Hello there!

I know you guys were hoping for a full nice fancy review of my new system this week, but unfortunately it’s taking me a little longer than I expected to buy me the new games :).  I have my hands on Fallout 3 and Crysis, will hopefully get myself soon Crysis: Warhead and Left 4 Dead.  However, as of now I have been entirely unsuccessful at getting Crysis to run in Cedega (7.0), CXGames, or Wine properly.  I am still looking at the “how-to’s” on the web of people that have gotten this to work but I am extremely un-hopeful with that one.

Fallout 3 I finally got running after literally 2 days of screwing around with it – and by running I mean I can play it for about 10 minutes and then it hangs, then I played it about 5 minutes and it hangs, and so on.  If that wasn’t bad enough, I now have finished the Vault 101 beginning stuff, and can’t leave.  Everytime I click on the vault door to get out it crashes.  So, even though wine rates this as gold I would have to personally disagree.  I mean, it’s gold as far as actual gameplay, I can run the game on “ULTRA” settings with my hardware and the graphics are good (except in the faces, they are shiney and glitter, huge artifacting here) and the games FPS is playable (I don’t have any software that will measure this ones FPS, and it has no built-in benchmarking?  What kind of crap is that?) even with the ATI Catalyst drivers.. but again: it took me near 8 hours (across 2 days), give or take a few, to actually get the game to that point – and it still hangs randomly and won’t let me leave the vault.

Let’s just say I expected more from a “gold” rated game.  So given my experience with Fallout 3, I’m not very hopeful I’ll be able to hack Crysis into working, either version.  However, Left 4 Dead is still officially certified to work with Cedega, so I am hopeful that once I get that one I will be able to test that out.

I originally intended my review to sort of be a Wine/Cedega/CXGames/PlayOnLinux face-off but so far, the three show no difference in gameplay for WoW (the only game all three can play), and wine is the only one capable of playing Fallout 3.  If more than one can play Left 4 Dead, then I will compare those framerates if there is a significant difference, otherwise I’ll just be building you guys a graph of Resolution + Min/Max/Avg FPS for the game, and which “compatibility layer” I pulled those numbers from.

I also have installed Phoronix Test Suite and will be running Doom 3, UT2004, Unigine Tropics/Sanctuary, and ET: Quake Wars Demo.  I will probably throw in several of their other free benchmark tests for fun.

A quick peak is Doom 3, at Ultra 1680×1050, I got 132fps originally.  For some reason unknown to me the past several runs I was getting in the 50’s.  I also noticed that I had significant better framerates in WoW before I did a full Jaunty upgrade after the install, so I am hypothesizing the ATI Catalyst Drivers worked better on the older kernel, I am testing this by reinstalling Jaunty and will perform several more tests.

So have I gotten you excited yet?  Hope so!  This should be up by the end of next week at the very latest.  I’m hoping to have it done much sooner than that but it will depend on my success or failures at getting Left 4 Dead running.  Since that is the last major game that I have hope of playing, I am trying to hold out until I can get it.

See you soon!