“Linux is no good for gamers”
I just thought I’d go through a few things about gaming under linux. I recently built myself a new main gaming machine, with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, gig of RAM, and an nVidia 7600GT XXX (Factory overclocked).
Linux support for this hardware has been brilliant – I have previously had to struggle with ATi binary drivers, and have found the nVidia ones to be so much better.
Once I got gaming, I was amazed by the performance. Playing at 1600×1200, with all settings at the highest, in UT2004 (Not the latest and most demanding game, but it could bring my old system to it’s knees at a higher resolution) and I was getting consistantly 200FPS at least on large outdoorish maps (CTF-FaceClassic). Now, what really amazed me was when I compared this to my friend’s results – he runs Windows XP (32 bit), has a gig of RAM, a dual core opteron (64 bit though the 32 bit OS…), and has the GeForce 7900 GLH (Goes Like Hell).
In pretty much every regard it appears his system should perform better than mine, but he gets a peak of 100FPS on most maps.
As far as I know the reasons for this probably are -
- He only runs 32 bit windows, therefore not utilising the 64 bit processor. I use 64 bit linux (Gentoo, so everything is optimised too. Ricer, I know
). I don’t know how much of a difference, if any, this makes. - Linux doesn’t have all the gunk of windows. Windows XP isn’t as bad as Vista in this regard, but it still runs a lot of unnecessary stuff and has a much bigger memory footprint than a carefully put together Gentoo Linux system (I mention the distro, since I have found Ubuntu with GNOME can sometimes take more memory and be slower than a fresh XP install). In addition, Windows tends to collect spyware, background processes and other general gunk, meaning your PC that seemed snappier than, well, a clothes peg, starts becoming more like a wet towel just days after “general usage”.
Also, enemy territory ran perfectly smoothly on 1600×1200, though I haven’t managed to benchmark it under windows on a similar system.
Now I await the release of Unreal Tournament 2007/3. From everything I have heard this will have full linux support (Hopefully UnrealEd will do linux too – previous versions need wine, not native), and should utilise my shiny new system.
Cheers.
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