Question about WINE

[Pud]

Is WINE -guaranteed- to run my Steam games? (since i know alot aren't supported natively)
Is some heavy tweaking involved?
Or will some games just not run at all with WINE.

Either way i'm switching to this OS, i just would like to know where i stand with some of my games.

Thanks for all the answers guys!

[omegadot]

WINE isn't guaranteed to do a damn thing.

[Toquita]

Most of them will and will run great. Others however might freeze, others my get low performance. I recommend you to test WINE before doing a full switch. If you like, then be Welcome! =)

BTW most game don't need tweaking, just "install and go".

[[Linux] unbridledExüberance]

WINE has come a long way over a short time, and runs a lot of games near-flawlessly; however, you're probably not going to have any luck running DirectX10 or 11 games, but most DirectX games still use DirectX 9, and now OpenGL is becoming the norm (about time!), which works great since OpenGL is directly support by LInux.

To see if a game will work in WINE before your download/buy it, check the WINE database[appdb.winehq.org] which keeps a record of how well programs run on different versions of WINE and whether any workaround are needed or not.

[Tazza.sh]

http://appdb.winehq.org/

check here for your favourite games to see how well they run under wine, im a skyrim fan, and it runs really well on wine (as does RAGE which i really like too! and civ v runs great too.... i could list games but check the link above :))

edit - games that im annoyed i cant run that ive noticed so far is bf3 and max payne 3...

also just realised the link was posted by the guy above :)

[Oerthling]

There's no guarantee.
Many games will run. Some of those will need tweaking (see http://appdb.winehq.org/).
Sometimes the game itself will run - but the launcher doesn't and has to be circumvented.
Sometimes the game runs - but you'll have to tolerate the occasional graphics glitch.

In general you have the best chances with games written for opengl and you using an NVidia card.
Expect more trouble with games if they use the newest directx and/or you have an AMD/ATI card.

It also plays a role how popular the game is. If it is very popular and has been out for over a month there is a fair chance that people have already supplied new patches to the wine project and/or tweaks have been posted on winehq.

Simply look up the games you are interested in the appdb on winehq.org. If it has a gold or even platinum rating you can expect the game to run well.

You can get some additional support by using CrossOver (commercial app by codeweavers.com) or playonlinux (community tool). Both use wine - but have additions and make installations easier or automate some tweaks.

Expect to get less fps than on windows. Though there are some exceptions depending on your hardware and how the game is implemented. Linux is better than windows when it comes to handling many processes, IO and network and that can show even through the wine layer. In some cases running a game on Linux can be faster than the same game on the same hardware running windows - but these are exceptions.

I have been playing games on Linux via wine for > 5 years now. It involves some extra hassle to get them running and I have a much smaller selection of games available than on windows. But there is plenty that do work well and that number just jumped up a lot with Steam for Linux.

Games I played many hours on Linux (thanks to Wine):
EVE Online
DDO
GW
GW2
L4D2

[Toquita]

I played COD4, it ran better on Wine than on Windows. Crysis 2 also runs better on Linux than on Windows :D

I'll try most of my games, but I'm sad by the fact that EasyAnticheat will not support Linux for the next 6 months at least, so I'll have to install W7 just to play Counter Strike

[Tazza.sh]

is easy anticheat needed for clan play? not heard of it before :S (dont play cs much anymore)

[Toquita]

Linux Tarron lähetti viestin:

is easy anticheat needed for clan play? not heard of it before :S (dont play cs much anymore)

Competitive mode here is taken too seriously, if you don't use an anticheat you're never gonna be able to play competitive mode without cheaters. 99.99% of the servers here use EAC by default, so either that or I have to choose to play 4fun =P

[Teisei]

Wine is the way to go if there's no native client for Linux.

[Toquita]

⠀ lähetti viestin:

Wine is the way to go if there's no native client for Linux.

Do you know if Origin can be used as well? I want to play Crysis 2 but I don't know if theyr DRM will work under WINE

[Mikutron]

If you are getting better performance in wine than in windows, you have managed to hose your windows setup somehow. On a purely technical level, it is impossible to run something *faster* in wine than it is in windows, as there is a software middleware that has to ALSO translate system calls in addition to everything else.

But yeah, the whole "runs better than windows" thing is FUD

[toastiety]

Is WINE -guaranteed- to run my Steam games? (since i know alot aren't supported natively)

Absolutely not.

Is some heavy tweaking involved?

For some games. Most Valve/Source games work perfectly.

Or will some games just not run at all with WINE.

Plenty. Skyrim for example.

[[Linux] unbridledExüberance]

Unreal Desu Desu Ex lähetti viestin:

If you are getting better performance in wine than in windows, you have managed to hose your windows setup somehow. On a purely technical level, it is impossible to run something *faster* in wine than it is in windows, as there is a software middleware that has to ALSO translate system calls in addition to everything else.

But yeah, the whole "runs better than windows" thing is FUD

This is incorrect (though almost always true in practice if the Windows machine is a fresh install). If an OpenGL call runs faster than the equivalent DirectX call plus the time taken to convert (which is done on the CPU, which is available to work in parallel with the GPU, so it can theoretically pipeline well) then you have a net gain in speed. In practice, this won't happen much, if ever, but it is not technically impossible.

If the application uses OpenGL to begin with, then there's no change in graphics performance, so your CPU and memory management is what matters. In this case, it's pretty easy to outperform Windows (though they'd be equivalent unless your GPU wasn't the bottleneck which it usually is for games) since Linux simply manages memory better than Windows does 99% of the time.

[toastiety]

I have applications I've cross-compiled for Windows and have run faster in Wine than in my native Windows install but like ^^ he has said, it depends entirely on workload. I was doing high through-put network applications and it was bottlenecking in Windows and not in Wine where it was translating to something the kernel support.

[Dolus]

If every new version of Windows isn't "guaranteed" to run every windows game.......how the hell would a compatibility layer be?