Well, it still manages to run Shogo and Blood 2 but the graphics look like absolute crap unless you have a sufficiently old enough GPU or are willing to code your own hacks to support legacy graphical features.

The fact Wine can even run Blood 2 at all is astonishing considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to run that game under any Windows.

Wine also is the only thing that can run "DARKFIX" for Privateer 2: The Darkening. No Windows system in my possession would even let it run, it'd just silently exit with seemingly no error message to go by.

Other than that, every other game I've ran on this (Unreal, UT99, UT2004 before I got the Linux native port setup, Earth 2150) ran fine performance wise... I didn't notice any of them running worse in performance compared to natively on Windows or in a VM. So either I'm really lucky or I'm completely oblivious.

I'll keep that in mind - I don't know what Darkfix is? Haven't got around to playing Privateer 2 yet.

I was comparing Arx Fatalis - it looks like it works fine, but Windows is noticeably smoother rotating the viewpoint when the character turns.

I have a fair few old GPUs. Main system is a 780Ti and a Quadro 6000 (flashed GTX480). Legacy Windows game system is a Quadro FX4400 (similar to a Geforce 6800, includes stereo connector). Also have a 7600GT hanging around, and a TNT..somewhere. Also a FireGL 8800 and a Radeon 8500 (almost the same thing).

DARKFIX was a hacked version of the elusive Windows 95 version of Privateer 2 that removes the scanlines from the videos and makes the game run at a consistent timerate. (The game does not move faster than it should, spaceflight, menus, etc) It was also supposed the fix the game from not launching on modern Windows systems with modern hardware.

Also when it comes to Linux and graphics performance, NVIDIA is the biggest problem because they have absolutely terrible Linux support. (Not only is it proprietary as hell it relies on very specific kernel versions due to this and even relies on their own X display server!)

I played World of Warcraft during months (Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm) with Wine running on Debian with a NVidia card. It was not faster nor slower than Windows (some tenths of FPS, depending on zones) and it feels more stable. They have a compatibility database with fixes or workarounds for some games, and although they have their share of incompatible games the list is smaller every day.

At times, WINE is better than Windows... mostly because there are games that you can not run with recent versions of Windows and WINE can.

DracoNihil wrote:

Also when it comes to Linux and graphics performance, NVIDIA is the biggest problem because they have absolutely terrible Linux support. (Not only is it proprietary as hell it relies on very specific kernel versions due to this and even relies on their own X display server!)

Sure? NVidia has propietary drivers, but their performance is very good. It is true that their drivers are propietary (there are some free drivers, but the performance and capabilities are sub-par) but most distributions have their easy installation methods for them (I got Debian and only needed apt-get install nvidia-drivers to get the thing working). In worst cases, you can download a driver installer from NVidia and you'll need to update it manually (every time you update your kernel and every time you want to get another version) but that's all. Even when Debian had not "official" drivers, I was able to install those drivers without problems.

AMD/ATI, on the other hand, have free drivers... but their performance (at least a few years ago) was not as good as NVidia. I don't really know how good is ATI on Linux at this time, but I've heard (so don't believe on this) that latest cards need some kind of propietary drivers to work at full performance.

And Intel... well they had free drivers (I don't know if they still colaborate with Linux community) but Intel graphics performance is minimal. Note that this is not a Linux problem... Intel never had a gaming video card.

So (until someone tells me that ATI have fixed their issues with Linux), I'd say that NVidia is the way to run games on Linux or WINE.

Have you tried Wine Staging?

I'm running a Radeon HD 6870 on purely open source drivers and haven't ran into a single performance problem I didn't already have on Windows 7 running Catalyst... so I say they have fixed their problem, Zup.

There are some games that struggle on this card but I've had the same amount of struggle I did Windows 7 with Catalyst, so clearly the open source drivers have reached a parity with the proprietary ones.

Gta 4 runs decent on a hd 5770/r7 360 with open drivers. Not with full details but enough to be fun. Gothic 2 runs perfect. I think star wars kotor ran perfect some years ago when I played it. I don't run many games on wine but when I do, they work rather well. Gothic 3 had some graphics issues years ago, don't know if they've been resolved.