I used to have an ATI Radeon X850XT. What tricks I found for better 3D
support? Easy. I bought a new motherboard with an integrated Intel X4500. I
know, it sucks. Both the fact that this is the only way for reliable, non
reverse engineered 3D support and the performance of the card. Some older
games run with wine, unfortunately not even all games that are supposed to
run well in wine run! Serious Sam 2 for example has huge graphical errors
that make it unplayable (some parts of models don't get displayed and you get
weird polygons floating around instead).
For gaming I emulate old-school 16-bit consoles (not out of desperation mind
you, I'm a huge fan of the Mega Drive and the SNES also has it's golden
titles). I also own a real Mega Drive. The best way for gaming is to buy a
console and leave the PC for emulation of old 2D games. DOSBox works very
well.
I know the situation sucks, I'm not trying to hide the fact that you will
have to do without many modern games. Crossfire TO is supposed to run
natively, as an add-on for UT 2004, but it is so goddamn hard to install it
all properly (install UT, install the correct patch, install Crossfire TO,
patch that too) that I never managed to do it. Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike
are supposed to work with wine (but I never got it that way). Half-Life 2 is
obviously out of question with the X4500, it says it's Direct X10 compatible,
but it has barely enough performance to run Direct X8 titles (just my
personal feeling about it, no measurements made or something).
The good side: there are free software games like Nexuiz (a very good UT
look-a-like) and OpenArena (Quake3 engine, Quake3 feel). Many free software
mini-games that are quite fun if you don't expect them to be of the quality
of full-price titles and like that sort of gaming. Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 work
flawlessly! Infinity Engine games from Bioware probably all work flawlessly,
Icewind Dale 1 and 2 sure do! Also the DOSBox emulated any DOS title I threw
at it without any kinds of errors. If you like old Lucas Arts adventures,
there is ScummVM (which is in the repository of Trisquel, yeah!) which allows
you to play all of them perfectly.
Good luck.
