gentoo goes* - 'emerge nvidia-glx', add nvidia to the modules autoload list, change the driver in xorg.conf from 'nv' to 'nvidia', and I think that's about it. Of the games I tried (UT2003 demo, UT2004 demo, Wolfenstein: ET) all worked flawlessly, and as far as I can tell the same speed as under Windows. AA/AF worked also - nVidia has a nice graphical control panel for them too (called 'nvidia-settings' in portage); it's not as full featured as their Windows drivers, but it does the job.* What I like about Gentoo is that although you have to setup most things manually, you generally don't have to touch them again after you do. The distro gives you a lot more control over your entire system than 'user friendly' ones like SuSE/Mandrake/Fedora, as well. ie, if you're fascinated with customization, have tried far too many Windows tweak utilities, and can find your way around the registry well enough, there's a good chance it's the distro for you.
Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
#3, ATi is generally poorer with OpenGL games than nVidia, and Linux doesn't support DirectX (a Windows thing), so it's fairly obvious that the nVidia cards (which are better at OpenGL), will be better than the equivelant ATi cards (which are generally better at Direct 3D stuff - looking at NV3x vs R3xx)Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Have you been working with the 3Dc people? (I notice one of their forum members featuring in a screenshot, an immature one IMO at that ;))Congratulations for putting up a Linux gaming article, it would be nice if you could do older cards though (I was thinking of setting up a machine with a GF4 Ti4400 to run Linux).