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First Person Shooters (Games) Software Linux

Review of Doom 3 on Linux 41

yamla writes "Doom 3 was released for Linux sometime last week. LinuxHardware.org decided to test how well it runs compared to the Windows version. Read the article here, including some technical information from the id Software employee who did the Linux port, Timothee Besset." AnandTech has a similar review available.
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Review of Doom 3 on Linux

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  • Hmm (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I got "nothing for you to see here". Does that mean it is still too dark?
    • Re:Hmm (Score:1, Troll)

      You can use the flashlight to find the article, but it'll take you 5 minutes to figure out your orientation and create a mental map of the document page.

      This rant is related to the Windows version BTW:
      On a serious note, is anybody else annoyed by the shoddy quality of the flashlight? Most of the time when you shine the flashlight on the floor, you still can't see the floor. Its like whatever processing occurs to highlight an area is not detecting where the floor is and is actually illuminating an area
      • Maybe I'll give it another try this weekend. Maybe some of the other levels are more interesting (or well lit at least).

        No such luck. Only the final 2 levels are brightly lit. Ironically, those take place in an long-abandoned Egyptian-style pyramid, which still somehow has better illumination than a modern Mars station.

        Even when the rooms start to fill with boiling lava, the game still isn't bright. If the darkness bothers you, then look for a 3rd-party patch to increase brightness (the "duct-tape mod
  • by forged ( 206127 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @12:31PM (#10526375) Homepage Journal
    • only nVidia GPUs are supported now. ATI's are just not supported by ID at this point in time
    • the same features are supported on both platforms
    • the win32 version is noticeably (25-50%) faster when using higher-end video hardware than the linux version
    • in lower quality settings, both versions are about the same.

    That's it folks. For more boring details, well RTFA :)

    • by mobets ( 101759 ) * on Thursday October 14, 2004 @12:40PM (#10526476) Journal
      You forgot to mention that a large part of this performance difference is likely due to the lack of SSE2 instructions in the linux version. This will be fixed as he finishes porting the ASM from the windows source.
    • Both versions work about the same on my computer. One difference is that in linux xinerama is not supported, so I cannot play the game full screen while I have xinerama enabled. Actually, I'm using twinview, but as far as any apps are concerned its xinerama. Id said they would add support in a future release though, so it's all good.
    • One thing more (you have to read all the way to the end):

      • in high quality settings, the Linux version looks better than the win32 version. They're going to ask Id to see why that might be.
    • ATI's are just not supported by ID at this point in time

      You slightly misspelled "Linux is not (well) supported by ATI at this point of time", compared to the nVidia ones the ATI drivers tend to make huge rendering errors. This is not limited to ID games, e.g. UT2004 is nearly unplayable on some maps without lowering the texture details to "lowest": It looks like your Radeon is puking all over your screen if the scenery gets too complex.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 2004 @12:56PM (#10526692)
    find it funny that the screenshots are near-total black!

    (reading in a well lit office)
  • Driver questions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @01:08PM (#10526818) Homepage
    1) Does anyone know when will Linux nVidia drivers catch-up to the Windows versions, or why they are behind?

    2) Any idea when 64-bit versions of the drivers will be available? (And what distro I need to take advantage of it)

    3) Any idea when 64-bit version of Doom 3 will be available for either platform, or what priority that has over Linux-SSE2 instructions?

    4) How is the Linux install? What package manager does it use? Or is it just an executable?

    Oh, and "yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!! !!!!!!" If Carmack wants to email me the source code, I'll happily get starting compiling it for 64-bit for him...
    • Re:Driver questions (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lenolium ( 110977 )
      1) That I don't know, they have always lagged a bit, but typically they eventually catch up to near what the windows release does.

      2) There are 64-bit versions of the nVidia drivers for amd64, they work great, I'm using them right now. The rest of the kernel has been 64-bit capable for many, many moons so no worries there. There are a bunch of amd64 distros out there, Gentoo, SuSE, and I'm using an unofficial port of debian to amd64, which by the way works great.

      3) Again, no info.

      4) There is a little inst
      • Got a good source for that amd64 Debian? I just finished up a new machine this week - oh, and as long as I am asking for the moon, how is SATA support? Any help would be nice.

        Sera

  • by Jacek Poplawski ( 223457 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @08:55AM (#10534726)
    You can play Doom3 on fully Open Source system (without any binary drivers).

    All you need is:
    - Radeon with R200 chip (8500, 9000, 9100, etc)
    - latest DRI driver (from Mesa CVS)
    - S3TC library (you can find it with google)

    Just compile Mesa, copy file r200_dri.so to your X modules, make sure hardware acceleration is working, then... run Doom3 (with following env set):

    LD_PRELOAD=libGL.so.1 R200_NO_TCL=1 ./doom3

    (if you see no textures, make sure you have installed S3TC library!)

    I have it working on my computer. Please don't repeat that nVidia and binary drivers are required. It is not true.

  • Why no ATI? Because it's not supported by id at this point for the Linux port WTF Oh well ill have to use my x800 pro on my win hd

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