Quake 4: Linux & ATI

I love using Linux. Earlier this year I purchased Doom 3 for the sole purpose of being able to play a high end game in Linux.

I finished that game up a while ago and was once again wanting to have something in Linux. The next game I naturally chose was Quake 4. I love ID software for producing everything needed for these games to run native in Linux, and for that I'm gladly willing to support them so that they keep creating wonderful Linux games. I hope that other company will follow there example.

The game arrived and I was very eager to give it a try. Once I installed the game I remembered that a major thing had changed in my computer since I had ran Doom 3. This change was my video card. I had changed from my Nvidia card, known for its quality driver in Linux to an ATI who hasn't had, in previous years, the greatest Linux drivers.

Well, I installed the game and tried starting it up. I received then an error stating 'GL_ARB_texture_compression not found', then I would receive a segmentation fault, and then the resolution would change and the mouse would lock up. I would then have to reboot X. At this point in time I was using the open source ATI drivers which have partial support for 3d acceleration for my video card which is a X800 GTO 256 MB.

I tried searching heavily for a fix for the error 'GL_ARB_texture_compression not found' but I wasn't able to find any answers. All I ever found were people posting similar issues, and if they had an ATI card everyone would reply just get a different card. That ATI support in Linux is horrible.

I didn't listen to these posts, I just moved on. I then followed the guides for installing the latest binary drivers from ATI. I followed the steps and got them installed. I then proceeded to starting up Quake 4 and without a problem it started up. I was now in the game. I immediately went to customize the graphics settings because they never set the graphics as high as they can be for a system. I set the graphics to high and bumped the resolution up.

I started a new game and waited eagerly for the game to begin. It finally loaded and I then saw the graphics for the first time. They looked horrible. The graphics for Quake 4 were all washed out, there was no detail to anything. The characters ear looked like a bump on his head. I knew that this was not how the game was supposed to look.

I then rebooted the computer and did something I hadn't planned on doing. I installed the game on Windows. I started up the game to check the graphics and it loaded and the scene looked totally different. Instead of a blob for the ear, it was heavily define with shadows and everything. Something was up with Quake 4 and Linux, I just had to figure out what.

The first thing I did was to check if it was a bad install or something of the sort, so I downloaded the Demo, loaded it up and I had the same issue. This made me think it was the drivers. I began searching but didn't find anyone else with the same issue. So, I then decided to download the Doom 3 demo because I know it works in Linux well, I had played it before. I downloaded the Demo and ran it. Started a new game up and the graphics looked fine.

Since Quake 4 is using the Doom 3 engine this completely removed the fact that it could be a driver issue. It appeared for some reason, Quake 4 was limiting the graphics. I looked through the output from Doom 3 and I saw that it was only detecting my video card as having 64 mb of memory. This I quickly knew was the issue. I did a quick search online and found out how to check in Quake 4 for the same thing. So, I booted Quake 4, hit CTRL+ALT+~ and saw that my video card was being detected wrong. I then looked into the ATI control panel and it shows that i have 256 MB of video memory.

Well, I did a quick Google search for how to fix this. In no time, I came upon a forum post stating that you need to pass the parameter '+set sys_videoRam 256' where 256 is the amount of memory. Once I did this and started up the game, it looked just like in Windows.

ATI card may have not been very good back two years ago in Linux, but I can say that its totally a different ball game now. Nvidia may still have a performance edge, but its been developing its Linux drivers much longer. Give ATI a little bit of time and I'm sure it will have all its issues corrected, especially since it has now come under the ownership of AMD. I think we will see great things to come in the upcoming years.