wine users - May 2009 - Buying a graphics card for Wine: ATI vs nVidia

Hi all,

I'm planning to upgrade my graphics card soon (I currently have a
onboard Intel X3100)

I'm using Wine to play games under Linux. (I'm currently running x64
Ubuntu, I'm considering switching to sidux / debian testing / gentoo)
I currently play Warcraft III: Frozen Throne, Trackmania: Nations, Red
Alert II (which is really slow) and want to play Generals (too slow to
be playable on the Intel card) and maybe Red Alert 3. (I would also be
upgrading to enough RAM (8GB) to run OpenGL applications under
VirtualBox if neccesary)

I know that nVidia cards are working quite well with Wine. Do thay
experience many problems? (I saw quite a few issues caused be certain
driver version being discussed on the list recently)

How well is ATI cards working for older games? I know that the first
response here seem to be "get a nVidia", but that seem to be the
general response for Intel cards as well, which is working fine,
although really slow for me.

I would prefer to buy ATI to reward them for releasing the specs
needed for open-source drivers (And, under Windows, a few cards seem
to be really good value), but only if their cards are at least usable.
(I would probably be using fglrx and not the open-source drivers...) I
know that their drivers are not as good as nVidia's, but are they
actually usable for most things? If you have an ATI card, ehich card
do you have and what works / does not work on it?

Another question: How much of Wine's better support for nVidia cards
are caused by using vendor-specific OpenGL extensions and how much by
nVidia's better drivers?

Gert

PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's performance
issues?

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gert van den Berg <wine-users at
mohag.net> wrote:
> I know that nVidia cards are working quite well with Wine. Do thay
> experience many problems? (I saw quite a few issues caused be certain
> driver version being discussed on the list recently)
There's always problems compared to windows. But nvidia is much better.
> How well is ATI cards working for older games? I know that the first
> response here seem to be "get a nVidia", but that seem to be the
> general response for Intel cards as well, which is working fine,
> although really slow for me.
Get an nvidia :-).

ATI may work for older stuff, but the drivers are crap.
> I would prefer to buy ATI to reward them for releasing the specs
> needed for open-source drivers (And, under Windows, a few cards seem
> to be really good value), but only if their cards are at least usable.
> (I would probably be using fglrx and not the open-source drivers...) I
> know that their drivers are not as good as nVidia's, but are they
> actually usable for most things? If you have an ATI card, ehich card
> do you have and what works / does not work on it?
While I agree with wanting to show support for ATI for releasing the
specs, you've got another decision to make. Do you want results now,
or in a few years when the drivers may or may not have caught up?
> PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's
performance issues?
If it's using DIB's, probably. Try it and see.

-- 
-Austin

For Red Alert the DIB engine is not a solution. The game can be very fast using
opengl and that's the way to go. There are several things which are holding
it back for both gdi and opengl rendering.

One of the main issues is that Red Alert uses 'LockRect / UnlockRect'.
Using these calls a game can directly access video memory. What happens in Wine
is that for each change (even when it is just a minor one) we refresh the whole
frame. We need to track what areas have really changed (that's what is
happening on Windows too) but it is very tricky as you would need to trigger
'segmentation faults' for this.

In case of opengl one extra limitation is that the game is multithreaded and
that means we have to switch opengl contexts dozens of times a second which is
very expensive.