Half-Life 2

What works

Everything.

I had played the whole game from the beginning and till the end two times, at first using Wine 1.2-rc5 and then using Wine 1.2-rc6.

Hardware the game was played on: CPU AMD Phenom II X4 810 @2600MHz, GPU nVIDIA GeForce GTS250 1Gb 738MHz NV Clock/1100MHz VRAM Clock.

What does not

Required to do some tuning to the wine configuration and to the in-game settings to get the proper behavior. FPS is still noticeably (about 1.5 times) lower than under Windows on the same hardware. There are some minor glitches in game render even after the tune-up of wine and game settings. Examples are incorrect z-axis clipping for the water surfaces (have to set "mat_clipz 0" in the game console to achieve semi-correct rendering), broken soft-shadows renderings (I don't know are there any ways to "heal" this using in-game console cvars), transparent surfaces anti-aliasing isn't working (at least the CSAA method offered by nVIDIA either activated by "mat_aaquality" cvar in-game or by forcing through nVIDIA control panel) and a number of other minor glitches.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Deathmatch as it is a standalone game named "Half-Life Deathmatch: Source".

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Hardware the game was played on: CPU AMD Phenom II X4 810 @2600MHz, GPU nVIDIA GeForce GTS250 1Gb 738MHz NV Clock/1100MHz VRAM Clock. Disabling GLSL in Wine registry gives about 20% FPS boost on my hardware without any changes in visual game appearance. I've been using dxlevel 90, 2x MSAA and 16x anisotropic set in the game setting, 4xSSAA+2xMSAA/16x aniso forced from the nVIDIA control panel, wine multisampling enabled in registry (by winetricks), offscreen rendering mode (orm) set to backbuffer (again using winetricks, this is required for water refraction pixel shaders to function correctly when AA is active), HDR level set to "Full" (it doesn't change anything as the game don't include any HDR-enabled map), shadows level set to "Low" (so-called "soft-shadows" Source engine rendering is currently broken under wine), texture detail set to "Very High", models detail set to "High", water reflections set to "Reflect All", shaders quality set to "High".