[Wine] Any hope for gaming?

[Edward Savage]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:13 AM, fsleeman <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> I haven't tried Wine for a couple years and wanted to get an idea what is the state of gaming in Wine. My only real question is if there is any hope of practical gaming under Wine. I have done some gaming with Wine and even with the semi-commercial Cedega with mediocre results at best. Games 4-5 years old seem to work ok but most modern games would have unplayable performance.
>
> I know there are a lot of tricks that can be used to improve performance, but when a game runs at 10 FPS in Wine out of the box compared to 50+ in Windows, I am not even going to bother to try to fix it. Has anybody done "real" benchmarks on a documented hardware setup? What kind of performance (out of the box vs. customized) can be expected? Is there any quantitative and reproducible evidence that good performance for current games can be achieved?
>
>

Yes, but on a case by case basis.

The general rule of thumb right now is 80-100% Windows FPS, if, and
only if, it works.

I have started writing a games watch section for WWN which you will
see from the next release going forward.  This will give you an idea
of the state of gaming in general and Wines support for newer games.
And, now that Wine supports Steam as-native games support will only
improve with increased popularity.

I play a lot of games in my spare time and I consider Linux to be a
perfectly viable platform with a mixture of native and Win32 games.  I
wouldn't bother trying to play games if I had an older system but I
would consider a dual core CPU with a recent nVidia graphics card with
the latest drivers to be viable.  I personally have an e6600 Intel
(2x2.4ghz) with an 8600gt and 4gb ram so most gamers will have a
better experience than me.

I play the following and consider them to be completely playable.

Some big titles Wine already supports for this year:
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2
Star Trek Online
Star Craft 2
Dragon Age Origins (11/09)

Other games on my regular play list:
EVE Online
Guild Wars
World of Warcraft
Team Fortress 2
Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
CS1.6/L4D/DOD(&2)
DoW Dark Crusade

I also play a lot of Heroes of Newerth which is a fantastic cross
platform game with a native actively-developed Linux client.