Fedora gameing/windows emulation

[sanitysbane]

I have been using windows for as long as I can remember and I am growing tired of it.
I am impressed with fedora's capabilities but I am a total Linux noob, and I am wondering about two things: first of all how to set up fedora to run .exe or another form of windows emulation, how seamless it is and if it takes up a lot of additional pc recourses. I do not want to have to use dual boot Because I would just end up using xp and having Fedora on my HD.
My second question is what is fedora's gaming compatibility with the windows emulation/system. In other words will it run Counter Strike Source, BF2142, Oblivion R6 Vegas and other high end games as well or better than XP?

I have read that their are some graphics problems with Fedora also, as far as drivers go. I have a Nvidia 7900, and I am wondering if their is good support for it, as far as compared to XP.

Thanks for helping me out, I appreciate it and hope to help out the fedora community once I get up to speed.

feel free to e-mail me @ ib2rock29@hotmail.com as well

[lazlow]

bane

1st you do not want to post your email address (I would edit it out). There are programs that scour these forums for that information and then they sell that information to spammers.

You are looking for Wine or Cedga (sp?). I think wine (which is free and available via yum) is usually about 50/50 on its sucess rate. The more popular the app, the more likely it will run. Cedga is more likely to run games (I think) but I think it is also something you have to buy. Some games have native support(linux version), Doom comes to mind. While I do not run anything big in wine I have not noticed any performance hit.

Nvidia will have the best/easiest support for linux. Unfortunately vendors view linux as an unwanted stepchild. The drivers generally lag behind the windows versions both in performance and in features. The driver problem is generally not Fedora specific but Linux in general.

Lazlow

[bob]

Moved to Gamer's Lounge

[evilinux]

Native Linux games will run better than they do on windows most likely. They do for me.
Nvidia provides top notch driver support and have full instruction on how to install their 3d drivers.
Games that run really well on Fedora are Quake 4, Doom 3, Quake 3, Ut2004, Enemy Territory.
Theres lots of others but these are the major releases from top of the line software companies.
Oh Quake Wars is coming to Linux so I can pretty much guarantee ya every Linux gamer will be dying to get that. Also UT 2007 will be on Linux.
Some people run CS Source in Wine but IMO you will need a top notch rig to make that worthwhile. It would run better on windows on any system, Windows games do not run as well on wine as they do on windows.

[Thetargos]

Nvidia will have the best/easiest support for linux. Unfortunately vendors view linux as an unwanted stepchild. The drivers generally lag behind the windows versions both in performance and in features. The driver problem is generally not Fedora specific but Linux in general.

Lazlow
I agree to most of what you say, except that for the nvidia drivers, the Linux performance for OpenGL is actually better than in Windows, feature wise, there are problems, especially with SLI (which apparently they're working out).

There are two types of games basically when you run in Cedega/Wine: Those that will run and those that won't (easy, eh?). Seriously, though, the more demanding the game is (i.e. more tied to Windows APIs) the less likely it is it will run smoothly (on either Wine/Cedega or even CrossOver Office). Basically OpenGL games will pretty much run at near native speeds, if nothing strange is required (i.e more often than not, a lot of OpenGL games for Windows rely on DirectX for the sound backend, and that may have some problems with Wine/Cedega/CxO). Even though a lot of the DirectX 9 titles run on either of these compatibility layers (they're not emulators, as they're actual implementations of the WinAPI and DirectX API on top of Linux), there is going to be great performance hit, your best bet is to check with the compatibility lists of Wine/Cedega/CxO and decide based on which provides you with the best support. Cedega and CxO are commercial software packages and as such cost money (not too much, mind you) and Wine is completely Free (and actually the base project for both commercial products).

[h3x0r]

Most games are created to run on windows platform(DirectX), and for that reason they will run better in windows than on linux even if your using wineX ( cedega). If you got the brains you can try compile the free version of cedega otherwise i think its around $15 to buy the RPM package(Cedega has a huge variety of games as opposed to the base wine).Otherwise for heavy gamers i would advice to dual boot.

[Shauly]

What about Age of Empires II? I installed it using Crossover Office, but I cant figure out how to get it to work. I have to go to the install option, and select the cd for it to even open. Once it opens, I hit play and it crashes, and doesn't even give an error message. If anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks.

[lightningshift]

Here is a question. Is there a version of linux that can handle direct x? I would think that it might make it easier to emulate windows if that were the case

[Thetargos]

Here is a question. Is there a version of linux that can handle direct x? I would think that it might make it easier to emulate windows if that were the case
Please, take a moment to think about this statement...

...

That wouldn't be possible as Microsoft controls the API, and it is tightly integrated into their OS. Not only that, but it is also sufficiently different from OpenGL. There is no way, unless they'd licensed it, for it to be implemented in a different operating system (whether it'd be Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc). So the only possible "solution" is to translate on the fly the API calls into another native one, in this case, OpenGL. Think of Wine, Cedega and Cross Over Office as massive wrappers which do exactly that, translate DirectX calls into OpenGL calls, so that applications may run. This, however is costly in terms of system's resources and adds overhead to the operation.

[lightningshift]

That's what I suspected. Oh well I was just curious.