Games run faster in ubuntu?

[teamalpha]

So, ive heard vista runs games faster than xp, though I see the exact opposite with my tiny 1.5GB of RAM. any ideas as to whether ubuntu will run my games faster?

[Zero Prime]

Where did you here that from? I don't know about Ubuntu running games faster, although I have had no problems in frame rates, but Vista is widely known to be much slower than XP in the gaming department. Service pack 3 for XP gave an even larger margin between the 2.

[Bölvaður]

So, ive heard vista runs games faster than xp, though I see the exact opposite with my tiny 1.5GB of RAM. any ideas as to whether ubuntu will run my games faster?

I've never heard Vista was making games faster. And I cannot remember how many benchmarks that suggested was a little bit behind XP in performance.

On Ubuntu I have no idea. I've heard people say it is faster, but it should be very similar to XP.

[atomkarinca]

I've played Medal of Honor Allied Assault both in XP and Ubuntu, I must say it was definitely faster in Ubuntu. I don't play so many games so I don't know about the others.

[blueturtl]

This depends a lot on the game. If you're trying to emulate something or run games with a compatibility layer (such as WINE/Cedega) performance will probably be inferior to running the game in it's native environment.

With that said I've experienced quite opposite results with my own experiments. Windows games that work properly under Cedega actually run faster than on the same machine under Windows XP. Not all games do work though, and some have issues even when they do run.

I once tried the Doom 3 demo out of curiosity. It was considered a very power hungry game at the time of it's release and it had both Windows and Linux clients. At the time I was dual-booting so I tried the game in both Windows and under Ubuntu. Same hardware, different OS. Under Windows I closed all applications to run the game as smoothly as possible, installed the latest drivers and all that. I managed to run the game at 800x600 resolution with medium graphics and it was playable although it did some times stutter. Rebooted into Ubuntu, downloaded and installed the game. Ran it, and to my surprise it seemed faster under the same settings so I upped my resolution to 1024x768. At this resolution and medium graphics the game still ran faster than under Windows at 800x600! And without any hiccups even though I had some apps left open in the background.

I concluded from my experiment that Ubuntu is more efficient with hardware and thus is the better gaming platform. :lolflag:

We have everything necessary to run awesome games, we just need developers to start releasing Linux versions of their games. That might be a while, seeing as our desktop market share is still single digits AFAIK.

[Tundro Walker]

I haven't really heard of anyone benchmarking the games that can run in Windows AND Linux. It'd be nice if someone did, EG: compare the various flavors of Quake games.

At any rate, it's getting to be a moot point, since most game development has moved to consoles. If you wanted to play those, you'd get stuck with some kind of emulation layer that would slow things down again.

We may be seeing the age of the "Swiss Army Knife" desktop computer slowly coming to an end; all the stuff it can do being farmed out to other things ... laptops, cellphones, consoles, etc.

[Bölvaður]

If you're trying to emulate something or run games with a compatibility layer (such as WINE/Cedega) performance will probably be inferior to running the game in it's native environment.

Emulation will give you worse results, but as WINE is only providing dlls and such that the programs needs. So it should be almost exactly the same performance (from that point of perspective) if you use WINE.

[tszanon]

I've got 2 cases:
- running Starcraft: Brood Wars using wine. It runs faster than in Windows.
- running native Doom3: better fps than in windows.

So, statistically speaking, 100% of the games run better in linux than in windows. :lolflag:

[original_jamingrit]

most of the performance charts comparing Linux+Wine vs. Windows that I've seen indicated the opposite, but for every batch there's always at least one or two special cases where a game runs faster on Linux+Wine. This is what I'd call a 'lucky' case, where the software and hardware simply mesh better together than they would under XP or Vista. So, it just seems that windows games under wine are generally benchmarked a bit slower, but off and on people can get 'lucky'.

By the way, I can't find these performance charts that I had in mind, but here's some others, with mostly the same results:
http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMarks

[Mr. Picklesworth]

OpenGL stuff: Quite possible.
DirectX stuff: Not a chance. Way too many extra libraries at that point, and Wine's DirectX implementation just doesn't have as much energy in it, at this point, as OpenGL or Microsoft's DirectX.

That's my experience, anyway. Beyond that, hope it doesn't have Securom...

[aeiah]

as far as i know, all games with dedicated linux clients will run faster (doom 3, quake 4, enemy territory games etc), especially if you stop your desktop environment and run from the command line (albeit with xorg still running of course)

i think some people have reported that well supported wine games can run faster too. things like WoW and Eve

[Zeotronic]

Firstly, I have to state what the initial posts did... WHAT!? Are you crazy? I've never heard of Vista being anything but slower than XP... It sounds like pro Vista nonsense to me. As for Ubuntu running a Windows game better than Windows... it strikes me as impossible, though it may be possible for it to run some games just as well.

But, I suppose my own personal experience with Wine and gaming suggests otherwise... have you ever heard of Deus Ex? In Wine it will work for a while and then crash... in Windows (or at least my Windows... I've had it work in others) it crashes right off, and take the entire system down with it! So I suppose sure, a Windows infected with the proper viruses will behave worse than Wine.

What? Windows always has at least one virus!