Linux Gaming PC Build

[gurgi]

So I'm never in windows anymore, and looking at the WINE/transgaming options out there, as long as I could get a few of the bigger budget titles to run, I'd be happy enough on the gaming side of things. I don't play many games anymore, and I don't want to see another windows disk in my home, or run seperate partitions for the platform.

What I don't know is where to find a compatibility list, or more importantly, driver information for GPUs that would help me build a PC that would perform well? Most anything I try to run linux on works fine, but I had some driver issues with my mobility radeon in my T42 (display was fine, but acceleration wasn't), and remember ATI having serious driver support problems on linux. Am I looking at an nVidia card? How good are the latest drivers for the latest cards...should I buy a product that is a few months old?


I guess my main question is what chipset, cpu, and gpu would be a good target for a linux gaming machine?


Much thanks in advance!

 

[Davros]

certified games
http://www.cedega.com/gamesdb/certified/

you have to register to see details - wtf ?

 

[Blazkowicz]

I have what should be a good linux gaming PC (athlon II X2, 2GB ram, geforce gt240 gddr5), and what runs on it runs fast. but it's hit or miss, I feel crippled not to be able to run any random game or technical demo I get, even for old stuff.
but you can have fun, if you're not an OCD freak

what does run often run quickly and flawless - that cedega list is a nice start (here there are, the usual valve and blizzard titles.)

ATI/AMD drivers are said to be good nowadays, the catch is their track of dropping older architectures. this is what left laptop users with not-so-old X1000 series graphics in the cold.
Nvidia maintains drivers for all cards down to the tnt2 so they can still run with the latest X server.
So an AMD graphics card will run great, but look for recent stuff rather than older.

usually there's no need to worry about cpu, chipset etc., but better be safe about wireless networking.

 

[Davros]

Isnt it the case that the amd driver is opensource and therefore old where as the nv driver is proprietry and pretty up to date ?

 

[hoho]

I've been playing quite a lot under Linux with Wine and most of the stuff I tried were as was as said, it either works (nearly) perfectly or not at all. About 3y ago I was paid subscriber to Cedega but often found that Wine still worked better. I haven't tried Cedega lately so it might have changed. To see the support list for Wine see this: http://appdb.winehq.org/

Hardware wise I'm not sure I'd trust AMD GPUs just yet. NV is a pretty safe bet, Intel is relatively decently supported but is just horribly slow. CPU wise it won't matter at all. Also feel free to go with 64bit, it has been stable for years now and generally provides higher performance for stuff that has been compiled for 64bit targets.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Isnt it the case that the amd driver is opensource and therefore old where as the nv driver is proprietry and pretty up to date ?

well currently on the nvidia side, you can either run a strong, feature complete proprietary driver or a good 2D-only open source driver.

on the amd side, the proprietary driver has been improved but now only runs on radeon hd 2000 and later ; open source driver can do 3D graphics (for real!) because of ATI/amd publishing some specs and documentation, and supports older cards. but it's much slower and presumably less stable or complete.

 

[gurgi]

I messed around last night on my laptop and got galliums open source driver installed for my RV350 and it works pretty well. I can run quake live and minecraft anyway, the card is a bit beefier than that, but I'm not that picky. My laptop is only a 1.8ghz centrino with a gig of ram anyway.

So you have mesa doing open source drivers for ATI, as well as the proprietary ATI drivers, and I like that. Having two options is great when an update breaks one of them. I wonder if MESA has open source nvidia drivers too.


Thanks for the advice, I might go 64bit amd cpu to avoid the latest intel chipset issues with I guess either nvidia or ati on the gpu side. It sounds like it might not matter.

edit:

well currently on the nvidia side, you can either run a strong, feature complete proprietary driver or a good 2D-only open source driver.

ahhh, so maybe ATI...what a trip, their linux support seems to have done a 180

 

[hoho]

ahhh, so maybe ATI...what a trip, their linux support seems to have done a 180

I'd say biggest "problem" why NV opensource driver hasn't got as much love is that the proprietary driver has generally been good enough so people haven't felt the need to fix the situation.

 

[Blazkowicz]

My laptop is only a 1.8ghz centrino with a gig of ram anyway.

a buddy has a similar laptop rig (without the LCD panel), it's quite powerful actually (a pentium M is as strong as an athlon 64), running linux mint and windows 7.
it's not a half-bad laptop

 

[gurgi]

I'd say biggest "problem" why NV opensource driver hasn't got as much love is that the proprietary driver has generally been good enough so people haven't felt the need to fix the situation.

good point! i should google some forums and see who bitches loudest.

a buddy has a similar laptop rig (without the LCD panel), it's quite powerful actually (a pentium M is as strong as an athlon 64), running linux mint and windows 7.
it's not a half-bad laptop

sure, but it's not running crysis 2 or anything...i want a new rig, and need a desktop anyway

i love my T42 though, it's lasted me forever, and the nub mouse is killer, i can play WoW on this laptop no problem with the built in IBM mouse...quake live is a little more demanding pointer-wise, but is still playable

I could never buy another laptop without a nub mouse...I always disable the touchpad, I hate em heh. They always just end up getting in the way and moving your pointer while you're typing or something.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Just chiming in with my experience with graphics drivers on Linux.
Even though it is not gaming based, being graphics programming it should still be somewhat relevant.

I've been using nvidia under Ubuntu for several years now and hardly had any problem with their drivers for OpenGL, Cuda or OpenCL. Granted this is based on their proprietary drivers, I have not had any need to try the open source drivers.

When trying to test my code with ATI an Firestream 9250 I had nothing but problems. Trying to get it to work over 2-3 days, I had trouble with the desktop being upside down, as shown in the following gallery. I found a fix for the desktop, but my own programs still got the inverted texture coordinates. http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/3262285/1/pics?h=7441a5 [EDIT] This was towards the end of my MSc work where the deadline was looming, so didn't want to spend too much time on fixing the problem. But it looked like the ATI drivers still were lacking compared to the nvidia counterparts¨[/EDIT]

Could be just a pebcak problem, though there are several bug reports about it, but I never had a similar problem with nvidia, so I'm still weary of using AMD under *nix.