Doom 3 linux client

[foolish]

Yes gamers, it's here, the doom 3 linux client. Download the client and the demo here: http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom

[ghaefb]

Thank's foolish.
Now I need to get those pak files... :rolleyes:

[JLF_65]

It runs pretty well, except that like many other people, sound doesn't work for me. Whoever was doing the sound there at id was stupid enough to use OSS instead of ALSA, and a pretty poor OSS implementation if all the problems reported are an indication.

[ghaefb]

The sound works for me OK.
The graphics are slow.. I need to buy a new graphic card :p

[Ug]

I find this quite ironic considering foolish once told me that he hated gamers. :p

Nevertheless, I wish my laptop could play Doom 3. :(

[Varkk]

I just need to reorganise my hadd space and then I will be playing it the way it was intended.

P.S does anyone know a way to resize ext3 partitions? All the software I have tried refuses to resize ext3, only create and delete.

[crackers]

I find this quite ironic considering foolish once told me that he hated gamers. :p
He does, obviously - I just blew about 3 hours (and my mouse hand) playing the demo the first time.

Yes, I suck - which is why I don't game on-line. I just like to shoot things - stress relief, y'know. :D

[foolish]

I find this quite ironic considering foolish once told me that he hated gamers. :p


I do have a dislike of gamers, I don't mind people who play computer games or the games themselves. Enjoy your gaming, just shut up about it.

[Nitro]

:D Most people who dislike gamers usually discover that fact about themselves after Booger (the 10 year old gamer from Maine) just handed them their last sliver of pride in a pixilated world by claming the 33rd frag of a best of 10 frag contest.

Everyone has their own claim to fame 10 year olds, 35 year olds.....heck most gamers look at Linux users in a reverse scenario....buncha geeks just shut up and buy Windows :rolleyes:

<insert flame here>

Long live Doom 3, Gamers and Linux we all have our nitche.

[crackers]

I think Foolish is referring to the types of gamers whose whole lives revolve around the games they play and won't ST*U about them. I, personally, don't know any of the computer-game types, but I knew some wargamers back in the day. I actually participated (once) in the War In Eurpope marathon with them, but very carefully opted to take Belgium. After leaving the game early Friday afternoon, I proceeded to woo their temporarily abandoned girl friends. ;)

[Dog-One]

My brother roped both me and my Pops into joining his America's Army Operations clan. The game itself is okay, but when you add TeamSpeak2 so everyone can laugh and have a good time, then you can go to bed rather early (in the morning that is) feeling like the evening wasn't a wash. I still find games quite amazing technically speaking--how they can get so much eye candy on the screen and still have enough clock cycles left to move around and do all the I/O. It's these kind of games that push the hardware folks to do more, so in that respect, shoot'em up games do have some value beyond simple stress relief.

[PompeyBlue]

Has anyone done a direct performance comparison between windows and linux ? What's your rough feeling for performance differences ?

[SuperNu]

Has anyone done a direct performance comparison between windows and linux ? What's your rough feeling for performance differences ?
There were a few article posted on Doom 3's performance between Linux and Windows. LinuxHardware.org (http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/12/1725246) and AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2241) both have articles and both come to the same conclusion, Windows is faster. But that isn't to say that there won't be further Linux optimizations or better Nvidia driver support under Linux either.

I get about 30 fps using the medium quality setting and 1027x768 on my system which is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1 gb ram and a Nvidia FX 5900 w/ 128 mb ram.

--SN

[crackers]

Considering the games are originally developed for Windows and highly optimized for DirectWhateverItIs, which is, of course, tightly integrated with the OS, it's no surprise that you get better performance for games on Windows. Linux performance in this area, as it stands, will always be "worse" since there are extra software layers involved.

[PompeyBlue]

I thought it was OpenGL and so a fairly close comparison ?

[crackers]

I would be extremely surprised if ID wrote to the OpenGL drivers in the first place:

This is a wild guess (since I don't have access to the actual game code) based on my programming experience: the game engine uses an "abstraction layer" to "hide" whatever is actually doing the talking to the graphics engine of the OS. Since the biggest target audience is Windows, the abstraction layer probably closely resembles the DirectWhateverItIs interfaces. The port to Linux, then, has a translation from this abstraction API to the OpenGL interfaces, which of course, do not resemble those on Windows, so there's extra work involved there as well.

