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Forums > Home› Star Trek Online General Discussion

Linux STO players using WINE Video Card Survey

iridiumallyiridiumally Member Posts: 15 Arc User
edited August 2013 in Star Trek Online General Discussion
Hey guys, I'm looking to upgrade my video card from an ATI Radeon HD 6670. My goal is to get visual and performance parity of STO on Linux with that of STO on Windows. With my current setup I have to tweak some of the visuals down to get a performance boost. And, even then the look & feel is still less than what it is in Windows with the textures, brightness and colors. Also, I get some stuttering when panning around in sector space plus some graphic anomalies during times of multiple explosions.

I'm a distro hopper and I've tried STO using Crossover Linux on Korora, Fedora, Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Opensuse. Opensuse had the best experience overall, but not by much.

My current specs:
CPU: Phenom II Quad 3 GHz
Ram: 8 GBs
Video: ATI Radeon HD 6670 (Ram: 1 GBs DDR3)


What are you using under the hood & how well is your game performing?
Post edited by iridiumally on

Comments

  • therealfluffytherealfluffy Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    The way Wine implements DirectX-to-OpenGL translation will severely affect video performance regardless of your choice of video card. I'm running on a Quad Core i7 with a nVidia 660Ti and I still have to turn my video settings down to the lowest settings to be able to play. Things would've been much easier if Cryptic had chose an open graphics standard like OpenGL from the start instead of limiting themselves to a proprietary solution. Then the game would've run smoothly (albeit under emulation) on any platform - MacOS, BSD, Linux as well as Windows of course.
    There are recent out-of-tree patches to both the Linux kernel and Wine that implements a native DirectX API which doubles the current performance but it's nothing a normal Linux user can easily apply unless you're comfortable to do manual patching and recompiling.
  • zombiedeadheadedzombiedeadheaded Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    iridiumally wrote: »
    My goal is to get visual and performance parity of STO on Linux with that of STO on Windows.

    The only sensible answer to this is, use Windows.
  • iridiumallyiridiumally Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    zombiedeadheaded wrote: »
    The only sensible answer to this is, use Windows.

    MY aim is to get rid of Windows altogether. My Steam games on Linux run great. And, a lot of my Windows games that I still play run fine in Linux under WINE. I just play STO the most. I really enjoy the space battles; I'm not much into the away team excursions.
  • therealfluffytherealfluffy Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    iridiumally wrote: »
    MY aim is to get rid of Windows altogether. My Steam games on Linux run great.
    I both admire and share your goal. Steam has made the brilliant choice to use the platform independent OpenGL natively in their games, atleast their older titles like Half-Life 2, thus avoiding the performance penalty in Wine. They've also started to port their titles to Linux, removing the need for Wine entirely. Cryptic went the Microsoft only way and currently there's no way around the performance problems other than to have a parallel Windows installation only for this game. Yes, it sucks.
  • zarathos1978zarathos1978 Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    iridiumally wrote: »
    MY aim is to get rid of Windows altogether. My Steam games on Linux run great. And, a lot of my Windows games that I still play run fine in Linux under WINE. I just play STO the most. I really enjoy the space battles; I'm not much into the away team excursions.

    Any particular reason why? I'm curious as I do like Linux and use Ubuntu for work at home and recreation other then gaming (writing, photo edition etc). Also with some older games that don't need superb computer specs. It just makes little sense for me to use Linux as gaming system (or any other system then Windows in the first place).
  • iridiumallyiridiumally Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    zarathos1978 wrote: »
    Any particular reason why?

    Well, I just prefer it. Been using it at home exclusively, except for Windows only games, for over 8 years now.

    I've used DOS, Windows 3.11, Win95,Win98,Win2000,WinXP and Win7. I prefer Linux.

    To me it's like moving from a neighborhood with a homeowners association dictating the colors you can paint your house and what flowers you can plant in your garden. Then you move to another neighborhood without the association. Total freedom to do whatever you want. Yeah, your new neighbors can do the same thing and they like purple shutters with a pink roof, but you can do something just as colorful, or polar opposite conservative. It's YOUR choice.
  • curs0rcurs0r Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    This may help you a bit http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-July/041900.html. It's nowhere near a finished state but has already seen some encouraging results. You just might get the performance boost you're after.
    I'll sell you some weapons from New Romulus. Never fired, only dropped once.
  • sirokksirokk Member Posts: 990 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    therealfluffy wrote: »
    I both admire and share your goal. Steam has made the brilliant choice to use the platform independent OpenGL natively in their games, atleast their older titles like Half-Life 2, thus avoiding the performance penalty in Wine. They've also started to port their titles to Linux, removing the need for Wine entirely. Cryptic went the Microsoft only way and currently there's no way around the performance problems other than to have a parallel Windows installation only for this game. Yes, it sucks.

    It was mentioned by someone at Cryptic that they are actively working toward getting STO to work on Apple IOS. This could lead to an easier transition to Linux. I wouldn't hold my breath though. :rolleyes:
    Star Trek Battles Channel - Play Star Trek like they did in the series!Avatar: pinterest-com/pin/14003448816884219Are you sure it isn't time for a "colorful metaphor"? --Spock in 'The Voyage Home'
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  • aarons9aarons9 Member Posts: 961
    edited August 2013
    i didnt have any problems with STO under wine. i used a Nvidia GTX video card.
    there was a few issues.. like missing textures and very slow loading.. sometimes taking up to 3 or 4 minutes at the loading screen..

    use a blank prefix and install IE8..
    set the video memory to what you have in winetricks and also in the game under troubleshooting.

    you should be set.

    ultimately tho i went with windows 7.

    most of the newer games require dx 11, and wine will never have that.
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  • browserxlbrowserxl Member Posts: 16 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    I did pretty much the same like you are planning some months. I have completely dumped my Windows7 install in favor of a Linux Mint Box.
    I am running it on a Toshiba Satellite L750 with an i5 CPU an NVidia 525M and 8GB of Ram.

    I run STO through Crossover which works half way decent. The main problem I have is massive degradation of performance in the underlying wine after some PVE Queues which seems to be a common problem, but I can live with that.
    Using steam won't help here as well, since there is no native Linux STO Client and you would have to run steam through wine leaving the same problems unanswered.
    In my eyes its currently impossible to run STO lossless on a Linux machine, even when its a high end gaming rig.
  • iridiumallyiridiumally Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    edited August 2013
    Yeah, thanks to various forums I learned to set the cards video memory in WINE and the game itself, which was a nice bump in stability & performance.

    I've always liked ATI/AMD cards, but I'm heavily leaning to a nice nVidia card with DDR5 ram as my next GPU. nVidia really has the best Linux support.

    Thank you all for all the feedback. See you in the game!
  • aarons9aarons9 Member Posts: 961
    edited August 2013
    linux likes NVIDIA..

    it does not get along very well with ATI.
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