Hello,

I am not much of a gamer myself, but my gf likes a ton of (Windows) games. I tried to run them with "wine" in Slackware64 and realized that half of them worked only with Nvidia driver and the other half worked only with nouveau driver. Do you have any idea why? Is there any chance of finding a solution?

Thanks.

Certainly research what successes others have had and how with specific games and settings at winwhq but also possibly helpful is PlayOnLinux which is a graphic wine manager putting all settings in one spot and allowing for trial nd error as well as easy access to multiple instances of different settings and/or even wine versions. I'd stick with the nvidia driver and give nouveau several years to catch up.

Which games (list the titles) "worked" only with the Nouveau driver, and which games (list the titles) "worked" only with the Nouveau driver? When you say that a game did not "work", did you mean that they crashed when you tried to launch them, that they didn't display properly, or something else?

Are you using multilib, and did you install the the Nvidia driver from SlackBuilds.org with COMPAT32 set to yes?

By default, Mesa lacks the S3TC support vector unless you add the optional dynamic library for it. Most games will complain if this extension is not available. I've never had any issues with Nouveau.

Hi...

Does she have her own computer running Windows?

Regards...

Hi Dugan...

I'm guessing you meant to put "Nvidia" somewhere in there.

Regards...

I know that there is a slackbuild for adding support for that.

Yep libtxc_dxtn. I use that with driconf for a full support system for Nouveau. I also rebuild my Mesa to support OpenCL (libclc) and OpenMAX (libomxil-bellagio) to expand support more from my own packages.

Well, most games are really old and it was a surprise that they worked at all. Like Cultures and Sacred. Sims 3 was the reason I put Nvidia driver instead of Nouveau. But Nvidia has some problems like :

err:winediag:xrandr12_init_modes Broken NVIDIA RandR detected, falling back to RandR 1.0. Please consider using the Nouveau driver instead.

I've seen that with several versions of Nvidia driver and wonder if they will ever fix it.

The Nvidia driver I got from their site. Compat libraries for x64 are installed and working.

Knowing Nvidia... No.

A few developers I follow who write software using OpenGL have had numerous complaints about several issues with Nvidia drivers, only to stop coding specifically for Nvidia or AMD proprietary drivers and went back to Mesa and the problems disappeared.

I had a relatively new asus mobo fail on me recently, but it presented mostly as opengl and video related issues. There was a period before it started crashing every 5 minutes where the nvidia drivers stopped working at all, but nouveau was fine.

Links please.

Usually the free open drivers get fixes faster which is why over time the free driver gets better compatibility. The xf86-video-ati driver is a prime example of quality going into drivers to make them good. Combined with libclc, Mesa under the free AMD/ATI driver is literally second to none in terms of support.

Byuu.org (look for it somewhere in the developer blogs and forum section) It's honestly been a while since I posted there, but Higan developer Byuu did talk heavily about his criticisms of the Nvidia driver and problems encountered with it in several posts, and yes I have ran several things using Nvidia and Nouveau and got smoother video frames with Nouveau rather than Nvidia. Yes, I know an emulator is not the best project to test things, but considering OpenGL is the primary hardware video API in UNIX systems, what would be simple enough to use basic render to texture without problems unless problems existed in the driver?

Plus, my card is deadlocked with a now legacy status driver, so in essence, Nouveau is my only real source of newer drivers.

I haven't seen Byuu's posting about that, but I did see his rant about Qt that was mostly motivated by him thinking that he was above reading the documentation. He lost a lot of credibility for me after that. For work on the parts of game emulators that actually do the emulating, he's obviously one of the best in the world. For anything else, he's an expert outside his field.

I didn't think of that, but yes, that makes sense. NVidia stopped developing drivers for your card while Nouveau kept getting better.