# A question for any and all gamers here



## CamelCaseGuy (Mar 13, 2011)

What do you do about gaming with FreeBSD?  Do you game on FreeBSD, or do you dual boot with another OS or play on consoles?  Is there good support for various video cards?


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## caesius (Mar 13, 2011)

There are official binary drivers for Nvidia cards, not to mention the excellent utilities they also provide: nvidia-xconfig and nvidia-settings.

The only game I've run under FreeBSD is World of Warcraft (under wine). It ran flawlessly as far as I could tell. I've tried a few others like various Steam games but with no luck. Although I have heard of some people who have had better luck.

Probably the best outcome for FreeBSD (if one cares about games) is to hope PCBSD gets a bunch of Bordeaux stuff developed and integrated.


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## sk8harddiefast (Mar 13, 2011)

One word. Warzone2100
You will find it on ports 
FreeBSD is not for games but this is awesome!!!!


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## richardpl (Mar 13, 2011)

Tremulous and Urban Terror for MP (best native MP games IMHO).

With wine it is much more, but wine is buggy (from perfect to unplayable for some games).

For retro gaming you have dosbox, zsnes and many more.


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## shitson (Mar 14, 2011)

The obvious elephant in the room is Windows... Most of the games industry focus on building for this platform (OS X in recent times as well). If your wanting to play the latest & greatest games right now Windows (Dual boot ofcourse) is pretty much your only choice. 

Other options include getting a console, which is a painless way to game albeit expensive. 

p.s Other great games include gcc  as most of the Dev's on here will agree


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## sossego (Mar 14, 2011)

The problem is finding people who are willing to develop games on FreeBSD.
The only application that I am aware of for doing this is blender.


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## kpedersen (Mar 14, 2011)

Though I don't really play games, I am writing some 3D software using OpenGL as part of my dissertation and FreeBSD certainly poses no problems.

Depending in certain Intel Video cards, there may be some GEM issues, but these can be avoided or minimized by switching to indirect rendering.

The nvidia binary driver is very simple to install without needing any of that weird linux auto-compiling on kernel update stuff.

In short, FreeBSD is as good as any other platform for 3D games (if they were actually made for it lol).


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## UNIXgod (Mar 14, 2011)

I actually have a triple-booting machine and leave windows to 3d games like gta or crysis. Not that hardcore of a gamer myself and enjoy a bit of lbreakout every now and then.


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## Zare (Mar 14, 2011)

I mostly play < year 2000 games. Dosbox, ZSNES, and wine are enough for me. Played Flash-based tower defense games for a while. Therefore, I need working 2D acceleration and that's about it.

The only post Y2K games I've actively played and enjoyed are King's Bounty series. However, even the first release (2008's The Legend) isn't running on wine, AFAIK.


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## mickey (Mar 14, 2011)

There are a number of quite enjoyable games that run natively on FreeBSD. Q3A/Q3TA, Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, AlienArena just to mention a few. For everything else it's more or less dual booting into windows though.

As has already been said, Nvidia is quite well supported by the binary drivers. So in my opinion this makes FreeBSD an execellent gaming platform :e


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## hedgehog (Mar 14, 2011)

Actually, I have more games installed under FreeBSD, than I had under Windows. Here is my game list:

Wine:

*Sins of Solar Empire*
*Space Rangers 2*
*Homeworld 2*
TES4: Oblivion
World of Warcraft < not anymore
D2: LOD
*HoMM III*
C&C: Tiberium wars
Mount & Blade
DOSBox:

*Master of Orion 2*
Elite 2
Native:

*Battle for Wesnoth*
All of the games runs perfectly with no issues at all. There also huge platinum and gold lists of appliation which are work flawlessly under wine on appdb.winehq.org. Of course, I would love to see more native games.

PS: I use nvidia graphics card and I have only FreeBSD on my desktop.


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## expl (Mar 14, 2011)

shitson said:
			
		

> The obvious elephant in the room is Windows... Most of the games industry focus on building for this platform (OS X in recent times as well). If your wanting to play the latest & greatest games right now Windows (Dual boot ofcourse) is pretty much your only choice.



Not true. WINE became so advanced in last year or two, it supports almost all fresh new and older games running either OGL2.0, DX9 or older versions of them. There is just no full support for DX11 yet, but even new games have DX9 compatibility modes in their engines along side DX11.

Aside from that I play StarcraftII and CivilizationV (those are pretty new games and worked out of the box the day they came out) on my FreeBSD desktop. I use NVidia 240GT DDR5 edition.


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