[Wine] L4D crashes reaching in-game, d3d_shader bug maybe?

[Austin English]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:27 PM, English_Mohican
<wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> I have also run Wine on fglrx drivers and seen your error message before. It was some time ago and my memory is struggling but I think the game managed to carry on despite that. It crashed later though.
>
> I cannot check that now because I have changed to the radeon driver as ATI are now supporting that development for machines as old as mine!.
>
> When investigating the crash, I concluded that Wine did not correctly translate the version number of the fglrx driver. I think the idea was to convert the ATI Linux driver version string to something more like a Windows driver version string, but (I suspect) ATI had changed the Linux version format themselves and Wine no longer parsed it correctly. Therefore, the string it passed to the game (if the game asked) was gibberish. That could confuse the game properly. This was a few versions ago and may have been fixed, it may not be important, but it was a wine problem, not an ATI one.
>
> Austin will say I should have raised a bug report but I did not reach the level of confidence in my work to do so.

Of course ;-). Bugs can't be fixed if they aren't known.

> So why raise it now - mostly because I get annoyed by some wine enthusiasts hatred of everything ATI. I am not associated with ATI (except by owning an ATI card) but I think this idea that ATI is wrong and Wine is right is mostly pure bias - perhaps based on long gone history.

It's not that we hate ATI. It's that there are plenty of bugs in
applications on Wine that ATI hasn't fixed, but work fine in
Nvidia/Intel. Stefand put a lot of work into making testcases, and
filed bugs with ATI about them, but they are reluctant to fix them
unless they affect 'a large number of popular applications'.

> Please do not be put off; ATI cards can work quite nicely, as can Wine. Try the open source drivers - they are getting pretty good, try digging around in Wine - you may do better than I did and find your solution and be confident enough to raise that bug report.

The open source drivers are getting better, sure. But 3d support still
isn't too great, and most users don't want something that will work in
a few years, they want what works now, which is Nvidia.

It's not the best choice, and coming from a student of economics, not
the most optimal market solution, but it's the one that Linux users
currently are stuck with. Of course, you're free to make up your own
mind, but having seen many users/reports/test results, I can say that
Nvidia is currently the best choice for Windows games under Wine.

-- 
-Austin