[Wine] Any hope for gaming?

[James Mckenzie]

>Where in Wine is this bottleneck?

I'll give you an off-hand answer:  Windows uses DirectX and other Dircect processes to work video.  Most other Operating Systems use opengl.  The conversion process from one to the other is complex and uses a lot of time.  Thus the number of frames is going to be less, in some cases very noticable.

>For me, performance is the main reason I cannot play games in Linux.

This is very true.  However, there are games that will NOT run, at all at the present time.  That is where a majority of effort is being focused. 

>There are a lot of ways you can make a game run, but if you are getting a 50% drop in FPS's it makes most games unplayable,
>even on a decent machine.

Let's see:  Most game creators love an FPS of 60+ but find an FPS of 30 or more acceptable for play.  Now, if you are getting an FPS of 15, that is poor.  

>Is there a concentrated effort to improve performance in addition to fixing known bugs?

Yes and no.  The main concentration is to get the games that do not work to.  There are folks who are working on performance, but at no time will Linux/Wine ever work at the same level as Windows in the DirectX arena.   Some game producers did include opengl code and thus their games work as well on Linux/Wine as they do in Windows, sometimes even better than their DirectX versions.

Which game(s) are you experiencing low frame rates and what type of Video card are you using?  If you are using an Intel type card, this is strictly a Windows device and Intel has no interest in creating great Linux video drivers.  AMD/ATI are working on their drivers and nVidia has the best of the three.

James McKenzie