Start Linux gaming
Matt Hanson shows you how to start enjoying playing games on Linux.
Linux is ready for top-flight gaming but are you? We explain the cards, the drivers and the CPU you need to easily enjoy the latest games.
Gaming on Linux has never been better. With over 1,500 games available on Steam (store.steampowered.com) alone that support Ubuntu (officially 12.04 LTS and many other distros, unofficially), the breadth of games that you can get on Linux is astonishing: from casual card games and puzzles for whiling away a few hours, to indie games that might be low on budget but are high on inventiveness, and even big budget ‘AAA’ games are now available.
Games are also beginning to run better than ever on Linux distros now that many game engines used by some of the biggest names in the gaming industry – such as the powerful CryEngine.com – have native Linux support. Gamers switching from the bloated Windows OS to Linux can also see performance increases, as their system won’t have to devote as much of its resources to background processes and instead concentrate on delivering the best gaming experience possible.
Not only is there a plethora of choice when it comes to gaming on Linux, it’s now easier than ever to get started. Although Valve’s proprietary store front has its issues – such as game DRM– it does make installing and running games an incredibly simple process. It’s also not the only game in the Linux-verse, Good Old Games ( www.gog.com) is another service that sells games for Linux. It offers a mix of classic games (that have been made compatible with modern computers), new games and has a no-DRM policy.
Hardware manufacturers have also been upping their game as well, making good strides to ensure their graphics drivers are Linux compatible, so we can fit the most powerful gaming components into our machines. Of course, the beauty of Linux is that if you’re not too keen on using the hardware maker’s proprietary drivers, there’s a dedicated community creating third-party open source alternatives.
Thanks to the large variety of games available on Linux, the PC you use should be able to run at least some of them – though older machines without dedicated graphics cards may struggle to run the more graphically intensive and newer games – however you’ll still be able to play some puzzle, indie and retro games.
If you want to give your PC a bit of a boost to handle more demanding games then you don’t have to spend a fortune – a few modest upgrades here and there should give you a good experience when gaming. Most games – unless they are huge open world games – aren’t particularly CPU-intensive, so if you have semi-recent dual- or quad-core processor, then you’ll most likely be fine to leave your CPU as it is. Modern CPUs, such as Intel’s Core i5 and Core i7 range, also include pretty decent integrated GPUs as well
“We’ll show you how you can prepare your system to handle any game you want to play.”
– which means you might not even need to buy a dedicated graphics card to play many games. However, if your CPU is showing its age or you want to play more demanding games, then buying a dedicated graphics card is the best upgrade you can buy for your PC.
We have good news on two fronts here. First, most modern graphics cards play pretty nicely with Linux these days, so putting one in your system shouldn’t cause any trouble. Both first-party and third-party drivers are quite easy to install too (more on that in a bit) and they generally behave themselves.
The second bit of good news is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a capable graphics card. Sure, there are some ludicrously expensive GPUs on the market, such as Nvidia’s £800 Titan X, but these are aimed at gaming enthusiasts. For entry level and mid-range cards you can get something decent for between £60-£150, depending on the level of performance that you require. Despite these low prices you should be able to run most modern games smoothly thanks to most games being scalable for a variety of hardware configurations – so you might have to dial down an effect here or there, but you’ll get smooth framerates.
Most modern games are also developed with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in mind, and despite being pretty new, these games consoles have relatively modest graphics capabilities compared to PCs. If you want to future proof your gaming machine a really general rule of thumb you can use when choosing a graphics card is that if you want to run games at resolutions higher than 1080p, or on more than one monitor, then we’d recommend going for a GPU with 4GB of GDDR memory. However, for most casual gamers this will be overkill, and any card equipped with 2GB should be plenty.
With this in mind, we’d suggest a graphics card, such as the Nvidia GTX 950, is a great choice if you want to play most of the latest games at 1080p. It comes with 2GB of memory and goes for around £130, which makes it excellent value for money. We got one in to test, in fact, and ran a number of benchmarks to see how good it performs.
