Speed problem with Wine...

[Jeremy]

"Andreas Mohr Usenet 07/01" <xsidycvl001 at sneakemail.com> wrote in message
news:9huiun$8sa$1 at news.BelWue.DE...

> If you want blazingly fast Wine GDI speed, then what about writing another
> graphics driver ? (for GGI, Berlin, ...)
> The infrastructure already kind of exists anyway...

I have actually looked at why wine is so slow.  I very rapidly came to the
conclusion that it was X that was the problem.  I looked at a some of the
wine code and saw that it pussy-footed around X to get a result.  I have not
devoted a lot of time to it but the issues seem to be :

1. X sucks when it comes to high efficiency graphics, especially bitmaps
2. Wine has had to do all the hard work itself - ie unaccellerated crude C
implementations
3. There is no way to use any hardware assistance when you have to run
through X (unless specific GDI calls can be mapped?)
4. (trivially) The present release of wine doesn't allow remote X servers to
operate, rather negating any benefit of X

> > Secondarily, there are faults in the implementation of some GDI
functions,
> > especially fonts, but even simple line drawing and polyfilling is
faulty.
> Sure.
> I know that e.g. controls/static.c is horribly broken.
> I'll fix it very, very soon.
> (it affects many programs)

I am not talking about complex problems I am talking about things like
polylines are too thin, or polygons don't quite fit.  I realise again, this
is almost certainly a problem with the X interface. (fonts are another
question.  I am seriously unimpressed with the fonts I am provided with, but
I haven't tried to work around them yet)

> what about getting active ON YOUR OWN ? :-)

I'd love to.  I think wine is a good idea.  However I don't think things can
be greatly improved in the GDI area if the X model is maintained.

I have seen a number of projects that provide fast accellerated graphics on
*nix systems that don't use (or not wholly use) X.  they of course dispense
with the remote capability, but as of the release I am using for wine, this
is not an issue as it doesn't do it anyway :-)

Wouldn't it be great is wine could use native windows drivers for display
cards and bypass all the X problems ?  Probably impossible or totally
impractical, but staying with X will always result in a slower, not quite
right solution.

jeremy

P.S. If I am annoying you, it is because I want a better outcome for
everyone, not because it is an easy thing to complain.