Looking to play old games in Wine with old computer

[leilei]

Due to the sorry state of ATI drivers in Linux atm

i thought the 'sorry state' ended in sep 2007 :S

[Hephasteus]

7600 GT eats 6600 for lunch. A lowly entry level 8400GS will beat up a 7600GT fairly well. Pentium III is not a good modern game cpu or even good slightly older game CPU. Intel's northwood or prescott is a good older game cpu with fast clock and hyperthreading.

If you put in a saphire 4670 or a decent 9600GT I'd consider playing one or two of those games on that rig under WINDOWS XP with tons of registry hacks to make it minimal platform. You can forget about FC on that cpu. And call of duty 2 is probably totally out of the question.

Maybe an AMD 4850e or 7750be on a 780G or 8300 chipset motherboard with 4gb of ram and either the 4670 or 9600GT would give those games hell.

20 to 25 frames per second is not playable on any game. Crysis will play well at 30 to 40 but most games need 60 without possibility of getting below 45.

775 pin prescotts will likely never die but it's time to bury the pentium III.

[Kano]

8400GS has got only 64 bit memory bus and is of course slower than a card with 128 bit memory bus. Just VDPAU support is there then.

[leilei]

Maybe an AMD 4850e or 7750be on a 780G or 8300 chipset motherboard with 4gb of ram and either the 4670 or 9600GT would give those games hell.

at that point, it's overkill. Even a Sempron 2600 would do nice for them.

[Hephasteus]

at that point, it's overkill. Even a Sempron 2600 would do nice for them.

You can't buy sempron 2600's any more.

Far Cry and Half life 2 just barely needs more cpu but it needs it completely. Without that extra CPU those engines will die because you can't do the AI and pathing to even be able to push the graphics.
A 1 ghz athalon could handle them with a 7600GS or GT video to take up the slack but a 1gh athalon and 733mhz pentium III are worlds apart in capability.

[Wyatt]

You can't buy sempron 2600's any more.

Huh?

a 1gh athalon and 733mhz pentium III are worlds apart in capability.

At some level, so are a 1.4GHz P3 and a 1GHz Athlon, though.

[Jaguarandi]

Thanks guys for continuing the discussion. I've had Jaunty issues lately on my laptop and desktop

Anyway, ATI is dropping R3xx support, when support atm for those cards is less than ideal. The open source drivers aren't doing it for me either, unfortunetly.

60 frames per second for me is overkill. Most console FPSes run at 30fps, so 20-25 is very acceptable.

It's looking like it's going to come down to a 6600 GT or a 6800 GT. I've looked at the 7300 and 7600 GS and both aren't as good. Anyway, is BFG the best brand, or might I want to try somone else?