Written by Tom Wickline

Thursday, 10 December 2009 02:37

To start off, here's some info on Crossover Games

Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel, OSX Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes, be they first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs, or more, CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles. CrossOver comes with an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing your games simple and fast. Once installed, your game integrates seamlessly into your Desktop. Just click and run! Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

Some notable features already in previous versions are Multi user support, Bottles (It is essentially different wineprefix for each application to ensure compatibility) and a list of supported games for quick installs.

The Latest release from them is Crossover 8.1.3

ChangeLog

8.1.3 CrossOver Games - November 24, 2009

Fix yet more Left 4 Dead 2 issues
Worked around a driver bug on ATI cards on Snow Leopard. Should improve behavior in Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and many others.

8.1.2 CrossOver Games - November 20, 2009

Fix installation of Left 4 Dead 2 via Steam on the Mac.

8.1.1 CrossOver Games - November 19, 2009

Prevent 'error 53' during installation of Left4Dead 2 with the latest Steam client.

8.1.0 CrossOver Games (aka Zombie Mallard) - November 18, 2009

Add support for Left 4 Dead 2
Fix a problem with directory permissions in World of Warcraft in Ubuntu 9.10
Fix a number of problems with Guild Wars
Fix a number of Mac audio issues which should fix Steam voice chat
A few minor adjustments for Snow Leopard
Fix a bug registering CrossOver under Snow Leopard

8.0.0 CrossOver Games - September 2, 2009

Improved behavior of the Steam game store
Fixed several problems with memory management -- this should fix TF2 crashes, among others.
Enabled Shader Model 2.0 and 3.0 by default
New supported games:
- Dragon Sky
- Last Chaos
- Jade Dynasty
- Ether Saga
- Perfect World
- Left 4 Dead
- Tales of Monkey Island
- Shaiya (Though only in non-English versions, for DRM reasons)
Fixed various regressions in:
- Half-Life 2
- Team Fortress 2
- Spore
- Guild Wars
- Civilization IV
- LOTRO (unsupported)
- EVE (unsupported)
- Pharaoh (unsupported)
- City of Heroes (unsupported)
- Lego Star Wars (unsupported)
- Bejeweled

This release, Crossover Games 8.1.3, has fixed various issues with L4D 2 and created workarounds for the ATI driver issue with SnowLeopard.

Crossover Games 8.1.3 utilizes Wine 1.1.25

And in this Review (like every other I have written, I will again attempt to find the reasons why Crossover 8.1.3 is worth our money.

In this review Crossover Games 8.1.3 will be pitted and benchmarked against Wine 1.1.33 using Everest Ultimate Edition benchmarking utilities (don't ask me why I use it. I just happen to have it conveniently on hand.)

I didn't go through all the benchmarks though, as 5 were sufficient.

PS: For those of you wondering about the memory latency, both Wine and Cxgames achieved 65ms.

My test rig (also my daily usage rig):
C2d 2.4ghz
4gig ram
Nvidia 8400 gs

For me, I generally use Crossover Games to run Steam and other Half-life 2 mod games like Counterstrike source, TeamFortress 2, Insurgency and Left4dead.

Well, the bench marks aren't everything, so I decided to give it a road test. This time Crossover Games 8.1.3 with wine 1.1.25 (Counterstrike source has a minor bug with wine 1.1.33 )

Running Counterstrike Source with DirectX level 8 and a resolution of 1150 by 900 in a sever of 77 tick and 20 people.

The results aren't really glamorous, but Crossover games did indeed perform better than Wine on the road test.

Running Team Fortress 2 with DirectX level 8 and a resolution of 1150 by 900 in a sever of 100 tick and 26 people

Well, this review wouldn't be complete if I didn't insert a few screenshots. I love screenshots

As you can see from the screenshots Steam integrates rather well with Compiz thanks to Crossover Games 8.1.3.

Forgive me, I was playing mouse hunt on Faceboook while writing this review.

Yup, Some Screenshots when I am playing Counterstrike Source.

In conclusion, the results, graphs, and statistics have shown Crossover Games 8.1.3 is better than Wine. IMHO, yes it is worth our money. Plus Codeweavers (the company behind Crossover) are one of the main contributers to Wine.

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