[Wine] Re: Buying a graphics card for Wine: ATI vs nVidia

Thunderbird wineforum-user at winehq.org
Fri May 29 11:49:02 CDT 2009


For Red Alert the DIB engine is not a solution. The game can be very fast using opengl and that's the way to go. There are several things which are holding it back for both gdi and opengl rendering.

One of the main issues is that Red Alert uses 'LockRect / UnlockRect'. Using these calls a game can directly access video memory. What happens in Wine is that for each change (even when it is just a minor one) we refresh the whole frame. We need to track what areas have really changed (that's what is happening on Windows too) but it is very tricky as you would need to trigger 'segmentation faults' for this.

In case of opengl one extra limitation is that the game is multithreaded and that means we have to switch opengl contexts dozens of times a second which is very expensive.







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