WoW+Wine:What performance can I expect?

[krnlg]

First of all- I'm already running World of Warcraft with wine using my Radeon X1650. I get mediocre performance compared to Windows (ie. at medium to low detail settings, draw dist. etc I start to get what seems like 'smooth' fps in outlands- full terrain draw distance is a big no-no, giving under 10fps in shattrath with other settings still minimal).

Now I dont have Windows anymore and I dont want it. I'm looking at buying a new graphics card (nVidia) but I've found it very hard to find concrete examples of framerates etc that also say what detail settings are used. So I'm wondering, are there any kind WoW players here that could give me an idea of what I can expect from a newer nVidia card?

I'm think I can afford something up to about an 8800gts but I'd really appreciate any suggestions about what works well and so on before I spent lots of money and end up with something that doesn't work for some reason. Note that I'm using vanilla Wine and not Cedega. I think this means using d3d isnt going to happen (at the moment I dont get usable fps at any setting unless I'm in an enclosed space in d3d mode).

So please, any framerates you can give will be helpful, just mention what detail settings you're using (well I mean even just low, medium/high would be useful!)

I'd appreciate any help, thanks :)

[darkknight045]

Well, I will say that I ran Ubuntu with the 8800GT and I found the experience... unstable.

This may have been due to other issues though; but nevertheless the stability of my system did decrease when I upgraded from a 7950GT to the 8800GT.

Now running (sadly) Windows on that machine (its primarily for gaming) and the card has given me no trouble.

I suspect the Linux support for the 8800 just needs some work.

[aoanla]

Well, I will say that I ran Ubuntu with the 8800GT and I found the experience... unstable.

When was this?

I've been using my 8800GT with Ubuntu for months, and it's been fairly solid (other than some issues with the most recent release of Wine - but 1.1.3 and earlier are stable).

The trick is to update your drivers to the most recent ones available from nVidia - the ones in the official repository aren't that good.

[darkknight045]

This was about a month ago. I had the latest Nvidia drivers at the time. The graphics would crash on me often. Even when I switched to vista things weren't stable at first. Then the OS discovered some sort of issue with my PCI-E slot, installed a fix and BAM haven't had a problem since.

Admittedly all of my hardware is fairly new, so I've been riding the bleeding edge of Linux compatibility.

[desertboy]

I've had an 8800GTS since February 2007 and using it with Ubuntu since April 2007 with no problems so far (I Ditched Vista in April as well, still it had 2 months and that was only because until April Ubuntu wouldn't boot on my new machine) I can't say I've had any major crashing issues, in fact I can't remember Ubuntu ever crashing so I had to reboot.

Performance has been alright for me as well I play games through wine all the time including trying every new game I get my hands on. (My friends think I'm wappy because I refuse to use windows even for gaming, yet I don't have system restore every month or buy antivirus software every year)

Can't say about WOW because I've never tried, but in my experience with wine the 8800GTS is a great card, I should think the whole line should be good. I do keep my drivers up to date and don't bother with the restricted driver manager.