Is Ubunutu gaming friendly?

[Iced-T]

Question about Ubuntu.

I am curious to try the new Ubuntu... Do windows games work well on it? I read that I need to install a software called Wine to run windows applications.. but apparently it doesnt work all the time..

 

[davidktw]

I am curious to try the new Ubuntu... Do windows games work well on it? I read that I need to install a software called Wine to run windows applications.. but apparently it doesnt work all the time..

Nope Linux isn't the most straight forward platform for games despite that has change quite a fair bit ever since recent kernels have heavy development from both ATI and NVIDIA. There are some games that works fine on the Linux platform, but you are better off on Windows platform.

If you want to test out linux distro, Ubuntu for example, you can try with a virtual machine approach. I believe you are running Windows now, hence your options are Oracle VirtualBox and VMWare player/workstation. The former is free while the latter has much better integration with the OS. Both have 3D acceleration with the latter more robust and well tested.

Using virtual machine will have impact to the graphical performance, which is known. Even so, moderate gaming experience can be obtain out from them.

If you are just trying to test out Linux distro, go ahead using virtual machine approach without installing your games in it. Have your games and Windows application working on the native Windows OS and play around with Linux inside the virtual machine.

 

[simplon]

Steam is quite well supported in Ubuntu now. Of course, there are only a few games that is for Linux only. I know TF2 works as I played with it before. I think Dota2 works too but I am not too sure on that.

 

[ykgoh]

Nope Linux isn't the most straight forward platform for games despite that has change quite a fair bit ever since recent kernels have heavy development from both ATI and NVIDIA. There are some games that works fine on the Linux platform, but you are better off on Windows platform.

-snip-

Just curious about games on Linux. Afaik, in the 90's and 2000's when Microsoft DirectX was the dominant platform, most games were programmed using Direct3D, DirectSound etc. not available on Linux. So Windows DirectX games do not run on Linux.

Is the current trend to support games on Linux and Steam enticing game developers to use OpenGL and OpenAL instead? Or there is a new emulation/compatibility layer for DirectX on Linux today? Anyone knows?

 

[davidktw]

Just curious about games on Linux. Afaik, in the 90's and 2000's when Microsoft DirectX was the dominant platform, most games were programmed using Direct3D, DirectSound etc. not available on Linux. So Windows DirectX games do not run on Linux.

Is the current trend to support games on Linux and Steam enticing game developers to use OpenGL and OpenAL instead? Or there is a new emulation/compatibility layer for DirectX on Linux today? Anyone knows?

If it is graphics, often the choice made is with OpenGL on the unix systems. Having DirectX alone will not make games run wholeheartedly from Windows to Linux. There is still substantial changes required. Having that most of the gaming audience are in Microsoft platform, it probably isn't the wisest choice to invest too much effort into the Linux platform for gaming. It is not hard to guess how much revenue the companies are getting from each platforms.

I would suppose looking at the landscape, the most confident of getting anything working would be WineHQ or CrossOver from Codeweavers. Maybe you wanna get involve because it seems the DirectX implementation from WinwHQ still got stuck at version 10.

Having these days the games are so demanding on the hardware resources, it seems silly to consider emulation. Might as well just rewrite from the intended platforms.

 

[ykgoh]

If it is graphics, often the choice made is with OpenGL on the unix systems. Having DirectX alone will not make games run wholeheartedly from Windows to Linux. There is still substantial changes required. Having that most of the gaming audience are in Microsoft platform, it probably isn't the wisest choice to invest too much effort into the Linux platform for gaming. It is not hard to guess how much revenue the companies are getting from each platforms.

I would suppose looking at the landscape, the most confident of getting anything working would be WineHQ or CrossOver from Codeweavers. Maybe you wanna get involve because it seems the DirectX implementation from WinwHQ still got stuck at version 10.

Having these days the games are so demanding on the hardware resources, it seems silly to consider emulation. Might as well just rewrite from the intended platforms.

That's a lot of effort involved. For AAA titles, on top of PC (Windows and Linux), they also port to consoles like Xbox One and PS4. Probably smaller games even get ported to mobile platforms like Android and iOS. I'm guessing game developers are using middleware game engines that are taking care of the lower level details, or else they will cough blood rewriting the same game so many times.

 

[davidktw]

That's a lot of effort involved. For AAA titles, on top of PC (Windows and Linux), they also port to consoles like Xbox One and PS4. Probably smaller games even get ported to mobile platforms like Android and iOS. I'm guessing game developers are using middleware game engines that are taking care of the lower level details, or else they will cough blood rewriting the same game so many times.

It depends. Middleware, frameworks or even compiler compilers may probably just serve a fraction of the software. There will still be a lot of groundworks required. Depending on the type of games, some are more isolated from the external hardware. Some requires quite a fare bit of HID involved.

I would like to believe games are just like general applications with common modules and designed for portability. For example, instead of binding the engine against the libc, a higher level abstraction library be used for common lower level resources usage. It is rather common to see such kind of architecture, so rewriting is more likely underlying modules which will end up benefiting future games from the same software house.

Without such moves, it will be hard to get good performance out of the platforms. Again boils down to what need to be optimize and what do not.