| How-to + Benchmark: Playing Prey in Linux with Wine! |
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| Monday, 02 June 2008 10:53 |
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”In Prey, players enter a living spaceship which enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Prey turns the first person shooter genre upside-down with awesome new gameplay features like wall-walking and gravity flipping, making for intense singe-player and multi-player experiences. Prey is built on a heavily modded version of the Doom 3 engine and is developed by critically acclaimed developer Human Head Studios under the direction of 3D Realms.” Source Testing This test was done in a clean wine prefix and the game was played in a Virtual Desktop. System Specs Linux distribution: Fedora 9 Wine version: 1.0-rc3 with 3DMark patch applied. Video Card: Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB CPU: Intel E6550 2,333 GHZ Memory: 2 gb RAM 1. Installing, patching and playing! Installation Insert the Prey DVD in your drive, and direct to your disc drive in a terminal. In my case it looks like this: $ cd /media/cdrom0 And then you start the installation program by typing: $ wine setup.exe  Patching Download the 1.4 patch from here. Place the executable in your home folder and start patching by typing the following in a terminal: $ wine SetupPreyPt1.4.exe  Playing the game After you have installed the game and patched the game (which I really recommend because of better performance and you don't need to insert the dvd to play the game), you can either start the game through the start menu or by typing ”wine PREY.exe” from the game folder in a terminal.   Performance boosters If you want to enhance performance, then you can add WINEDEBUG=-all before ”wine PREY.exe”, ”WINEDEBUG=-all” means that the Wine Debugger will be shut off. Compiz can be quite the performance killer. You can change some settings in Wine's regedit (type ”regedit” in a terminal) to enhance performance. This is how my settings look like:  You can read more about regedit on this page: http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys Problems Punkbuster doesn't work, that's about that! 2. Benchmark! I decided to try out Wine vs Windows performance. I used the latest Nvidia Linux driver (173.14.05) and the latest Windows Xp driver (175.16). One thing is worth mentioning, The Wine results was a couple of fps higher with the 169.12 driver, but I can't use it with Fedora 9, I will redo the benchmark with more types of settings and resolution with the older driver when I have time to install another Linux distribution. I used the two demos you can find in this tool (the benchmark tool doesn't seem to function with Wine), I simply placed the demos in Prey's demo folder and started them by typing ”timedemo demoname” in the game's console. The testing was done with the same config file, with eveything turned up to max and I tested each demo and settings 10 times and calculated their average. Guru3D-6 Demo   Guru3D-5 Demo   3. Video And finally, here is a video when I play Prey. (the performance is a lot lower because of the screencast program) 
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