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mghong
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Linux replace win 7 ?

Sun Oct 17, 2010 10:06 pm

Hi Team,

Will there any linux Os can replace Win7 and provide better entertainment and games around ?
 
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 12:21 am

Linux replace Windows as an entertainment/gaming platform? Not gonna happen any time soon, if ever. Game developers target consoles first, Windows second... if they do anything beyond that they're probably more likely to do a Mac port before they touch Linux.

The problem is that Linux is a very small segment of the market, and is also more work for game developers to support due to the large number of different distros with different, incompatible package management systems. The state of audio APIs in Linux has historically been a mess as well (though this has been improving lately).
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SuperSpy
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 9:12 am

I saw somewhere that Linux was getting very close to having near native-speed DX10/DX11 emulation support. Has anyone seen that from a reliable source? Sounds like something that would make a huge boost for Linux gaming once it gets integrated into wine.
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just brew it!
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 9:45 am

SuperSpy wrote:
I saw somewhere that Linux was getting very close to having near native-speed DX10/DX11 emulation support. Has anyone seen that from a reliable source? Sounds like something that would make a huge boost for Linux gaming once it gets integrated into wine.

If it really is that fast (and reasonably stable), it'll help. But wine will always lag behind new versions of DirectX, since they've basically got to reverse-engineer any new features and re-implement them from scratch. And there will always be at least some performance penalty, since wine has to take all of the Direct3D calls and translate them to OpenGL; this translation takes a non-trivial number of CPU cycles.

There's also the question of whether wine's support for 64-bit Windows applications will stabilize before PC games start migrating to 64-bit.

Wine is incompatible with many CD/DVD copy protection schemes (Safedisc 3.x, Securom 5.x, PunkBuster, etc.)

At the end of the day, most gamers aren't going to care about Linux because it has nothing to offer them in terms of improving the gaming experience. IMO Linux will not become a viable gaming platform until a significant percentage of game developers release native Linux games; and that is unlikely to happen until a significant percentage of gamers run Linux. Chicken, meet egg.
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notfred
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:05 am

If you are after gaming then Linux is not the OS for you. I'm not a gamer and I run Linux rather than Windows everywhere. I left the Windows world in the XP SP2 days and all my day to day computing needs plus media watching has been on Linux since then.
 
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 11:00 am

While I love Ubuntu I cannot use it for gaming. I can play TF2 in a Windows 7 VM on my Ubuntu rig but that is as close as I have been able to get (no success with Wine). Windows 7 on dedicated hardware will remain my gaming platform of choice for the foreseeable future.

I can see it being used on a HTPC. I'm running XMBC on my ION equipped netbook (Ubuntu 10.10 x64) and it can play 1080p content.
 
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 11:15 am

just brew it! wrote:
And there will always be at least some performance penalty, since wine has to take all of the Direct3D calls and translate them to OpenGL; this translation takes a non-trivial number of CPU cycles.

Not exactly, the new dx11 port is native, and not translated through opengl.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3d11&num=1
 
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 11:31 am

l33t-g4m3r wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
And there will always be at least some performance penalty, since wine has to take all of the Direct3D calls and translate them to OpenGL; this translation takes a non-trivial number of CPU cycles.

Not exactly, the new dx11 port is native, and not translated through opengl.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3d11&num=1

Well... only sort of. It is native if your graphics card has Gallium3D-aware drivers; and that's a really big "if"! If you're using ATI/nVidia's binary drivers (which AFAIK don't and likely won't support Gallium3D directly), you're still stuck going through an OpenGL translation layer; it is just buried further down in the rendering pipeline.

Things are slightly less grim on the ATI side, as the Open Source ATI driver is improving quickly now that AMD has released the GPU hardware specs.
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Shining Arcanine
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Mon Oct 18, 2010 8:40 pm

just brew it! wrote:
l33t-g4m3r wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
And there will always be at least some performance penalty, since wine has to take all of the Direct3D calls and translate them to OpenGL; this translation takes a non-trivial number of CPU cycles.

Not exactly, the new dx11 port is native, and not translated through opengl.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3d11&num=1

Well... only sort of. It is native if your graphics card has Gallium3D-aware drivers; and that's a really big "if"! If you're using ATI/nVidia's binary drivers (which AFAIK don't and likely won't support Gallium3D directly), you're still stuck going through an OpenGL translation layer; it is just buried further down in the rendering pipeline.

Things are slightly less grim on the ATI side, as the Open Source ATI driver is improving quickly now that AMD has released the GPU hardware specs.


Let me be the first to say that open source Linux drivers are still awful for anything other than 2D. If you want serious 3D support, you need to use Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's proprietary binary driver.

Anyway, I switched from Windows 7 to Linux, but I really do not do much in terms of gaming or media anymore. I plan to get my music collection working on Linux, but I will need to dig out all of the CDs to re-rip everything. I also have Rise of Nations working in WINE, but it was a pain to get working an alt-tabbing causes problems. If the original poster wants to stop using Windows and still do gaming, he should get an Apple system. An inordinate amount of Windows software is ported to Mac OS X and that includes games. It is uncommon to find games that do not run on Mac OS X. If you consider the fact that WINE runs on Mac OS X, then it becomes even harder to find games that do not run on it.
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mghong
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Re: Linux replace win 7 ?

Wed Oct 20, 2010 12:20 pm

Let me be the first to say that open source Linux drivers are still awful for anything other than 2D. If you want serious 3D support, you need to use Nvidia hardware with Nvidia's proprietary binary driver.

Anyway, I switched from Windows 7 to Linux, but I really do not do much in terms of gaming or media anymore. I plan to get my music collection working on Linux, but I will need to dig out all of the CDs to re-rip everything. I also have Rise of Nations working in WINE, but it was a pain to get working an alt-tabbing causes problems. If the original poster wants to stop using Windows and still do gaming, he should get an Apple system. An inordinate amount of Windows software is ported to Mac OS X and that includes games. It is uncommon to find games that do not run on Mac OS X. If you consider the fact that WINE runs on Mac OS X, then it becomes even harder to find games that do not run on it.[/quote]


You are right , i will fall back to my 32bit XP since i only got that license but for gaming i believe 3 GB is enough.. :) Now everything settle i need to make use of my new rig for other purpose...

Thank for all the clarification and explanation.

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