Cedega v5.1 + NVIDIA

Unveiled last week by TransGaming Technologies was Cedega v5.1. Appended to the growing Cedega gaming database was Sid Meier's Civilization 4, FIFA 2006, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. In addition, there are many other enhancements in Cedega Version 5.1 that range from game enhancements and a new user interface to copy protection improvements. For the uninformed, Cedega allows hundreds of Microsoft Windows engineered games to run on Linux seamlessly with very little end-user modifications required. Some of the supported games range from Battlefield 2 to World of War Craft, and Madden 2006. Cedega is similar to CodeWeaver's CrossOver Office and WINE except is specialized for use with games. Cedega works by directly loading a Windows program into the memory on a Linux system and linking it to a Linux-optimized version of the Windows 32 APIs. Cedega is geared for use with the Windows APIs as well as Direct3D, DirectInput, and DirectSound, which in turn is powered by OpenGL, X11, OSS, and ALSA interfaces. In addition to TransGaming's Cedega, they are developing alternative products for the Sony PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable as well as the Microsoft Xbox and a portability technology to allow PC source-code to run across the Macintosh OS X platform. With this recent release of Cedega v5.1, we have executed a series of tests with the latest Windows games as well as dedicated benchmarks. Running under Linux today, thanks to TransGaming Cedega is 3DMark 2001 SE, Soldier of Fortune 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, Quake 4, and a horde of other games. Below is the list of system specifications and software used throughout the entire testing process.

The 32-bit version of Fedora Core 4 was used due to complexities with TransGaming Cedega and x86_64 Fedora on the AMD Athlon 64 processor. We also took this rare opportunity to compare these Linux and Cedega results against that of running Microsoft Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2) 32-bit. Unfortunately, TransGaming Cedega is not availably freely under Linux, but rather comes at a cost of $5.00 USD per month or $55.00 USD per year. However, Cedega does offer a time demo, which is a full featured version of the client except is limited to 14 days of usage and features a watermark in the middle of the screen. For our purposes today, we used the Cedega 14 day trial, which has already been updated for v5.1. As this is our first Cedega article at Phoronix, on the following page is an introduction to the Cedega installation process as well as configuration and game installation.