Linux: Speeding up 3D games?

[rdevos]

Hello all! This is my first post here, so please bear with me and correct me if I'm wrong

Anyway, I recently moved from Windows COMPLETELY to Linux, and i must say, best decision ever! Super fast, sleek, elegant, you name it. I'm running PeppermintOS 3, if you wondered.

One problem most ex-Windows users face is gaming, but luckily there is Wine!
I'm not a hardcore gamer, I only like playing some classics with my friends, Age of Empires II and Battlefield 2. I got AOE working with LAN, but I'm having some problems with BF2.

I'm proud that I installed BF2 mostly myself, reading some tutorials here and there. I'm installing games through PlayOnLinux. I noticed that in BF2, my performance was greatly reduced. I can clearly see the difference between running on windows and Linux. I remember to fix one of the problems, I had to disable glsl, to fix some terrain issues. So my main question is, how can I improve the speed? Here is my graphics card information:

Code: Select all

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: PC Partner Limited Device e990
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 44
	Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Memory at d0020000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
	I/O ports at d000 [size=256]
	Expansion ROM at d0000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci
	Kernel modules: fglrx, radeon

Not too bad, but as you can see, I have the proprietary drivers installed. One of the other games I have is Minecraft, which ran much faster with the proprietary drivers installed. So my question again, how can I speed it up? Do I have to install DirectX, configure some library overrides? Any help will be much appreciated

Thanks again,
Rdevos.

[Mateusz Stachowski]

Wine is a compatibility layer which from my understanding translates Direct3D calls into OpenGL calls (in the matter of graphics). It's introducing more overhead for Windows programs than on it's native system. You probably won't achieve the same or even close level of performance in Wine as on Windows.

[André H.]

Did you read http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=3438 ?
Btw, this is normally pure Wine support, not PlayOnLinux

[gururise]

I too am running BF2 on Linux. My Specs:

Intel i7-3770 (Intel HD4000 Gfx)
Intel Driver: 2.20.4
Linux Kernel: 3.4.9

GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 8.0.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30

I've noticed on my Intel HD4000, which supports GLSL, I need to disable GLSL in the wine registry for me to get some textures on screen. With GLSL enabled, the gamma is much to dark, and some textures do not appear, or are too dark to see. Furthermore, I had to disable dynamic lighting and set lighting to "medium" in BF2 settings. Setting lighting to anything higher than medium or enabling dynamic lighting causes wine to crash. On my other machine with a ATI4670 using fglrx, I can have both those settings set to high, and GLSL enabled, and I have no problems.

I hope Wine figures out how to get GLSL working properly on the Intel drivers, as the intel drivers are really the best OSS drivers for Linux.

[gururise]

I too am running BF2 on Linux. My Specs:

Intel i7-3770 (Intel HD4000 Gfx)
Intel Driver: 2.20.4
Linux Kernel: 3.4.9

GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 8.0.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30

I've noticed on my Intel HD4000, which supports GLSL, I need to disable GLSL in the wine registry for me to get some textures on screen. With GLSL enabled, the gamma is much to dark, and some textures do not appear, or are too dark to see. Furthermore, I had to disable dynamic lighting and set lighting to "medium" in BF2 settings. Setting lighting to anything higher than medium or enabling dynamic lighting causes wine to crash. On my other machine with a ATI4670 using fglrx, I can have both those settings set to high, and GLSL enabled, and I have no problems.

I hope Wine figures out how to get GLSL working properly on the Intel drivers, as the intel drivers are really the best OSS drivers for Linux.

After playing around with it more this afternoon, I figured out that GLSL actually has no effect whether its on or off. The low gamma is in the areas where there are shadows, making the shadows extremely dark, and the game almost unplayable.