wine users - Apr 2009 - Squeezing every last drop of performance out of DirectX

Hi Folks,

I have been using Wine for some time now to run Team Fortress 2 (and other HL2
based games) on my Ubuntu system.  I was previously running Ubuntu 7.10 with an
Athlon64 3800+, a 7600GT (256MB of RAM), and 2GB of DDR2 333MHz.  Recently I
upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (i386) with an AthlonX2 64 6000+, an 8800GT (1GB of RAM)
and 4GB of DDR 800MHz.  I was really hoping for a nice performance bump
(especially when I installed Wine 1.1.20 today) but unfortunately I really
don't notice it.  Windows of course runs TF2 without issue (it's like
glass) but it's still choppy on Linux.  I'm using the latest proprietary
nvidia drivers as well.

I have found that passing the following options to TF2 definitely makes it run
MUCH better (Steam-related options):

-heapsize 1048576 -dxlevel 81


Actually, to be precise, I'm running in windowed mode at like 1100 something
by 940 (I think)?  My monitor support 1280x1024 but I'm basically running at
the largest I can such that it stays within the desktop without being overlapped
by the top or bottom menu bars in gnome.  So the options are something like:

-novid -windowed -w 1175 -h 940 -heapsize 1048576 -dxlevel 81

I am also using WINEDEBUG=-all when I launch Steam to suppress all debug
messages.

I'm trying to find ways to make this run even smoother in Linux.  I know
there are some changes I can make to the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D key.  I tried setting UseGLSL=disabled
but it screwed up some of the textures that made it slightly more difficult to
play.  I have also properly set my videoMemorySize to 1024.  I think I have
tried the offscreenRendering option as well (set to fbo or not) but it
didn't seem to help.

Overall the game runs fairly well.  I get around 30 FPS for the most part in
open areas (100+ FPS in small, confined areas), but every couple minutes it
drops to less than 5 FPS (sometimes even 1 FPS).  It will stay that way for
about 4 or 5 seconds and then corrects itself.  I thought that perhaps my CPU or
was being pegged or the RAM was running out (doubtful with 4GB of RAM now) but
that doesn't seem to be the case.  I installed conky and I was monitoring my
resources while running the game.  The first CPU core was steady at 53% and the
second core was steady at 12%.  I was only using about 1.3 GB of RAM total
(Steam and all other system resources).  Using the UseGLSL=disabled option I
didn't seem to notice this periodic drop to low FPS but like I said, some of
the textures aren't quite acceptable for me.

Is there anything else that I can do to get better performance out of this?  I
have installed DirectX 9.0c (Nov2008 release) and it works with TF2 but the
performance just isn't there (around 10FPS steady).  Using the dxlevel 81
option performance is pretty good, but would I benefit by setting some of the
DLLs to native?  Several of the DLLs are already set to native, some are set to
builtin but I think they mostly relate to DirectX 9.0c.  Here are the
instructions I used to install DX 9.0c:

http://howto.landure.fr/gnu-linux/install-directx-9-0c-on-linux-using-wine


Are there any other suggestions on how to get this faster via wine?  Some of the
things I'm wondering:

1) Are there any further tweaks I can make to the Direct3D registry key?
2) Are there any DLLs I should be tweaking and setting to native, for example? 
I do have a Windows partition that I can copy DLLs from.
3) Is running HL2 in windowed mode going to make things worse?  It doesn't
seem like it but I wouldn't be opposed to running in full screen mode
(1280x1024).  I haven't noticed any significant difference yet between full
screen and windowed.
4) Any other suggestions?

If anyone knows any way to make this better please help.  I have been a Linux
user for years and the only reason I even keep a WinXP partition around is to
run games.  Otherwise I'm booting into one of my other partitions (Ubuntu,
Fedora, or Slackware -- mostly Ubuntu).

In case there is nothing else I can do to improve things oh well -- Wine is
still amazing these days.  I'm really impressed and happy with it.

Thanks!

-Brandon


			
		
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> 
> I have found that passing the following options to TF2 definitely makes it
run MUCH better (Steam-related options):
> 
> -heapsize 1048576 -dxlevel 81

With 4 gigs ,actually 2 gigs since you're running a 32-bit program, you
could safely leave datacachesize/heapsize values to default which is what 521000
or 256000.(?)

