Recommended card to play Oblivion in Wine

[colmo]

Hello all, my first post here.

I'm considering 3D hardware for my otherwise beefy quad core, 2Gb, with 1600x1200 20" LCD running OpenSUSE 10.3 64-bit - the integrated graphics (X1250) run Unreal Tournament (Loki) and Jedi Knight II (wine) beautifully, but that's about it - Doom 3 works but is unplayably slow. I'm using the 7.12 Catalyst drivers (fglrx).
Compiz doesn't work either; frustratingly, when I tried it the Sabayon Live CD got it to work, but not when installed.

I got Oblivion GOTY installed, but it throws D3D errors about unsupported features when clicking Play on OblivionLauncher.exe. This could be due to the driver, the weeny graphics chip, or both.

My options are to:
1) Buy a generic Ati HD 3850 256Mb or 512Mb (?106 / ?118 or so inc. P&P, best I've been able to find - P&P to N. Ireland is a killer),

2) I stretch my budget and get a Palit 8800 GT Sonic (?157 - free Amazon P&P!),

3) I wait for the just-benchmarked 9600 GT, which should compete with the 3850, due out Valentine's day - a month spent staring at my Oblivion GOTY discs during a time I could do with some escapism.

4) I give up and get a console!

If the cheaper card were the nVidia, it would be a no-brainer. I could setup a separate Windows HD to boot just for games if needed, but I'd prefer to give Wine a chance first - nVidia giving the best chance of success atm. I don't absolutely have to play games at 1600x1200, but it would be nice.

Long term, I suspect Ati's open-source strategy will deliver, but not in time for this generation of cards or games.

My questions are:
1) Does anyone have experience running Oblivion with either of these cards?
2) Given my requirements, what would you suggest?

[Melcar]

Oblivion works on Wine? That's news to me. Anyways, under Windows I was able to play it with a 7900GS @ 1680x1050 with medium settings and could max out the game with a x1950xt at the same resolution.
I'm having some doubts on how well R6xx chips are being handled with the current fglrx, so I will go against my code and recommend an nvidia card. The 7xxx series seems to be the best supported right now.

[colmo]

Oblivion works on Wine? That's news to me.

See here for details:
Oblivion Wiki
Winehq
A user's account of doing it with a 8800 GT

[Melcar]

Doesn't work for me. Installs fine, but the game won't run. Followed the guide exactly. Using an ATI card (HD2900XT) with the latest drivers, so maybe nvidia cards have better luck. Could also be that I'm running a 64bit kernel; the disc has a 64bit version of the DX dll needed, but then Wine complains that the platform is not supported.

[deanjo]

Doesn't work for me. Installs fine, but the game won't run. Followed the guide exactly. Using an ATI card (HD2900XT) with the latest drivers, so maybe nvidia cards have better luck. Could also be that I'm running a 64bit kernel; the disc has a 64bit version of the DX dll needed, but then Wine complains that the platform is not supported.

Your wine is more then likely compiled as 32-bit even though you are running a 64-bit linux distro. You should not need any 64-bit directx dll's but use the 32-bit ones.

[Cpt-Klink]

Ya its always nice to get a new video card the new usaully the better just the more expencive

[colmo]

I dug out my old XP licence and a spare 20Gb drive - Oblivion is playable on the integrated ATI X1250 chip at low resolutions - it isn't that bad looking at all (but then, I remember Quake and the early days of 3D).

Having to boot into Windows is still annoying - if anyone has recent experiences of Oblivion in Wine (especially if they actually got an ATI card to work), I'd be interested to hear from them.

[Svartalf]

I dug out my old XP licence and a spare 20Gb drive - Oblivion is playable on the integrated ATI X1250 chip at low resolutions - it isn't that bad looking at all (but then, I remember Quake and the early days of 3D).

Having to boot into Windows is still annoying - if anyone has recent experiences of Oblivion in Wine (especially if they actually got an ATI card to work), I'd be interested to hear from them.

I've not attempted the act myself (I typically do not buy Windows titles except to evaluate something to tell Michael Simms what might be cool as a porting project...) but according to the WINE Applications Database, it's Silver on most distributions, though I suspect if you don't have an NVidia or a high-end ATI card, you may have problems with playability though...

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5777

Just google "Oblivion Wine" and at least a few good links pop right up. Accordng to many, Cedega does a good job
of playability with the "right" cards.

[EmbraceUnity]

Sorry to revive this thread, I'm just here to notify everyone that the newest catalyst drivers are now working with minimal glitches in Oblivion.

EDIT: well, at least until you go outside for the first time, yikes. Too early to celebrate.