I haven't tried Wine for a couple years and wanted to get an idea what is the state of gaming in Wine. My only real question is if there is any hope of practical gaming under Wine. I have done some gaming with Wine and even with the semi-commercial Cedega with mediocre results at best. Games 4-5 years old seem to work ok but most modern games would have unplayable performance. I know there are a lot of tricks that can be used to improve performance, but when a game runs at 10 FPS in Wine out of the box compared to 50+ in Windows, I am not even going to bother to try to fix it. Has anybody done "real" benchmarks on a documented hardware setup? What kind of performance (out of the box vs. customized) can be expected? Is there any quantitative and reproducible evidence that good performance for current games can be achieved?
Games work fairly well with Wine, they'll work better or worse on a case-by-case basis. http://wiki.winehq.org/GameChecklist should give you a good approximation on how well popular games ranging from 1999 to now work with Wine.
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:13 AM, fsleeman <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:> I haven't tried Wine for a couple years and wanted to get an idea what is the state of gaming in Wine. My only real question is if there is any hope of practical gaming under Wine. I have done some gaming with Wine and even with the semi-commercial Cedega with mediocre results at best. Games 4-5 years old seem to work ok but most modern games would have unplayable performance. > > I know there are a lot of tricks that can be used to improve performance, but when a game runs at 10 FPS in Wine out of the box compared to 50+ in Windows, I am not even going to bother to try to fix it. Has anybody done "real" benchmarks on a documented hardware setup? What kind of performance (out of the box vs. customized) can be expected? Is there any quantitative and reproducible evidence that good performance for current games can be achieved? > >Yes, but on a case by case basis. The general rule of thumb right now is 80-100% Windows FPS, if, and only if, it works. I have started writing a games watch section for WWN which you will see from the next release going forward. This will give you an idea of the state of gaming in general and Wines support for newer games. And, now that Wine supports Steam as-native games support will only improve with increased popularity. I play a lot of games in my spare time and I consider Linux to be a perfectly viable platform with a mixture of native and Win32 games. I wouldn't bother trying to play games if I had an older system but I would consider a dual core CPU with a recent nVidia graphics card with the latest drivers to be viable. I personally have an e6600 Intel (2x2.4ghz) with an 8600gt and 4gb ram so most gamers will have a better experience than me. I play the following and consider them to be completely playable. Some big titles Wine already supports for this year: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 Star Trek Online Star Craft 2 Dragon Age Origins (11/09) Other games on my regular play list: EVE Online Guild Wars World of Warcraft Team Fortress 2 Titan Quest: Immortal Throne Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor CS1.6/L4D/DOD(&2) DoW Dark Crusade I also play a lot of Heroes of Newerth which is a fantastic cross platform game with a native actively-developed Linux client.
Thanks for the updates. Maybe I will try Wine on Ubuntu 10.04 and see how it goes. Will this new documentation system show up for 1.1.45? Is there any performance information I can post that will help getting things working better? I would be interested in helping from the software end but I just don't think I would have time to get plugged in.
>Where in Wine is this bottleneck?I'll give you an off-hand answer: Windows uses DirectX and other Dircect processes to work video. Most other Operating Systems use opengl. The conversion process from one to the other is complex and uses a lot of time. Thus the number of frames is going to be less, in some cases very noticable.>For me, performance is the main reason I cannot play games in Linux.This is very true. However, there are games that will NOT run, at all at the present time. That is where a majority of effort is being focused.>There are a lot of ways you can make a game run, but if you are getting a 50% drop in FPS's it makes most games unplayable, >even on a decent machine.Let's see: Most game creators love an FPS of 60+ but find an FPS of 30 or more acceptable for play. Now, if you are getting an FPS of 15, that is poor.>Is there a concentrated effort to improve performance in addition to fixing known bugs?Yes and no. The main concentration is to get the games that do not work to. There are folks who are working on performance, but at no time will Linux/Wine ever work at the same level as Windows in the DirectX arena. Some game producers did include opengl code and thus their games work as well on Linux/Wine as they do in Windows, sometimes even better than their DirectX versions. Which game(s) are you experiencing low frame rates and what type of Video card are you using? If you are using an Intel type card, this is strictly a Windows device and Intel has no interest in creating great Linux video drivers. AMD/ATI are working on their drivers and nVidia has the best of the three. James McKenzie