[Wine] ATI/AMD GPU + Ubuntu + Wine + EVE Online = I need help...

[wheunis]

Hey all.

It's been a long while for me and linux-gaming. Having somewhat followed the wine progress made over the last 20 years, I must say I am quite impressed.

So I decided to make a pet project.
I want to play EVE Online on Linux. I used to play WoW, but have "upgraded" since, hehe...

So.

AMD XII Quad Core 955 BE.
4GB RAM
ATI/AMD HD6970 (2GB) - Latest ATI Catalyst installed
Ubuntu Natty 10.04 - Kernel 2.6.38-11-generic
Wine 1.3.28

Notes: With source-build Wine, nothing works. With pre-packaged Wine, direct from PPA (I assume its 32bit variant) things work.
I have played with WINEARCH - 32 the game crashes at splash screen. 64 things work as described below. This applies to source and packaged.


For the most part, everything works. But only barely.
Under Windows, EVE runs at 140+ FPS, churning a hard 60-85% CPU usage across all cores. (She's quite a CPU hog, sheesh!)

On Linux, under Wine though, EVE can't break 25FPS, and barely ever touches in at 25% MAX across all cores.

Now here is what I am having trouble identifying. I am aware that ATI/AMD's drivers are not all that, but I'm not too sure this is indeed the problem. How come the CPU usage is so low under Wine?
Within EVE, the monitor indicates 100% CPU usage at all times. Checking resource monitor in Linux at the same time though, indicates a max of 25% on any one or sometimes all cores. I'm guessing that has something to do with virtualization of some sort?

If it's not the CPU, then how can I jack the fps higher? It really isn't playable like this, as it PEAKS at 25FPS. Most of the time it hovers around 10FPS.

I have tried going to open source drivers for my card, but then Ubuntu/Xorg won't even detect my resolutions correctly at all...

The other weird thing is that EVE under Wine detects my GPU as an HD3200 in settings (inside EVE). What gives?

All these things are quite troubling and I've been so out of touch with Linux for so long, that I'm not sure where to even start...

While I fully realize that I wont get the same FPS under Wine as with Windows, I really do want 60FPS+ to mark this project as a success for myself (and thus start the full migration of Linux into all systems in my home).
Any helps and suggestions to try and get this playable would be highly appreciated.