Then you add in that the graphics drivers and OpenGL are not highly optimized for the specific OS, unlike the Windows stuff.

Remember, with commercial software especially, it's all about "bang for the buck" and, to be honest, with the huge installed base and monopoly of Windows, there's the bang and buck.

[PompeyBlue]

Absolutely, it's bang for the buck, but I was under the impression that Doom3 was OpenGL, even on windows. Certainly the console at start up on windows talks about starting OpenGl. So the wrapper should be an OpenGl u like, and thus very portable to Linux and Mac (which is partially why they may have done this ?)

Either way, I guess it's still not a great test since it DOES require DirectX (I guess they're using it for sound and maybe just keyboard handling) which would require work to port.

[crackers]

Since I don't have a Windows box, I did say it was a guess. If you see a message about initializing OpenGL, then I'd say you were correct: it's using OpenGL. No wrappers needed. :D

Nevertheless, even the OpenGL drivers on Windows are more optimized than any other platform. Like I said, them's where the bucks is - just take a gander at all the stuff you have to jump through on Linux machines to get accelerated graphics going.

[fjleal]

I downloaded the files foolish mentioned, plus I got the .pk4 files from the original CDs. When running "./doom3", everything goes well until I get:

WARNING: vertex array range in virtual memory (SLOW)
signal caught: Segmentation fault
si_code 1
Trying to exit gracefully..
Shutting down sound hardware
----------- OSS Sound Shutdown -----------
unmap dma sound buffer
close sound device
------------------------------------------
idRenderSystem::Shutdown()

And that's it. No game. Any ideas? The idSoftware site mentions problems with ATI cards, and I'm using an ATI Radeon 9000 - this is probably whats causing that segmentation fault. Any workarounds?
Thanks for any help. ;)

[Varkk]

As far as I am aware, Doom3 will not work with current ATi drivers, I think the only workaround is to get an NV card. Either that or email ATi everyday until they release some good linux drivers.

[fjleal]

(...) Either that or email ATi everyday until they release some good linux drivers.
Yes, I've set a background process to send them a an email every passing minute...


No, of course I didn't! But now that I think about it... :rolleyes:

[JLF_65]

Good news! The new nVidia driver is out and boy does it make a difference!

Computer:
Opteron 240 (1.4GHz)
MSI K8T800 Master2-FAR motherboard
1 GB DDR333 RAM
GeForce FX5600 with 256MB video ram
2 - 80GB 7200 RPM SATA drives running in RAID 0 mode
Nothing is overclocked.

I got the following results from "timedemo demo1 usecache" using a default config with the specified resolution and quality setting:

Windows XP Pro with SP1, 61.77 nVidia drivers:
1024x768 HQ = 15 FPS
800x600 MQ = 23 FPS
640x480 LQ = 36 FPS

Fedora Core 3, 61.11 nVidia drivers:
1024x768 HQ = 11.8 FPS
800x600 MQ = 14.5 FPS
640x480 LQ = 19.2 FPS

Fedora Core 3, 66.29 nVidia drivers:
1024x768 HQ = 19.3 FPS
800x600 MQ = 29.1 FPS
640x480 MQ = 42.5 FPS

I haven't tried 640x480 in LQ yet, but I imagine it's faster than MQ at least a little.

At first, I thought something was wrong... things were going WAY too fast... but it all looked GOOD! To get that speed before, I had to turn off all the stuff that makes DOOM3 look so nice (shadows, bump mapping, specularity, etc.). I can't believe how nice DOOM3 plays now! And my CPU really isn't that high end. If you're wondering, the Opteron 240 scores almost exactly the same in every benchmark I've ever run as the Athlon XP 2600+.

PS: When I say FC3 above, I mean test3. The official release just came out and I'm downloading it now. Hopefully, by the end of the day I'll be running the official FC3 with the new nVidia driver.