Great Progress with DX11 Games Support with WINE 2.3 | Hacker News Reader

Great Progress with DX11 Games Support with WINE 2.3

boilingsteam.com

116 pointsekianjo34 comments

Appreciate the link... after many years as a Windows/.Net developer, I made the jump to Linux full time after the release of Windows 8. I don't game much anymore but every once in a while I get the itch. I bought Cities:Skylines through Steam, but I've particularly been missing the racing genre. The boilingsteam site has some good reviews including the recently released Dirt:Rally. So glad to see things are progressing on Linux, and hopefully that continues as SteamOS picks up... steam.

There are many of us waiting for Valve to deliver on SteamOS promises, but it doesn't look too good.

SteamOS was a reaction to Windows App Store. If MS wants to take away from their market share, they would push Linux as preferred platform. I don't really see this happening, so it remains a pipe dream.

We can at least hope Vulcan adoption will ease the effort of porting AAA titles to Linux.

> If MS wants to take away from their market share

MS has actually already started to flag users not to install software from outside of the Windows store for "security reasons", in the latest Win10 updates. We still don't know how far they want to go with that idea.

crappy prediction:

Within 3 years, the Windows "Home" and "Cloud"[0] editions will be unable to install applications that are not from the store. Not even with a registry hack. Anyone wanting non-store applications will be forced to the "Pro" edition.

[0] - https://betanews.com/2017/02/09/windows-10-cloud-hacked-to-r...

I think things are still progressing.

In fact, it looks like they just recently hired someone to work on the Linux display stack:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Hi...

I believe they also hired someone to work explicitly on the AMD drivers as well, but I could be wrong.

Valve just hired its 6th Linux graphics engineer.

  - 2x as many as AMD employs
  - ∞x as many as NVidia employs

Who writes NVidias bsd and linux drivers?

Ah, open source drivers.

But you must've understood that.

Not sure why you're negative about the progress so far. Tons has happened and Vulkan will hopefully be the last remaining blocker for in-house porting on a wider scale.

But for all their sins, we have many AAA games on Linux now.

The reason you've not seen everybody and their brother come over is simple. They have games they want to play that don't work in Linux. Old rubbish like LoL, WoW and GTAV (which nearly didn't get a Windows version) is very sticky but the developers won't throw money at porting it. Hopefully their next iterations will be a little more open to cross platform support from the ground up.

Another good site for staying on top of Gaming on Linux is... GamingOnLinux. Lots of stuff on upcoming games, betas, livestreams to see the game in action, etc.

http://gamingonlinux.com/

"Dirt:Rally" <-- it's good. You won't regret such a choice.

If I could just run Overwatch with little issue on Linux [without a virtual machine], I'd be a total convert.

It's getting there. I saw a video last week of someone running Overwatch in wine at about 45 FPS with a patched version of Wine. Not sure how easy it is to get running or if/when those patches will be merged in, but it's making good progress.

From what I remember, Overwatch doesn't use much of DX10/11, possibly just a few minor things, so it's mostly just a case of getting it not to crash when those features don't exist, and the rest should perform ok.

That must have taken an amazing amount of effort. Bravo, friends. Bravo.

Could running a windows game under Wine and Linux practically get you higher fps then under Windows alone?

I don't think this was ever the case, but sometimes WINE benchmarks come pretty close to Windows, especially with optimizations like CSMT.

In some rare cases like L4D IIRC. However it's highly unlikely for the simple reason that most of Linux GPU drivers are inferior to Window's.

> L4D IIRC

This was not using WINE.

I was playing portal before it was available for linux (it was 2008 and I don't think there was even a mac client for steam yet). It ran faster on mac under wine than it did on windows, but I did notice wine was downgrading the graphics a bit (probably to DX8).

It's possible they were playing L4D under wine before the "native" linux client was released.

(the native client still uses a DX -> GL translator for shaders IIRC. Valve open-sourced it.)

> (the native client still uses a DX -> GL translator for shaders IIRC. Valve open-sourced it.)

yes, toGL - but it's not actively developed anymore. It was Richard Geldreich's project if I recall correctly.

> It's possible they were playing L4D under wine before the "native" linux client was released.

I did play it under WINE before the native client was released, but the native one was faster.

And AFAIR once the improvements were discovered these were carried over to Windows versions as well.

It's possible, and if I recall, it has been known to for some games (this was a couple of years ago when I was more interested in Wine and gaming, and even then not the most recent titles). Depends on your graphics drivers, etc. but there were some operations that were more efficient through the translation layer and OpenGL than DirectX directly (probably version 9 at that point).

I have no idea whether that's the case for modern DirectX and more recent games though.

Around 10 years ago I would sometimes see higher framerates in games like HL2 but I'm pretty sure it was b/c I was running Gentoo and had all the cruft removed and had custom compiled everything for my hardware.

Doesn't source love CPU and linux would have had a better scheduler?

Years ago I did a small experiment. I ran Armagetronad (OpenGL open source game) on Windows and Wine, on latter FPS was few percent higher. I really don't know why, but OpenGL probably helps (I guess that calls are directly translated to native OpenGL).

Unfortunately most of the apparent cases of this are likely because under Wine/Linux some of the more advanced effects and visual options aren't available, so the display resolution or quality are actually not equivalent to what you'd get under Windows. There are some comments here about running on cut-down optimized versions of Linux and that's quite possible, but these are really edge cases. The relatively poor state of graphics driver support on Linux is the main problem but it depends on your hardware.

Not sure about games, but I remember trying some benchmarks on Windows and under Wine (same machine) and it was faster on Linux

(but this was 10yrs ago)

The Wine camp is doing amazing work here. I wish more companies would release games native for Linux.

So how long until MS freaks out and starts attacking Linux again? I'm calling GPU DRM modules existing in the next 2 yrs, commonplace in three. Shaders and 3D API inaccessible without the right keys. Only 2D mode and OpenCL without the keys, to "protect" game makers from people running their games on unauthorized platforms. EUFI isn't enough to protect their market share if gaming is threatened, they will extend the lockdown to GPU's as well... for "security"

Linux is still a small share of the Gaming market, I don't think MS feels it is a threat at this stage. As for GPU DRM, is there any indication that manufacturers are moving in that direction ?

There is this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...

Indeed, At least AMD is going in a more open direction.

I knew what this was going to be before I clicked it...

Old NVIDIA cards flashed to show false specs were showing up in the market, NVIDIA was completely in the right to move towards signed firmware, and while it had an unfortunate effect on an open source effort, it was what had to be done at the time to protect consumers.

Attacking Linux... By releasing some of their "family jewels" like the Core CLR and SQL Server for it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com