[Wine] Re: Slow performance with many 3D games

[vitamin]

mrspoon wrote:
> 
> vitamin wrote:
> > 
> > Wine will always have bigger overhead in CPU just because it has to "convert" all the d3d into OpenGL. Which requires lots of extra operations such as state tracking that are not present on windows.
> 
> 
> That may be so, but we should still do some research to work out which parts of the Wine D3D code give the most overhead, in case there's some fat we can trim off.

That's fine if you have a car and you trying to make it go faster.

Wine's d3d is a big pile of parts on 8-wheels that are being rearranging daily. Optimizing something like that will give you performance for today. And tomorrow it will be all scrapped because it's hard to work on optimized code.

The big performance hits you really see in some games (which used to work fine a day before) usually caused by:
1. Added new support of something that wasn't available to games before. This usually exposes major differences between d3d and OpenGL and requires extra workarounds. Some of such problems still don't have a workaround.
2. Changes that trigger slow/software path in drivers or games themselves

Don't forget that most(all) d3d games are optimized for each particular card. Most of that optimization goes out the window because same card on windows and Linux has different capabilities thanks to differences in drivers and/or conceptual differences between d3d and OpenGL.

Same goes for driver optimizations. It's not a secret that both nVidia and ATi optimize their drivers for most popular games & 3D software. Sometimes this increases performance by as much as 30%-50%!!! Of course such optimizations are not present in Linux drivers.