Linux - Hardware Rendering

[gabrielbyrnei]

Has anyone here been able to play using hardware rendering on an ATI card? if so, how? Playing on software is incredibly slow on bigger tiles.

[SC4BOY]

I believe hardware rendering requires DirectX. Does Linus do DirectX? I thought that was only in Microsoft's bag'o'goodies..   There are OpenGL renders for ATI cards. Perhaps that will work? I don't know a lot about that. Maybe someone who uses OpenGL would know. I tried it briefly on my XP system, but never got satisfactory results.

[sumwonyuno]

I don't have an ATI card, but I have success with SimCity on Linux.  If you haven't done any wine registry tweaks, I suggest you take a look at: http://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/index.cfm/Main.SimCity_4.Running_Sim_City_4_on_Linux

You can try to load the game with the OpenGL option: -d:opengl
As an example:
wine ".../path/to/game.../Maxis/SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -f -d:opengl

[SC4BOY]

You can try to load the game with the OpenGL option: -d:opengl
As an example:
".../path/to/game.../Maxis/SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -f -d:openg

That was the limit of my trial. It was a total failure trying to render the game in a small playing card sized window in the middle of my screen. I don't know what would actually be required. Under wine, it may work fine, but didn't for me under XP

[sumwonyuno]

Did you try the additional arguments for screen resolution?
As an example for fullscreen 1024x768:
-r 1024x768x32

[gabrielbyrnei]

I did try -d:opengl and got horrible results, screen corruption, etc.

I guess ill find a way of installing directx libraries for wine

[gabrielbyrnei]

Ok, so i installed d3dx9 (directx 9.0c) using winetricks and configured my Simcity 4.ini file so it used directx instead of opengl.

This is what i got

[SC4BOY]

That's kind of related to what happened to me.. it's like OpenGL is trying to tile the screen. Perhaps someone is around who's used OpenGL for SC4.. they are few and far between.

[sumwonyuno]

I guess I can't really help much about the ATI thing.

So wait, you guys have been able to play SimCity under some other configuration?  gabrielbyrnei, it seems you have the game working under software mode, but it's running slow for you on large tiles.

[SC4BOY]

I believe both ATI and nVidea support hardware OpenGL (exactly what that means is open to interpretation as the game was designed for DirectX.. and as also discussed many times, the GPU does very little in SC4 no matter which method you use).. The video card does 2 things that I can see

1. It provides an isolated, dedicated, and fast set of memory for the screen image (instead of the video on motherboard systems which simply share standard system memory)
2. The gpu seems to run only the "special effects" such as clouds, explosions, etc The cpu does all "picture view" rendering itself.

[gabrielbyrnei]

I can indeed run it on software mode with no corruption etc. But its getting kind of slow with 1kk population on a big tile.


And yes, ofcourse, ATI and Nvidia both support OpenGL. Until Catalyst 9.11 it supported OpenGL 2.1 if im not mistaken