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Lophosaurus
suruasohpol


Registered: 08/09/07
Posts: 8,744
Loc: CA
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Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions
#23577293 - 08/25/16 07:02 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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I'm switching from a PS4 to a PC to play video games and I'm building the PC myself and it will actually be the first PC I've ever built.
I hate Windows and would like to install Ubuntu on it. Is it possible to run the games on Linux using WINE or something like that? Does anybody here do it and is it a big headache?
These are the parts I'm using if that matters. CPU AMD FX-8320E MOBO Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P GPU EVGA GTX 1060 RAM Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB HDD Seagate Constellation ES 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gbps 64MB CASE Zalman Z1 NEO PSU XFX 500W XT ODD Samsung 24x SATA WIFI Netis WF2113 Wireless N 300Mbps Advanced PCI-E Adapter, 5 dBi High Gain Antennas, 2T2R MIMO
I just realized I forgot to buy the optical drive. Is that something I have to have or can I just download games? Is there anything else I'm missing?
Could I watch 4K video with this setup if I had a 4K TV?
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Lophosaurus]
#23577603 - 08/25/16 08:31 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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You can play a lot of games on Linux.... there's also a lot of games you CAN'T play. Wine will help to bridge that gap a little bit... but emulators to play games generally suck and can indeed be a headache. While you CAN play a lot of games on Linux.. any diehard will tell you Linux isn't for gaming.. and that's true. It's a lot better than it used to be however. Windows... as much as you may hate it, is going to be far better for gaming purposes.
I mean it's certainly possible to get a ton of different games to work on Linux, but you usually have to do a lot of extra work to get them to work in the first place. You can load most games with Wine but in my experience oftentimes it can be a royal pain in the ass. Unless you like configuring and troubleshooting getting a game to load properly for hours. Wine can be a bitch sometimes and it's not universally great for everything. It's not always stable and you'll be troubleshooting a lot.
I would personally do a dual boot. Make a partition on your HDD, install Linux on one and Windows on the other. Windows for games. Or run linux from a bootable thumb drive or something..
You don't HAVE to have an optical drive, if you have USB thumb drives you can install software or make a bootable OS or whatever from there. Most games these days you can just download. Unless you buy a hard copy in a store or something..
A 1060 should be able to handle 4k pretty well. I wouldn't expect it to be OMGamazing in 4k but it should be able to handle it.
TL;DR: Gaming on Linux? Possible, but not worth the headache long term IMO.
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Shroomism]
#23577649 - 08/25/16 08:49 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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And to finish off that system you definitely need to add an SSD at some point. They are cheaper than they have ever been now. Your HDD will be the bottleneck in the system with this setup, so get an SSD pronto for the best possible performance.
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Lophosaurus
suruasohpol


Registered: 08/09/07
Posts: 8,744
Loc: CA
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Shroomism]
#23577707 - 08/25/16 09:10 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Thanks for the help Shroomism. I like troubleshooting so I'm going to try Linux without a partition until I find a game that I can't play or until it becomes too much of a headache.
What size SSD should I get or does it even matter? Like 120GB or 250GB? It's just to take some of the load off the HDD right?
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Lophosaurus]
#23577813 - 08/25/16 09:52 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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I'd go with 256GB or more. Put your OS and most used games on the SSD. Mechanical HDD can be for your mass storage. you just want your OS and programs and such to be loaded on the SSD for fastest possible performance. It's literally a night and day difference in speed.
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Byrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Shroomism]
#23578561 - 08/26/16 04:32 AM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
Shroomism said: but emulators to play games generally suck and can indeed be a headache.
There is no quality emulator I can not use on linux, RetroArch/libretro is more often than not the best way to emulate consoles and is entirely cross platform.
Quote:
Shroomism said: While you CAN play a lot of games on Linux.. any diehard will tell you Linux isn't for gaming.. and that's true. It's a lot better than it used to be however. Windows... as much as you may hate it, is going to be far better for gaming purposes.
95% of the games I want to play work as well as I would want them to, it helps that I don't really want to play many AAA games.
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howsyournaggerdoin
Happy


Registered: 02/04/16
Posts: 1,600
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Byrain]
#23578602 - 08/26/16 05:12 AM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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For gaming you could set up a virtual windows machine with a GPU passthrough. This way you can play games at almost the same speed as a real windows machine but do all your work, browsing, etc. on the linux/freebsd machine.
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Lophosaurus
suruasohpol


