Anandtech was nice enough to put out an article giving you the latest on running Major Release Windows games in Linux. The article goes into great detail about the various software packages you can use to run Windows games. It pits a monster Intel i7 overclocked to 3.97Ghz, 6GB of PC3 12800 ram, two 74GB Raptor hard drives in RAID and a NVIDIA 280GTX 1GB video card. Now I don’t want to split hairs here, but aren’t we running Linux for these games because Windows is so “expensive?” That’s a ridiculous machine even by today’s standards. An $800 PC from Best Buy is capable of playing the latest Major Release games very very well. But let’s move on.

So What’s My Beef?

Game selection for one. The writer chose Eve Online, Team Fortress 2, Trackmania, Unreal Tournament 3 and 3D Mark06. This article was written in December 2009. Some of these may have been major release games, but not in years.

That means the most recent one is three years old which is AGES by PC gaming standards.

The Results?

Windows decimated linux by a huge margin in all but one game. So now you are paying less of course, but for less performance. But let’s get real for a second.

Core i7-920 $288.99
6GB OCZ Ram $149.99
Motherboard ~$289.99 (They didn’t specify which board they used)
EVGA 280 GTX 1GB $349.99
Raptor Drive $185 x2

That’s $1500 with no case, power supply, optical drive, monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, fans, cooling, etc.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for System Builders $104.99

Really?

I am not claiming to know the guy who built this system, or his motivations, but it seems pretty obvious the intent here was to play some games. So I am supposed to buy that someone would spend $2,000+ on a computer, and then run Linux on it to save $100?

I just don’t buy it, not for a minute. We are talking the guys that spend money water cooling cases to squeek out 5 more frames per second. These guys are enthusiasts here. They are really going to go all out on hardware to run an operating system that sucks 60% of their frame rate not to mention the hassle of keeping this fragile mess running?

Do you want to deal with sorting this out?

The problem with attempting that task was that each Wine project has different functionality with different games. For example where we could get a game to work in Wine, the game then in turn didn’t work with Cedega and vice versa. We were able to get newer releases like Dragon Age Origins and Far Cry 2 to work in some of the different Wine projects, but none of the new releases would work in all projects. This lead us to regress to some older but still actively used releases in order to provide a more detailed report across the three projects.

I sure don’t.

I totally get why a business would look at Linux servers for tasks like MySQL and Apache, and I even get why some big business like Oracle are using it as an alternative for Windows Server. Linux makes a super stable server, usually in an all command line environment.

What I will never understand, is why people will go out of their way, and spend the greatest asset they have, their time, to make something barely kinda maybe run a little bit. Is that sticking it to the man? That seems like sticking it to myself.