wine users - May 2009 - City of Heroes / wine not identifying NVIDIA video card

I've been using wine for some time now to play City of Heroes and overall
I've been very satisfied.  One issue that has always bothered me is that COH
gives a warning about outdated video card drivers even with the most recent
drivers from NVIDIA installed.  This limits the settings that can be chosen in
the video options.  I also suspect it's not making the most efficient use of
my video card.  Here's my setup:

Hardware:
Intel Core2 Quad 6600 processor
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT / 512 MB RAM

Software:
Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty" (Linux kernel 2.6.28-11-generic)
NVIDIA 180.51 driver
Wine 1.1.21
winetricks used to install corefonts, directx9, gecko

Registry settings:
HKCU\software\wine\Direct3D\VideoPciDeviceID: 0x0421
HKCU\software\wine\Direct3D\VideoPciVendorID: 0x10de
HKCU\software\wine\OpenGL\DisabledExtensions: ""

I ran City of Heroes from the command line and wrote the standard output and
error to separate files.  The output has some very interesting lines:


Code:

Running City of Heroes
Preloading DLLs...done.                                               (0.00)
SVN Revision: 52770
CityOfHeroes client count: 1
num cpus = 4 / 4
Loading message stores...done.                                        (1.24)
Disabling multi-threaded rendering because ATI drivers are older than 6.6
project coh
Driver is old because NVIDIA version < 5216
CPU: 1600 Mhz / Memory: 2012 MBs / Video Card: Unknown / Driver Version:
UnknownVendor / Available Memory: 1403 MBs / OS Version: 5.1.2600 / Video
Memory: Unknown
Render settings: VBOS 1
Render path: NV1X NV2X ARBVP 
Render features: BUMPMAPS* BUMPMAPS_WORLD* 
OUTDATED VIDEO CARD DRIVER




The first thing that stands out is the line about multi-threaded rendering.  I
don't have an ATI video card, so why is it looking for a driver version?  I
would love to be able to make full use of my quad core CPU by using multiple
threads, but I'm not going to get an ATI card just for that.

The second thing is that it says the NVIDIA version is < 5216.  Does anyone
know what it's looking at there to get that value?

Next is the "Video Card: Unknown", "Driver Version:
UnknownVendor", and "Video Memory: Unknown".  Why isn't it
getting this information?  I've explicitly defined the vendor and device in
the registry to no avail.

I'm pretty much out of ideas at this point.  I used WINEDEBUG=+opengl,+wgl
and got a lot of trace output but nothing obvious related to this issue.  (Only
one warning:  warn:wgl:X11DRV_wglSwapIntervalEXT (): GLX_SGI_swap_control
extension seems not supported.)  Anyone have any suggestions on what else I
might try to get this figured out?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

The m$ version numbering is hardcoded into wine ... nv 7.15.11.8044.