[Wine] Can I replace my Windows install with Wine, on my hardware?

[achalmers]

I'm relatively new to Wine. I've been hearing about it for a while now. I've look a various comments about Wine on the net and I seems like a lot of people have got it to work for them. I've even used at work to run Inno to create a simple windows installer, which work well, although the User Interface was ugly (probably some missing fonts and things).
I have a laptop at home running Ubuntu. I also has a small Windows partition that I boot into from time to time, mainly just for games. If I could run my Windows Games under Wine I could get rid of my Windows partition for good.

Last week I gave it a gone on a couple of the Harry Potter Series of games. Unfortunately although I can get "Goblet of fire" to run I get no graphics, just a black screen ( I can tell it's running because I get the audio) an lot and lots of warning and errors about GL functions mainly. many references to "fixme".
It seems I'm one of those unfortunates to have an ATI video controller (Radeon X1200 or X1250) which ATI no longer support with their fglrx Linux Drivers. I therefore use the recommended open source drivers (not much choice really).

There a lot of comments/discussion on the net about issues with wine and the fglrx drivers and ATI controllers, and various tweaks and configuration settings that people have use to fix various issues. Unfortunately none of it seems to relate directly to the ATI controller I have. I've even tried a few things but no luck.

The questions I'd like to ask are: is it worth my time continuing to pursue it? Does anyone believe that a solution (and not one that involves a downgrade) is actually out there in the immediate future? Or if I really want to play my windows games under Linux, would I be better off buying a new laptop with an Nvidia video Controller?

For the specifics:
The laptop is a HP 6715b.
Running Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) 64-bit
$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04 LTS"
$ uname -a
Linux tigger 2.6.32-22-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 3 19:31:57 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ wine --version
wine-1.2-rc3
$ lspci | grep VGA
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series]
$ glxinfo | grep version
server glx version string: 1.2
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.2
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.7.1
$ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RS690 791F) 20090101  NO-TCL DRI2