wine users - Aug 2008 - ATI (rv350) + open-source driver + wine gaming issues

Hello everyone. I seem to have a bit of a problem running some 3D accelerated
games under wine, while using the open-source ATI Radeon driver. My graphics
card is Radeon 9700, and the open-source drivers overall work much better than
the proprietary fglrx.

The fglrx driver allows me (in most cases) to run games like Temple of Elemental
Evil (particularily) or Morrowind normally, but I can't use it for everyday
work because of it's constant issues which get fixed and then re-appear from
version to version.

The problem with ATI open-source driver is that no Direct3D stuff is
accelerated. For instance, the Temple of Elemental Evil runs fine with fglrx,
but with open-source driver even the main menu is unplayably slow (say, 1-2 FPS
at it's best).

My xorg.conf section for the open-source driver looks like this:


Code:
Section "Device"
	Identifier  "** ATI Radeon (generic)               [radeon]"
	Driver		"radeon"
	VideoRam	65536
#	Option		"RenderAccel" "on"
	Option		"AGPMode" "4"
	Option		"ColorTiling" "on"
	Option		"AccelMethod" "XXA"
	Option		"EnablePageFlip" "on"
	Option		"AGPFastWrite" "False"
	Option		"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
	Option		"BackingStore" "True"
	Option		"DynamicClocks" "on"
EndSection



glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800 FPS
(with fglrx they never show over 2950 FPS, so I guess the driver should be ok,
and the acceleration should work fine).

Can anyone help me get something more decent out of Wine?
Many thanks!

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Wintershade <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> Hello everyone. I seem to have a bit of a problem running some 3D
accelerated games under wine, while using the open-source ATI Radeon driver. My
graphics card is Radeon 9700, and the open-source drivers overall work much
better than the proprietary fglrx.
>
> The fglrx driver allows me (in most cases) to run games like Temple of
Elemental Evil (particularily) or Morrowind normally, but I can't use it for
everyday work because of it's constant issues which get fixed and then
re-appear from version to version.
>
> The problem with ATI open-source driver is that no Direct3D stuff is
accelerated. For instance, the Temple of Elemental Evil runs fine with fglrx,
but with open-source driver even the main menu is unplayably slow (say, 1-2 FPS
at it's best).
>
> My xorg.conf section for the open-source driver looks like this:
>
>
> Code:
> Section "Device"
>        Identifier  "** ATI Radeon (generic)              
[radeon]"
>        Driver          "radeon"
I thought the radeon driver supports 3D only to the R200 series and
that the r300 driver is needed for the R300 - R500 cards.. (And
RadeonHD for >= R500) (I see you report that direct rendering shows OK
though...)

The open source Radeon drivers seem to be relatively undocumented,
with almost every source saying something else...

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R300_Portal
>        VideoRam        65536
> #       Option          "RenderAccel" "on"
>        Option          "AGPMode" "4"
>        Option          "ColorTiling" "on"
>        Option          "AccelMethod" "XXA"
>        Option          "EnablePageFlip" "on"
>        Option          "AGPFastWrite" "False"
>        Option          "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
>        Option          "BackingStore" "True"
>        Option          "DynamicClocks" "on"
> EndSection
>
>
>
> glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800
FPS (with fglrx they never show over 2950 FPS, so I guess the driver should be
ok, and the acceleration should work fine).
>
> Can anyone help me get something more decent out of Wine?
> Many thanks!
>

Wintershade wrote:
> glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800
FPS

This is like saying that PC beeped when you turned it on, then it must be
working.

OpenGL is a very complicated thing with 100s of different extensions and
features. ATI open source driver does not provide enough extensions for Wine to
support wide range of D3D features. So things like glxgears - will work. But
things like V2.x shaders, FBOs, pbuffers don't.

Is there a way to get them to work?

(apart from installing fglrx, or getting an nVidia/Intel graphics card?)

Wintershade wrote:
> Is there a way to get them to work?
> Or any workaround?
> 
> (apart from installing fglrx, or getting an nVidia/Intel graphics card?)

Yeah - start codding. That is why they are open source - so anyone can
participate.

In some games I saw an option to use opengl instead of directx output.

It is also worth trying "AccelMethod" "EXA" (this is the
method which is
better supported with the open-source driver) and removing options like
"BackingStore" "DynamicClocks" "VideoRam" and in
that case
"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" of course.
The defaults are usually fine. I have none of these set - just the driver
and AccelMethod.

But then again - I don't have the games you have...

Look through the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log for warnings and such...

There is a link for it

http://www.wineclubdirectory.net  Wine Club  


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Sent from the Wine - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Daniel Kasak wrote:
> they *have* started paying developers to work on the
> open-source drivers ( as Intel are )

...hence the sudden increase in performance in the last month :D

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Wintershade <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> Oh. I see.
>
> Any chance that the ATI/AMD driver will become completely open-source, as
it was announced some time ago? (not sure whether it was officially, though)
>
AMD released the specs needed to develop an open source driver. It is
being used for the radeonhd driver.

The man page: (for an unknown version) http://linux.die.net/man/4/radeonhd

Official page: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

The gentoo wiki has some potentially useful info: (even for other distros)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_ATi_Open-Source_Drivers (this is
probably more relevant for the RV350... Although it seem that your
distro has the r300 driver compiled in if direct rendering seem ok...)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/RadeonHD
> ...hence the sudden increase in performance in the last month :D
I think that AMD/ATI is mostly supporting (at least providing
documentation for) the radeonhd driver...

The documentation for the R3xx series is relatively limited:
http://developer.amd.com/documentation/guides/Pages/default.aspx#open_gpu

(I see anyone it up in the time between me writing the reply and
actually sending it...)

Gert