Half-Life 2 / Counter-Strike: Source under Wine

[James Liggett]

On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 11:34 -0600, Evil wrote:
> Thanks for the tip, James!  Disabling all the debugging had a much
> bigger impact than I would have expected.  I've included my observations
> and comments below, in hope that they might be of use to the devs
> working on DX.
Yeah, you wouldn't think turning off debugging messages would do much of
anything but it does. Don't ask me why though... :)
> 
> The Counter-Strike: Source Video Stress Test is now giving me 15.74fps
> in 1024x768 windowed mode (vs. 24 in Cedega and 44 in Win98).  It's a
> definite step in the right direction, but still a little too low to
> prevent you from getting shot by any newb.  :)  I get the same speed at
> lower resolutions, which indicates that I'm CPU-limited.  I can believe
> that, since it's pegged-out the entire time I run the test.
Hmmm... I can usually get double that. My card isn't all that different
from yours (I have a Radeon 9800 pro) Personally I think it has more to
do with the speed of the code and yet to be implemented features. I can
imagine that since Oliver is still trying to stabilize things and
implement stuff, speed isn't yet the priority.
> 
> I get pretty much the same performance whether I am windowing the game
> by setting wine to emulate a desktop, or just passing -window to the
> hl2.exe (15.2fps).
> 
> The odd thing to me is:  I get the same speed when running in fullscreen
> mode.  This is even the case if I used XRandR to set my desktop to the
> same resolution before starting Steam, so that I don't end up
> accidentally scrolling across my virtual desktop when I move the mouse
> down or to the right.  Doing that is also a help because it stops my
> newsticker from drawing over the top of the game screen, but it seems to
> have no impact on performance.
> 
> Do OpenGL applications typically perform the same in windowed mode as
> fullscreen mode?  My experience programming with DirectX made me expect
> fullscreen to run faster since the video card only has to flip the
> backbuffer pointer instead of blitting from one chunk of memory to
> another.  Of course, that all being handled by the video card, I suppose
> this too is probably just a side-effect of my CPU-limited speed.
I wouldn't think running a game in a window versus full-screen would
change much of anything. Then again, I'm no 3D expert either. 
> 
> Here are the parameters I'm feeding to CS:S by the way, in case anyone's
> interested:  "-heapsize 512000 -fullscreen -width 1024 -height 768". 
> I've tried passing "-dxlevel 70" to the hl2.exe, but don't see much if
> any performance difference.  It is interesting to not that if you don't
> pass this parameter, you will see little white boxes indicating each
> light source.  These boxes aren't clipped by any object.
> 
> Passing "-dxlevel 80" causes the menu screen to come up completely
> white, making it unuseable.  Forcing DirectX 8.1 or 9.0 has the same
> white-screen effect.
Try disabling pixel shaders in winecfg to get around that. They never
did work for me. I tried to use them yesterday with HL2 to get some
screenshots, and they froze my computer. If you're lucky enough to even
star a game using them, they mess things up anyway.
> 
> Restarting CS:S without exiting Steam completely can have flaky
> results.  It might be related to the amount of time it actually takes
> the game to cleanup and exit.  I've noticed that right after exiting the
> game and then exiting Steam, it can take several minutes or longer (of
> maxed out CPU utilization) before a command prompt returns.
Maybe the Valve minidump program is intercepting a crash. I see that a
lot with Source multiplayer games like CS:S and HL2:DM. I believe that
it might be because of the web browser control used to display MOTDs.
BTW, what did you do to get transgaming's mozctl working? Thanks.
> 
> Visually, I would say it looks better than I recall getting from
> Cedega.  The textures on the monoliths were always plain and flat when I
> was running Cedega.  I'm tempted to renew my Cedega subscription to make
> sure I'm remembering right.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I've never been a fan of Cedega, so I say to
hell with it. I would stick with free WINE. ;-)
> 
> Anyway, it's looking very promising.  Keep up the great work! 
I'm not really involved with development on the DX emulation. I just
follow Oliver's work, test, cross my fingers, and hope it works. :)
> 
> -Jesse
> 
> 
> 
> James Liggett wrote:
> 
> >I have single player HL2 running decent. Not quite excellent, but
> >playable. Try running steam with this command:
> >
> >WINEDEBUG="-all" wine steam.exe
> >
> >And you should get anywhere from 10-30 FPS. It's not the best in the
> >world, but at least you can play. :) I have started a new game, and I am
> >now in the beginning of the car sequence, and aside from some textures
> >being lit up and the flashlight not working, it's pretty nice. But,
> >beware of problems with pixel shaders. The make CS and HL2 deathmatch
> >totally useless (they give a white screen in menu. It's not frozen, but
> >you can't see anything.) I don't see that behavior with single player
> >because of the animated menus. Plus, pixel shaders screw things up big
> >time anyway. It inverts colors and makes it look like NPCs are holding
> >tree trunks. I'll put up some shots up later so you can see what I mean.
> >
> >James
> >  
> >
>