[Wine] Starcraft and Diablo II use a lot of CPU power

[Jochen]

belegdol schrieb:
> Hello,
> 
> I am running Wine 1.0 under Fedora 9 x86_64. The problem is that the
> two mentioned games use a lot of CPU power about 50 % on a 2 Ghz Core
> 2 Duo. At first I thought this is caused by GDI DirectDraw renderer,
> but changing to opengl did not help. Also, it is just the same when
> you configure Diablo to use Direct3D renderer. Does anybody has any
> idea where can I look for the source of this problem? Warming up the
> CPU just for fun isn't that cool after all ;) Cheers.

Many older games that are programmed for Windows and DOS use busy-wait 
polling for the input devices, such as the mouse. busy-wait polling 
means that the program will do nothing, but ask the input ports for new 
data. This kind of polling causes a CPU usage of 100% (single core, 50% 
dual core, 25% quad core). It does not matter how fast the CPU is, the 
program will consume it all. I am pretty sure if you would run these 
games on windows, the task manager would report the same. Many old DOS 
games behave this way, but usually in emulators like dosbox you can 
reduce the cpu cycles the emulator can use. That will then reduce the 
CPU load. But of course WINE is not an emulator ;) I am pretty sure 
there are tools for managing the maximum CPU load a program is allowed 
to take, but I have seen something like that only for big Sun machines 
so far. I doubt you are trying to play Starcraft on a T1000 ;)

So in short: it is no wine problem, but a design decision of the makers 
of the program at times where one application at the same time was all 
you could possibly get and where CPU where mostly cooled without an 
active fan.

bye Jochen