[Wine] Does Wine support the NVIDIA 7186 drivers?

[David Gerard]

On 15 February 2010 22:29, James Huk <huk256 at gmail.com> wrote:

> No, wine use OpenGL, and it works if drivers and hardware also support
> certain OpenGL version and/or extensions. The problem is - the fact
> that game X needs GF2 under Windows, doesn't mean that this game will
> run on GF2 on Linux, this is because some D3D->OpenGL conversions just
> can't be done (easily) without additional OpenGL functionality that is
> available only on stronger hardware.
> We need to keep in mind that, games usually degrades graphics if the
> graphic card reports that it support DX7, and game can run on DX7/8/9
> (Valve's Source engine is great example of this), however on windows
> there can never be a situation where card support "some" functions
> from DX7, and report that it support DX7 fully. With wine, we got a
> problem here, because there may be situation where drivers or hardware
> limit 3D support to only some functions, other functions simply won't
> work, and there is no way for application to know that, because wine
> will report full DX capabilities. I ran into this problem when I was
> testing cards with open drivers (Voodoo3 3000 and ATI Rage 128 PRO),
> although cards were capable to run certain games on Windows, they were
> not able to run them on wine because of missing OpenGL functionality
> (to this day I don't know if this was driver or hardware). In your
> case, your game probably needs more then OpenGL on this card can
> deliver...


Yeah. The problem is at the X driver level - Wine just uses what that offers.

The smarter drivers work around this by taking the bits unsupported in
hardware and doing them in software instead. Which is cripplingly slow
(by a factor of ~10-100x), but will run (or at least crawl) and won't
crash. Probably.


- d.