Doug Stewart on 15 Feb 2013 05:00:38 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] So... Gaming.



On Friday, February 15, 2013, wrote:
> Doug, you hit the nail on the head: I'm happy to see even the option of
> for-purchase titles on Linux! On the other hand, I'm going to spend way too
> much money on Steam sales these next few months....

Funny you should mention the sales.  It looks like Steam is officially releasing TF2 for Linux, unlocking it from beta land.  They're promoting this as part of a Steam update released in the last 12 hours which celebrates all their Linux offerings.  Every game listed is under $10, with most under $5 and some are even free.

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/linux_release/

Steam has also come out and stated they favor Ubuntu as their distro of choice.

One caveat to all of this geeking out is that you'll still need hardware that can support the resource load.  Running these games requires more resources than your average LAMP stack :).  I have successfully installed Steam & TF2 on a paltry HP 2000 laptop loaded with Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit atop Intel Core 2 Duo proc & 3GB RAM.  I average south of 5 FPS.  I haven't bothered trying to optimize the performance because I prefer gaming on my MacBook Pro (8 cores).  However, I stumbled across this which has captured my attention (and more of my free time than it probably should):

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Linux_dedicated_server

Unlike the TF2 client, the dedicated server DOES run very nicely on a machine with limited resources, such as my Linode 512.  As a matter of fact, I successfully ran up to 3 separate maps simultaneously on my Xen slice running Ubuntu 12.10 on 512MB RAM.

MD


You missed me mentioning selfsame sale up-thread. 

As regards your dismal performance -- it's not about the RAM, it's about your GPU. I'm betting you have an Intel embedded GraphicsMyA%# graphics card that shares system memory. Plunk TF2 on another similarly spec'd machine with a dedicated GPU and you'll be fine.  


--
-Doug



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