wine users - Apr 2010 - Poor wine performance

Hello,

I wanted to give wine a test (never used it before), so I went forth and
installed it on my - humble but not too lousy system:

CPU: Intel Pentium M 1.80GHz
Memory: 512MB
Graphics controller: ATI RV350 (Mobility Radeon 9600 M10)

While I had Windows 2000 on it, I was able to run the good old HalfLife2 pretty
nice, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This site
(http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=HOWTO%20Steam) gave
me confidence that it's at least possible.

What I experience, however, is quite depressing. I managed to install and run
Steam, but the preformance is apalling. Even though I finally was able to go and
start installing the app (will take some time to download), the Steam crashed
shortly after that and any subsequent attempts to launch it again result in
terrible system performance (ie, browsing the web on Firefox at the same time is
almost impossible), very active use of HDD, and even after hours of intensive
HDD digging and system resource hogging there is no visible result - the wine
apparently has aborted.

I'd be happy to hear how should I diagnose the problem. Or, maybe my system
is just too poor to run HL2 over wine in Linux. Maybe there is some problem in
some settings?

In Wine we emulate Direct3D using OpenGL. This emulation is not that bad (70% or
more of Windows performance) as long as the OpenGL drivers are good.
Unfortunately most open source drivers aren't that fast which limits
performance. Make sure you are using recent DRI drivers.