Benchmarking
The first benchmark we ran was Heaven, which is a well-known benchmarking tool among gamers for seeing how well a graphics card performs. You can download the RUN file from http://bit.ly/UnigineHeaven. Once downloaded, open up the Terminal and type: cd ~/Downloads chmod 700 Unigine_Heaven-4.0.run sudo ./Unigine_Heaven-4.0.run
To install the benchmark. To run it, change directory into the Heaven folder and type ./heaven . A screen will appear asking you what type of benchmark you want to perform. Click ‘OK’ and an animated video will appear, putting your GPU through a workout. On the top-right hand corner of the screen you’ll see a counter for frames per second – the higher it is the smoother the gameplay will be.
The test computer we’re running the benchmarks on has an Intel Core i7-6700K processor, Intel’s sixth-generation Core i7 flagship. It’s one of the best CPUs around, and
though it’s a bit pricey at around £260-£300, it’s got good future proof qualities, with support for new DDR4 RAM and a powerful integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU.
Without a dedicated graphics card, the Intel Core i7-6700K reached an average of 7.9 frames per second (fps), with a minimum fps of 5.6 in the Heaven benchmark. In comparison with a GTX 950 GPU installed, the Heaven reached an average of 39fps and a minimum of 20.4fps. We also benchmarked the GTX 950 in
MetroLastLight, a graphically demanding first person shooting game that was the first AAA game to be available for Linux. At full 1080p resolution the GTX 950 hovered around the 50 frames per second mark for most of the run, offering a smooth gameplay experience. However, we found there were sudden drops to 36fps when things got busy – though the graphics settings were set to maximum.
If you want a more consistent framerate then you can lower some of the graphical details, and it will still look lovely. It’s certainly better than the integrated graphics that is on the Intel Core i7-6700K, which only managed 21fps in MetroLastLight – and that was while running the game at the lowest graphical settings, too.
Installing a GPU
It’s clear, then, that if you want to play graphically demanding big budget games, a dedicated graphics card is a must-have on your shopping list. Graphics card are relatively straightforward to install. All you need to do is turn off your machine and pop off the side to get to your motherboard. The graphics card slots into the primary PCIe slot – check your motherboard’s manual (or run a quick online search) if you’re not sure, though most motherboards are clearly labelled up.
One of the best things about putting together a PC is that it’s pretty hard to plug something into the wrong port or slot – they just won’t fit. The PCIe slots have a little lever at one end of them and pressing these down helps eject the graphics card if you want to remove or replace it, so when installing you might have to angle the card so that the small cut out in the card fits under the lever. You’ll also have to make sure that there’s a gap in the chassis of your PC to allow you to reach the ports of the graphics card when it’s installed. To create a gap most chassis allow you to unscrew a thin metal grille to give access to the card’s ports. Find the grille that aligns with the PCIe slot you’re going to be installing the card in, and use a screwdriver to unscrew the screws holding it in place – but make sure you keep hold of the screws. Remove the grille cover and then insert your graphics card into the PCIe slot. Now use the screws that you kept hold of and use them to secure the graphics card in place.
Many graphics cards – especially the more powerful ones – require that they are plugged in to your computer’s PSU (power supply unit), so check to see if the card has one or even two of these PCIe six- and eight-pin sockets. Your PSU should have a cable running from it with matching connectors. If not, Molex adaptors should be provided with the card, however any good 500W PSU should provide at least one of these and we’d recommend upgrading if yours does not. You can now close up your PC and attach your monitor to your graphics card and power it on.
All going well your PC should boot and you’ll see the desktop environment of the
“If you want to play big budget games, a dedicated graphics card is a must-buy.”
distro that you’re running. Steam, which has the biggest collection of Linux games, runs on Debian-based systems, though only Ubuntu with Unity, Gnome or the KDE desktop are officially supported. We’ve run Steam on other Debian-based distros, Mageia and Arch with success, for the ease of this feature we’re running the latest version of Ubuntu.
