[Wine]WINE on FreeBSD: StarCraft 'stuttering'

[Travis Poppe]

Hello list and FreeBSD maintainer,

I -really- appreciate the fact that the major threading issues with FreeBSD 
and WINE have been resolved. I'd hate to see FreeBSD lose an application with 
such great potential. 

Anyway, I've recently taken an interest in WINE for use with gaming on FreeBSD 
(once again). I managed to get StarCraft installed with it and running. 
However, there's a slight problem. 

The game does not run completely smoothly. For example, when you move the 
cursor, it will move smoothly for about 2 seconds and there will be a slight 
"pulse" or a "pause" in movement for maybe a fraction of a second, and then 
the mouse will move normally again. Another 2 or so seconds, another pulse, 
etc. However, the sound does not skip, and my machine should have plenty of 
resources to run the game.

Watching WINE and Xorg running in 'top' they barely even break 10% usage. 

This issue renders the game unplayable on FreeBSD.

However, OpenGL applications don't seem to be affected. I've used WINE on 
FreeBSD to play both Max Payne and Half-Life for quite some time without any 
major problems. 

I'm running wine-20050419 on FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE with an nVidia GeForce 4 MX 
440 and the official nVidia drivers (1.0.7174) for FreeBSD under Xorg 6.8.2. 
This issue is not new and has been around for quite some time, but for 
whatever reason it never donned on me to report it.

Do any of you have any insight on what might be causing this to occur?

Thanks,
-- 
Travis Poppe
IRC: tlp @ irc.freenode.net