Starcraft Performance

[Michael Shurpik]

Hello all.  I have a question that Ill bet nobody has
ever asked before.  How can I get Starcraft to run at
full speed?

Seriously, it would be nice to nail down the answer to
this question.  I have searched all over the web and
people say all kinds of things about Starcraft and
Wine.  Some people say it runs fast.  Nobody has a
clear answer.

I have a P3-800 with RedHat7 and 384Mb ram.  I am
running Starcraft at 640x480x16bpp under XFree86 4.0
on a custom 2.4.9 kernel.  I have a Voodoo3 3000 video
card (or a Riva TNT) - yes they are both old.  I am
running BroodWars and I like to play Battlenet.  I
have tested the October and November 2003 releases of
Wine.  They work, but they tend to lag games on
battlenet.

The bottleneck seems to be video performance.

What I have learned:

1.  16bpp color is a must.  At 8bpp, Starcraft cant
allocate enough colors, and it is visually unplayable.

2.  The only Wine performance options Ive found are
for anti-aliased fonts.  There are Render, Core, and
XServer font modes, but I have no idea which is
fastest. 

3.  Turning off sound does little to improve
performance.

4.  Starting a bare xinit or startx session does
little.

5.  nice`ing (changing the priority of) Wine or X does
little.  If the game does happen to run faster, the
mouse is pre-empted and it is unusable.

6.  DGA (direct graphics mode) is supposed to be
wicked fast, but it doesnt work for me
(Voodoo3+Xfree4).  I installed Starcraft as root but
it crashes when DGA is enabled.

7.  The 2003.12.12 version of Wine doesnt seem to work
at all.  November and october do work.  Some people
say that Wines Starcraft compatibility gets worse over
time.  

I would be interested to know if any versions of Wine
are very good with Starcraft.  Also, how is the BSD
version of Wine?  What makes Wine run fast, and can I
get it to run faster with the hardware I have?

  -Mike






 









  







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