> 
> Actually, to be precise, I'm running in windowed mode at like 1100
something by 940 (I think)?

Make sure you have the WM set to Metacity(no effects) not Compiz. So basically
it's fullscreen wthout going fullscreen? ??
> 
> I have also properly set my videoMemorySize to 1024.  I think I have tried
the offscreenRendering option as well (set to fbo or not) but it didn't seem
to help.

ORM should be set to fbo to take advantage of the newest drivers(180.44+)
drivers and your hardware. The RegistryWiki -
http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys has all the fun Direct3D settings
info.
> 
> Overall the game runs fairly well.  I get around 30 FPS for the most part
in open areas (100+ FPS in small, confined areas), but every couple minutes it
drops to less than 5 FPS (sometimes even 1 FPS).

network congestion(?) or related to running with such a low heapsize probably.
> 
> I have installed DirectX 9.0c

I don't believe this is really necessary anymore. It seems to cause more
problems than it's worth. In any case, you already have WineD3D(X) installed
from a base wine install. At most you'd have to download(dll-files.com) the
d3dx9_36.dll to d3dx9_40.dlls / Xaudio stuff to the windows/system32 directory
depending on how much the app complains.

Tweakguides
http://www.tweakguides.com/HL2_5.html
applies to most source engine games 
----------------------------
i heart quoting

Im running TF2 with 100-200 fps on DX Level 81, Directx9+ games are still pretty
choppy on wine and so TF2 plays much slower on dxlevel 95,
I suggest enabling multi-threading in TF2, if you have dual-core or quad core

Brandon Mayes wrote:
> 
> > I think you really should get a clean wine 1.1.20 prefix and reinstall
> > 
> TF there without installing DirectX
> 
> > (or anything else). Then try playing the game without applying all
your registry tweaks (with
> > 
> -dxlevel 81).
> 
> > Then try applying those tweaks and see if it helps.
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> > Installing DirectX on Wine may create a little mess in your prefix,
I'm afraid.
> > 
> 
> 
> So if I were to do this -- what all is necessary?  Can I just run these 2
commands (I'm running Ubuntu 8.10)?
> 
> # sudo apt-get autoremove wine
> # rm -rf ~/.wine
> 
> I know there are going to be some menu entries left around in the gnome
applications menu as well.  I can remove those (usually just deleting stuff from
~/.local/share).
> 
> I guess I just don't know what you mean by prefix (I'm assuming you
mean ~/.wine), nor do I really know why installing DirectX 9.0c would muck
things up...Do you really think that installing DX9 is going to actually make
performance worse?
> 
> FYI, for anyone following this I did copy over the d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll
files from my Windows partition and set the libraries to native.  First, the
native d3d9.dll caused TF2 to crash as soon as I clicked to launch it (though
Steam seemed to work fine), and while the native d3d8.dll file doesn't seem
to cause any problems, it doesn't seem to perform any better than the
builtin file.
> 
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Yes, that's all you need, to remove wine (if you want to install another
version) and remove its folder, be sure to backup anything though. Also,
remember that all your wine configuration will be lost. The prefix means exactly
what you figured -- the user folder. You can have multiple prefixes in wine, by
running wine with the WINEPREFIXCREATE env var (someone correct me if wrong,
please), and then using that prefix with WINEPREFIX.

Installing DX9 might get some DLLs which use unimplemented functions, or expect
certain functions to behave in a way, while wine does not exhibit that behavior.
It's always good to try and keep things to the wine implementation, which
knows exactly what to expect from its code. Additionally, some Wine functions
that the native DX use could possibly be implemented in a low-performance way,
while Wine's implementation uses others -- just to throw in some random
coins at the issue.

I think you should never even do what you did with those DLLs, since it
definetely will not work. I'm even surprised that you managed to run the
game at all in dx8, I suppose that either wine used its builtin DLL or something
very strange happened there.

Its windows nVidia driver, i have copied it just in case to system32 :)
There was hack to make old HL1 engine games work faster by replacing the HL
engine driver dll with this nv4_disp.dll or some ati Dll.