Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance

Wine, Cedega

Linux has taken excellent strides in becoming a full Windows desktop replacement operating system; advances in Open Office and Mozilla being two of the most notable. Unfortunately, the decision to buy new hardware constantly goes hand in hand with the decision to play some new game - and if it's a gaming machine you want, then Linux isn't the operating system that you need. Fence sitters end up being the people who lose. For example, you may wish to buy a new Linux rig for some CAD tool, but are forced to dual boot the machine in order to play FarCry. Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica "virtualization" technologies may make dual boot and emulation a thing of the past, but today, we are stuck emulating Windows instead of running multiple instances of it.

Maybe emulation isn't the right word. "Wine Is Not an Emulator", as they used to say. In fact, the Wine project has very little to do with emulation. Wine acts very similarly to the AnandTech FrameGetter program - running a binary while replacing and linking libraries at run-time - but on a much more complicated level. TransGaming describes the basic implementation of WineX (Cedega) below:

"Cedega loads a game's binary into memory on a Linux system and then dynamically links to code that provides an implementation of the Win32 APIs that the program is using. The APIs that Windows games are mostly built on top of are primarily based on Microsoft's DirectX system. These APIs include facilities for handling 3D graphics (Direct3D), mouse and keyboard input (DirectInput), audio (DirectSound), and so on. TransGaming works to create Linux compatible versions of these APIs that work on top of the Linux equivalents such as OpenGL, X11, and the OSS and ALSA sound APIs." [2]

Wine continues to make an impression on the Linux gaming community. For large, major releases, Cedega provides some really great support and nearly flawless gameplay. We subscribed to Transgaming's Cedega program (previously known as WineX) several months ago and have met some limited success.

FarCry

Of course, we just laid out extensive praise for Wine and then we ran into a game like FarCry. We wanted FarCry to be our focus Wine benchmark game, but we immediately had problems when the game would not load. We were constantly greeted by "EXCEPTION: Attempt to read from NULL at 0x00000000" in the splash screen. We actually vaguely remember this same exception error from Mechwarrior 4 several years ago (on Windows). Part of us thinks that the attempt an unusual read like this may have something to the NX stack protection on Athlon 64 3800+ testbed.

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Jedi Knight: JA actually runs very smoothly and flawlessly on Wine. We cannot use our FG utility on Cedega (yet) unfortunately, so our benchmarks are based on numbers obtained in the game FPS averages.


Check out our very recent Windows analysis of JKJA. As you can see from our benchmarks, there is a definite performance hit with Wine. Derek Wilson, our GPU Editor, uses a slightly faster processor in his benchmarks, but not enough to account for a 15% lacking difference that we see in our tests. Cedega is slower, but for those of us who are trying to ditch Windows, the performance levels are acceptable.