General Hardware Requirement Question

[Asymtotic]

I have recently set up my laptop with Ubuntu 12.10 and am extremely happy with everything! I has been a major step up from other distros and especially ******* 8. Performance has improved tenfold.

My question is with porting games with wine or playonlinux, can I get away with lower hardware requirements than those required for Win 8?

Any input would be apprieciated!

[myromance123]

can I get away with lower hardware requirements than those required for Win 8?

If the game was Linux native, then very likely yes. However, since we're talking Wine and PlayOnLinux here I'd say no. From my own experience at least, games usually require the same hardware as they would in Windows. Sometimes though, they need better hardware than in Windows (this is usually because of unoptimized drivers/problems in Wine's implementation of DirectX9).

If you were to tweak your system though, it's very likely you could reach a point where you could game with specs that are slightly lower than the requirements necessary for windows. Off the top of my head, the first tweak that would benefit you the most would be to use a DE that is minimal in nature (something like GNOME2, MATE, or Cinnamon). DE's like Unity+Compiz and GNOME Shell look sexy, but take their toll on your system's resources to do so.

There are probably a lot more things that could be tweaked (maybe from the driver's settings for example), but I'm no professional in that area.

[Asymtotic]

Thanks for the input. I actually was thinking about installing another stripped down, lightweight DE like Lxde, Xfce or Cinammon just for gaming. Unity is nice, but I can see how it was aimed at the ******* transition. It's still much faster and stable than Win 8. I will play around with some tweaks and report back with my findings.