Starcraft Performance

[Marcos I.]

Redhat 9.0 + latest wine were the best combination for me at least in
singleplayer mode, everything worked fine.
If you are having trouble with DGA its probably because your drivers.
This year i have used ATI mach64, NVidia TNT, NVidia GForce FX 5200 and
intel i8x0 in an i865GBF motherboard, all of this worked just fine with
Starcraft + Wine but the intel one and after a few tests it was clear
that the problem is the xfree driver which i think is quite new and not
well tested, whith this card starcraft couldnt change the deept of the
display to the 8bbp required turning off DGA didnt help. It seems that
DGA and XV (this one not related to starcraft) are no fully supported by
the driver, i think starcraft doesnt use 3d accel at all so if something
is broken there its not probably to affect starcraft.
There are a few test for DGA available at xfree and perhaps you should
try them to see if the problem is somewhere else. conclusion DGA is a
lot faster for starcraft provided your driver is not broken.
There are for sure better and poorer versions for starcraft but also for
other apps so you must find the best for you, or use wine only for
starcraft see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/starcraft-wine/
Theres also a problem in the combination of distros and wine releases. I
recently switched to fedora core and starcraft crashed with this: "not
available - security-patched kernel ?", so i get the 20031212 version
and now even the (starcraft) installer crash with this: Unhandled
exception: page fault on read access to 0x1f4ddd70 in 32-bit code
(0x0041980d). I think is the same problem.

> 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

-- 
Marcos I. <marcos at spidermonkey.mine.nu>