[Wine] Re: Squeezing every last drop of performance out of DirectX

[gamblor01]

So I finally figured out how to register for this forum -- this is MUCH easier than using the mailing list!

I really appreciate everyone's help.  I didn't read this most recent post until now (thank you though.  The explanations were good), but I went ahead and blasted my wine environment this morning per dsent's suggestion.  As stated previously, I just did the apt-get autoremove wine, rm -rf ~/.wine, and then cleaned out the wine entries in ~/.local/share and ~/.config

I then reinstalled Wine 1.1.20 (apt-get install wine), and then reinstalled the Orange Box and applied ONLY the following changes:

1) passing -dxlevel and -heapsize to Steam
2) using WINDEBUG=-all
3) switching from Compiz to Metacity

The difference is astounding.  I'm operating normally on maps in the 50-60 FPS range, though it does occasionally drop to about 20 something.  I even saw it hit 200+ at one point.

It still does occasionally have the problem where it drops to single digit frame rates, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often.  I added the Direct3D registy key back and performance noticeably worsened.  I had all of the 7 or 8 different values in there so I'm not sure which one (or combination) specifically is making it worse, but it's running so well at this point I don't think I need to do any further investigation.  The only key I might consider adding back is the VideoMemorySize key.  I'll see if that helps I guess, but I don't feel like I want/need to try all combinations of them at this point.

Thank you all for your suggestions -- this really helped!  I thought I had noticed a considering performance hit since I first installed Steam but then I thought I was just being paranoid.  It turns out I was not; the more I tried to tweak the game the more I was actually slowing it down.

I don't plan on installing DX 9.0c this time either.  ;)

One last little tip, I stuck the following line in my ~/.gnomerc file:


> 
> fusion-icon &
> 


This way, whenever I login to gnome the icon is launched automatically for me.  :)

Thanks again!