Linux

On a 2nd PC I use for tinkering I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 and a working installation of Wine. It is held back by a Geforce 6600GT 128MB that meets the bare minimum specs for running EVE. In XP it can run EVE Crucible at around 15-25 fps in space with not a lot going on. In Wine the best It can do is 9fps in the same space environment - 2/5 fps of running EVE in XP.

I can get around in Linux but I am not good at solving problems if google can't give some clues. Can WINE actually run a Diretx game in Linux with fps that is close to if it was running in Windows? Opengl games out of the can run just as fast as they run in Windows. But WINE is just weird to me. I install DIrectX 9.0C with winetricks but to get dxdiag.exe working I had to copy that and i dxdiagn.dll from the XP installation into the WINE ..\system32 directory.

So it is possible to run EVE in WINE with the same fps as if it was running in Windows?

/EDIT: Ah getting better fps now I have turned off all graphics 'effects'.

Hey there.
As for my experience, I have tried linux several times already (Ubuntu fan). I am quite similar guy tech wise as you, can do things that are written in google/guides. Can't mess with terminal tho.
As for me, in linux you will always lose fps if installed via the simple way provided by several guides. Although I hear a telling that you can run EVE in linux with even more fps than Windows, but for that you have to compile wine some specific way I have no clue about. Thus leaving me no options only to continue with windows.

Yes, I am basic and GUI dependent linux user, but that is my experience. I will keep trying as wine keeps improving, you never know, maybe some day...

As far as I am aware, it will always take a bit more hardware wise to get the same performance, but on an i7 with 24GB of RAM and a GTX460, I can get a consistent 60fps (vsync rate) on max settings.

I can also run Far Cry 2 on maximum with little fluctuation from 60fps as well.

However, this has only been the case on my install of Arch and my Slack install doesn't get nearly as good performance, despite using near enough all the same libraries and the same Wine version.

So I would say, yes, Wine can run DirectX games perfectly well... If you get lucky and have the hardware to support it.

If you look at various benchmarks you will find that the NVidia binary drivers always lag a little behind in performance with native code. When you add directx and wine it lags a little more. That said in the past when I had both linux and windows installed on the same box it was only about 20% hit to fps for most games.

The keys I find is to use the latest binary drivers from NVIDIA as the native drivers tend to suck, and the prepackaged binary drivers tend to be out of date. As far as ATI goes my advice is just don't if performance matters more than open source drivers.

Right now with Eve I'm getting 40-50 fps with a $120 card I bought last year after Incarna. I dual box with high settings. 'm fine unless I have CQ's on and dock both accounts. (With Crucible dual CQ is possible, but not ideal.) I have some minor visual defects in CQs, but I don't use CQs. I do find I'm using up most of my 4G of system ram running 2 clients, a browser, and teamspeak.

Personally I think for Linux decent specs are:

CPU- Any dual core cpu that was released in the last 3 years.
GPU- Any Nividia card $120+ bought in the last year or so with 512M vram.
Memory- 3G of memory plus 2G for each client you want to run. (Basically 1G for OS/disk cache and 2G for each client.)

PS- If you plan on going into any sort of a fleet battle or POS siege I highly recommend reducing your graphics settings to low. This goes for Windows users too!!!

I am going to try Ubuntu 11.10 again on my games rig: i5 quad core @ 3.8ghz, 8GB RAM, ATI 6950. I borked the first attempt as I was having difficulty trying to set the main monior to 1920x1200. It was stuck at 1280x1024.

What I will do this time which is what I do with most of my Linux ventures is to create a text file that has a step by step guide of how to setup Linux with a given hardware platform. If I trash the Linux installation and I don't know how to recover it\ cant be arsed to endlessy google Linux forum threads, I know I can recover with a fresh installation up to the point it failed previously.
I did this when I tried Joomla in EVE on top of a shrink wrapped Linux Joomla virtual machine. Well VM snapshots make things so much easier. Which is what I can't use with a bare metal OS installtion on a PC.

On my tinkering PC i have used Clonezilla to backup Ubuntu and Windows XP across the LAN to my games PC.

Otherwise i do take a somewhat all or noting approach to fixing Ubuntu. If i can't google a specific fix to some fatal configuration problem I will reinstall Ubuntu from scratch.