Registered: 08/09/07
Posts: 8,744
Loc: CA
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: howsyournaggerdoin]
#23581264 - 08/26/16 07:00 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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My next question is what do you guys use for monitors?
I was thinking about getting a refurbished 50" 4K tv and then realized it might not play games as well as a monitor.I just found out yesterday that there are monitors made specifically for gaming, but from what I've seen they're all under 34" and/or really expensive. Those curved screens do look cool though. Is there a big difference between monitors and tv's?
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Lophosaurus]
#23582445 - 08/27/16 03:46 AM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yes. TVs will generally have a slower refresh rate / response time and almost always have pretty terrible input lag. I.E - not ideal for gaming at all.
Even modern smart TVs may have a "game mode".. but even then many have a pretty massive input lag of like 80-200ms. Go with a monitor for gaming, preferably one with a fast response time (<3ms). TV should be the last thing on your list.
There's other drawbacks too.. Here have Linus explain it
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CosmicJoke
happy mutant



Registered: 04/05/00
Posts: 10,848
Loc: Portland, OR
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Shroomism]
#23582865 - 08/27/16 09:25 AM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Nvidia doesn't give a fuck about linux, opengl support sucks, graphics performance would just take a massive dive on anything graphics intensive.... I see the Witcher 2 is on steam for linux, that would be a pretty good test putting it on ultra and seeing how that fairs for you. Then run it on windows, lol.... I hate windows, but try dual booting that game on both linux and windows..... and you'll understand why Windows is for gaming.
-------------------- Everything is better than it was the last time. I'm good. If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care. It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence. I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too. If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.
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Byrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: CosmicJoke]
#23586384 - 08/28/16 10:00 AM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Witcher 2 is not a good test example, the game is well known for being ported very poorly.
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logikal
POSIX Compliant
Registered: 06/11/16
Posts: 29
Last seen: 7 years, 4 months
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Byrain]
#23586934 - 08/28/16 01:15 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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I'm running Kubuntu on my gaming rig at the moment (also where I'm typing this from). It's not as good for gaming as Windows, but if you use it a lot for what Unix-like systems are good at, then I would say it's worth the trade off. My main problem ATM is that I can't play the Witcher 3, and I have an AMD card which has virtually no driver support from AMD so it plays games like my old 4870 did on Windows. Since you have a 1060 you won't have the driver problems I do, which is really good. I'm trying to find someone to buy my card (r7 370 4GB) so that I can get something that will have driver support on Linux.
PlayOnLinux is a better option than manually configuring Wine IMO. The POL people spend their time making Wine configurations to run individual games, so you can really just hit download through it and it works 95% of the time, I've only had to tweak one setting when something wasn't working properly.
Even then though I only buy games with native Linux support now. Vulkan is great and even OpenGL is fine when compared with DirectX. I think that gaming on Linux has a bright future but obviously it's lagging behind windows at the moment.
The GPU passthrough VM thing also sounds like a really good bet, I think you need two GPUs to do that though and my motherboard is not equipped to do so.
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CosmicJoke
happy mutant



Registered: 04/05/00
Posts: 10,848
Loc: Portland, OR
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Byrain]
#23587056 - 08/28/16 02:04 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
Byrain said: Witcher 2 is not a good test example, the game is well known for being ported very poorly.
It was NOT ported on OS X, completely native app..... Does appear like you're right regarding linux though...... "In the case of The Witcher 2, this was deduced in record time, when it was discovered the game was encased in “eON”, a virtualisation product from a company called Virtual Programming." So it's definitely not a good comparison, but even if it was native, it would still suck in my estimation.
-------------------- Everything is better than it was the last time. I'm good. If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care. It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence. I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too. If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.
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Byrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: CosmicJoke]
#23588811 - 08/28/16 11:38 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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I wouldn't know one way or another about the quality of the osx port, but I think given a proper port it could work well. Tomb Raider 2013 runs at full speed here even with nouveau drivers and wine.
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CosmicJoke
happy mutant



Registered: 04/05/00
Posts: 10,848
Loc: Portland, OR
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Re: Possible to Play PC Games on Linux? And Other Newb PC Questions [Re: Byrain]
#23588829 - 08/28/16 11:47 PM (7 years, 5 months ago) |
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Not a linux basher, I run a linux server that automates like 90% of my computing needs, makes my computer work for me, rather than me working to get things done.... If you're happy gaming with it, that's fine.... I run arch linux, get a fairly clean install that way, it's totally headless, I ssh into everything. Still I have a windows gaming rig, and a handful of macs that I use for a variety of other purposes (primarily work). Also have a couple raspberry pis, front ends for media serving etc.
-------------------- Everything is better than it was the last time. I'm good. If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care. It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence. I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too. If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.
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