Because of the growing number of Linux gamers both Canonical and Nvidia have worked together to make installing graphics drivers a lot easier. When Ubuntu is loaded you should see a message pop up saying that ‘Restricted drivers are available’. Click this message and a window will open up listing a range of drivers that you can install. A recommended driver for your system will be highlighted, but it’s worth checking some of the drivers as there will be information regarding whether the drivers are proprietary or open source. You can also install drivers from the terminal. Open it up and type sudo
Ubuntu-drivers devices . This gives you a list of possible drivers, eg for an Nvidia graphics card it could list: driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin driver : nvidia-304-updates - distro non-free driver : nvidia-331 - distro non-free recommended
If we wanted to install the latest official proprietary driver from Nvidia – which Ubuntu recommends – then we would then type:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 to install. You may notice that this isn’t the bleeding edge proprietary driver from Nvidia, but it will likely run most indie games. For more graphically demanding games, such as
Middle-earth:ShadowofMordor, you’ll need a more recent driver. In the past, this has meant either downloading and installing a driver manually from the Nvidia – which is probably too much Terminal exposure for most newcomers – or adding and enabling extra repositories (repos) to stay up to date. The latter option used to mean relying on thirdparty repos (eg ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/
x-updates for the latest stable), but in an exciting and recent development Ubuntu has set up an official PPA especially for Linux gamers wanting the latest drivers. To fetch them, add and enable the PPA using: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphicsdrivers/ppa; sudo apt-get update To upgrade to or install the latest driver use
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current . If you’re concerned about these drivers making your system bleed – most newly released Nvidia drivers can tend to have their teething problems – then we’d advise sticking to the x-swat PPA. To roll back changes made by the PPA use sudo ppa-purge ppa_name .
If you have an AMD graphics card and want to install the latest official drivers then you can download and install the AMD Catalyst program which gives an easy-to-use graphical interface for installing the latest drivers. If you have previously installed an AMD card you’ll need to remove the old drivers by opening up the terminal and type in sudo aticonfig –
uninstall . Now enter sudosh ./amd-driverinstaller-x86.x86_64.run into the Terminal. Where it says ‘amd-driver-installer-x86. x86_64.run’ you’ll want to double check that it’s the most recent driver for your card on AMD’s website ( http://support.amd.com). A window will open allowing you to complete the installation. A word of warning, before updating your kernel down the line, remember to remove the proprietary driver.
Game services
Now that your Linux machine is ready to play games the big question is where can you get games to play? Steam is the obvious choice as it has a huge collection with a decent mix of genres and game types. It also features some nifty features such cross buy, so you can buy a Linux game, and if it’s compatible with Windows or Mac, you can play it on those OSes as well without having to pay for another copy. Many games on Steam also support cloud saves for you saving your progress on one machine and switching to another and carry on playing where you left off.
To install Steam in Ubuntu you can either search for it in the SoftwareCenter or open up the terminal and type sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install steam to install Steam. Once installed you will need to sign in with – or sign up for – a Steam account. After that buying, downloading and installing games through Steam is a piece of cake.
Good Old Games is another great service that’s now supporting Linux. Although it’s not quite as straightforward as buying through Steam, its GoG Galaxy application takes plenty of cues from the Steam client (but isn’t currently available for Linux, you have to use the launcher), but it does come with its own pros, such as it only sells DRM-free games and it guarantees games to run on supported platforms or your money back. Also, as you can probably guess from the name, it started out specialising in old games, repackaging them so that they work on new hardware and OSes. Of course, it also features new games as well, and you can view and download games from www.gog.com.
We’d normally recommend taking a look at Desura, too ( www.desura.com), which has a host of Linux indie games – both free and paid-for – but Desura’s parent company filed for bankruptcy in June, and aside from Humble Bundle offering its assistance ( www. humblebundle.com, and another great source of Linux games), there’s been no official word on its future yet. The site is still up so the choice to buy is your own.
Regardless of the game service you decide to use, you should now have a Linux machine that’s fully ready to play the latest and greatest games.