wine users - Jul 2008 - Starcraft and Diablo II use a lot of CPU power

Hello,

I am running Wine 1.0 under Fedora 9 x86_64. The problem is that the two
mentioned games use a lot of CPU power about 50 % on a 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo. At
first I thought this is caused by GDI DirectDraw renderer, but changing to
opengl did not help. Also, it is just the same when you configure Diablo to use
Direct3D renderer. Does anybody has any idea where can I look for the source of
this problem? Warming up the CPU just for fun isn't that cool after all ;)
Cheers.

belegdol schrieb:
> Hello,
> 
> I am running Wine 1.0 under Fedora 9 x86_64. The problem is that the
> two mentioned games use a lot of CPU power about 50 % on a 2 Ghz Core
> 2 Duo. At first I thought this is caused by GDI DirectDraw renderer,
> but changing to opengl did not help. Also, it is just the same when
> you configure Diablo to use Direct3D renderer. Does anybody has any
> idea where can I look for the source of this problem? Warming up the
> CPU just for fun isn't that cool after all ;) Cheers.
Many older games that are programmed for Windows and DOS use busy-wait 
polling for the input devices, such as the mouse. busy-wait polling 
means that the program will do nothing, but ask the input ports for new 
data. This kind of polling causes a CPU usage of 100% (single core, 50% 
dual core, 25% quad core). It does not matter how fast the CPU is, the 
program will consume it all. I am pretty sure if you would run these 
games on windows, the task manager would report the same. Many old DOS 
games behave this way, but usually in emulators like dosbox you can 
reduce the cpu cycles the emulator can use. That will then reduce the 
CPU load. But of course WINE is not an emulator ;) I am pretty sure 
there are tools for managing the maximum CPU load a program is allowed 
to take, but I have seen something like that only for big Sun machines 
so far. I doubt you are trying to play Starcraft on a T1000 ;)

So in short: it is no wine problem, but a design decision of the makers 
of the program at times where one application at the same time was all 
you could possibly get and where CPU where mostly cooled without an 
active fan.

bye Jochen

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 5:26 PM, belegdol <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am running Wine 1.0 under Fedora 9 x86_64. The problem is that the two
mentioned games use a lot of CPU power about 50 % on a 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo. At
first I thought this is caused by GDI DirectDraw renderer, but changing to
opengl did not help. Also, it is just the same when you configure Diablo to use
Direct3D renderer. Does anybody has any idea where can I look for the source of
this problem? Warming up the CPU just for fun isn't that cool after all ;)
Cheers.
>
Run starcraft in its own X session at 640x480 and 8 bit color and you
will get better performance.

John

I can try that, but I thought using opengl ddraw renderer was supposed to solve
problems with different colour depths, wasn't it? At least that's what
the wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw) says.

John Drescher wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 7:01 PM, belegdol <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> 
> > I can try that, but I thought using opengl ddraw renderer was supposed
to solve problems with different colour depths, wasn't it? At least
that's what the wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw) says.
> > 
> > 
> I think this depends on you graphics card. If you have intel graphics
> or an older Radeon card and some Geforce cards you will not have the
> acceleration necessary so the conversion will be done by the CPU.
> 
> John
For reference, I have a GeForce Go 7600 here. I will try separate X and see if
it helps.

>> I think this depends on you graphics card. If you have intel graphics
>> or an older Radeon card and some Geforce cards you will not have the
>> acceleration necessary so the conversion will be done by the CPU.
>>
>> John
>
> For reference, I have a GeForce Go 7600 here. I will try separate X and see
if it helps.
>
That should be new enough. I am not sure why that does not work.

John

> Many older games that are programmed for Windows and DOS use
> busy-wait polling for the input devices, such as the mouse ...
> it is no wine problem, but a design decision of the makers 
> of the program ...
Granted it is primarily caused by the program, but I think Wine
*could* do something to reduce the impact:  before returning
"no input available" from one of these polling (non-blocking)
APIs, sleep for, say, 1/10 of a second.