Tag Archives: Warcraft

I’ve tried different configurations of my home PC and I’ve had WinXP, Vista and multiple versions of Ubuntu and this would be my evaluation of the different setups:

Setup:
Hardware: 2 year old DELL computer, 2 GB RAM, 3 GHz Intel Dual Core and first Nivida 7300 LE 256 Mb and later Nvidia 8600 GT 512 Mb.
Warcraft: In all tests Warcraft have been run in windowed mode with, to start with, the most basic graphics settings.
Software: All operating systems and 3rd party programs are installed “out of the box” with no tuning of the system except upgrade drivers and such to the latest version.

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WinXP:
None of the other setups rendered WoW as smoothly as XP did, if you want the best performance nothing beats playing WoW in native Windows XP environment. Graphic card upgrade did make high end graphics setting run smoother, but only made a real difference in spell casting intense raids etc. Framerate was always high, 60ish fps.

Vista:
Amazingly poor performance in relation to WinXP (aero was turned on, might have effected performance). Still bug free and decent frame rates though but did require a graphics card upgrade to run smoothly. With the lesser graphics card I had a framerate of 16 fps (!!) and after the upgrade it’s usually between 45 and 60 fps. Oddly I experience slower load times in Vista than in any other setup and the loading screen sometimes stays on for minutes before I can start playing. This also happens during game play when zoneing to another area.

Ubuntu 8.10 with Wine:
“out of the box” same performance as Vista, however some in my opinion grave drawbacks. First of all the framerate tends to go down very fast even with the better graphics card. While open areas have up to 80 fps (not even seen that in Win!) the crowded areas and instances skip down to 20ish fps. The bad framerate is not what bothers alone, it’s a combination of bad framerate and that Warcraft does not support hardware cursors in OpenGL mode. This makes the mouse feel “laggish” and in intense moments (when clicking the right button might be extra important) makes playing with the mouse very frustrating. I found myself trying to bind as much as possible to key bindings but honestly some actions are better performed with a mouse than a key binding (“onmouseover casting” just to take an example).

Conclusion:
If you want to play Warcraft and use Ubuntu I recommend using a dual boot even if the only thing you will use the Windows part for is playing games!

What is needed?
In my opinion we need to make game developers start to support a Linux platform like Wine and develop games to run smoothly with it, just like games say “DirectX compatible” it should read “Wine compatible”. There are optimizations that really needs to be done from game developers rather than from Wine. Where is a lobby group for this and how do I sign up to it?

Note:
If you want to try and run Warcraft in Wine here is an excellent guide that I followed when I installed it: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=579378

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