http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcwieeBEySc My performance doesn't even come close to this even at low resolution and overclocked, and I have the 512Mb version of this card, this guy has the 256mb version and I have the same settings, i've seen people run some really high-end games on this like crysis at decent settings, (not high just decent). Does wine actually bottleneck performance on modern games? I have native windows directx9 installed, does this reduce performance or the other way round?. Also, I plan to test it out in windows to see if I get any better performance, if I run XP in virtual box would I be able to run games? I don't particularly feel like formatting just to test something.
Wine always uses its own Direct3D dlls. Native d3d8, d3d9 friends don't work the only thing the directx installer adds (and which we can use) are d3dx9_*.dll which are helper dlls and which under the hood just call d3d9.dll which is the wine dll. We translate direct3d to opengl, there are some inefficiencies in that. Depending on the opengl driver not all operations can be translated due to lack of opengl driver features. Further not all Linux opengl drivers are of the same quality as the Windows ones which also limited performance. In the best cases on Nvidia hardware we can achieve 80% of the windows performance (hl2 on a geforce7 compared to vista). In various d3d9 games it can be quite a bit less due to the issues I mentioned above. Opengl apps should perform the same between Windows and Linux if the drivers perform the same.