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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adt6247 - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Good article. The one thing that I thought was lacking is the comparison to FPS's under Windows. That would be incredibly useful.One more thing -- nVidia actually has a graphical configuration panel for Linux. I forget what it's called; I use it all the time to set AA/AF settings on my box, but my machine is at home, and I'm at work now. I'll post later with the name of the binary.
adt6247 - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Ziast: Fixed.Kristopher
Ziast - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Nice article except for this glaring mistake:"All in all, just getting the ATI drivers on something that isn't Red Hat feels like way too much work for basic OpenGL support. Keep in mind that we even run SuSE, a Red Hat derivative."
SuSe Linux was first released in 1993. Red Hat Linux was not released until 1994. Just because SuSe uses RPM doesn't mean it's a Red Hat derivative.
Papineau - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Two RFEs, one for the article, the other for FG.For the article: Would it be possible to graph the ratio of FPS from one card to the other one over time? That would help to know if a card is "always 1.5 times faster than the other", or "sometimes even, sometimes faster, usually slower than the other".
For FG: Why modify the executable file? Why not use LD_PRELOAD/LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load the lib you want to insert (libFG), and then have it call the system's libGL and libSDL? It seems a bit "bad practice" to modify the benchmarked executable.
Term - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
#6I get more FPS with Linux in both Quake1(World) and Quake3 (single and dual cpu) then with Windows2000. Thow I suspect that if you have a newer card then you might not, due to the drivers.
Cygni - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
When 64bit Windows finally ships, and the entire Athlon64 and Opteron user base switches over, including many gamers, the pressure will be on for ATI, and judging by how good their driver team has been in the 32bit Win sector these last few months, hopefully they can rise to the challenge.As far as Linux drivers for speed? I hate to break the news to alot of people, but gaming on Linux is a HUGE chore with little payoff. Ive spent HOURS with clean installs of Mandrake to play games I already have for Windows... only to, of course, see that they are slower than their windows counterpart. Linux is great for alot of stuff, and ive always got a computer somewhere running Mandrake 9.1... but it just ISNT for gaming right now, which I think the review helped illustrate nicely.
ViRGE - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
I wouldn't be too excited about ATI's 64bit Linux plans, let alone even their 64bit Windows plans. Their only 64bit drivers are over 4 months old, and don't support any of the X-series of cards, which really limits their usefulness. ATI has said before that they may not ship another build until some time in 2005.raylpc - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"we received some information from ATI about some upcoming Linux announcements which they are working on"I remember ATi is working on some "plan", so the actual driver release could be way after. Well, nvidia is probably the next card I'm going to get.
Saist - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
my first thought was:how in the world can an Geforce FX MATCH and BEAT the R300 architecture. I guess if you ever wanted empirical proof that ATi has ignored Linux, this is it.