wine users - Mar 2012 - Extremely bad performance in games

Hello everybody,
the problem is that I have awful performance in games.
CPU: Intel Core2 Quad 2.66 GHz (q9400)
Memory: 4 GB DDR2 800 MHz
Video: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1024 MB
OS: Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64
Wine: 1.4-rc6
The video driver is proprietary, the latest one from the official ATI website.

The game I'm trying to run is GTA IV. Yes, it's not kinda
'light' game, but it used to give me around 30 FPS on Windows, on Linux
it gives me only 3 FPS.
I know that performance must be slower, but should it be THAT much slower?
On Windows I used to play 1920x1080 with medium settings and it was okay, on
Linux it gives me 3 frames and it doesn't matter which resolution or
settings I use.

Any ideas? I see people running the game on double-cored CPUs and cards like
nVidia 9xxx, this is so damn unfair :(

This is Linux ) 
Wine is the best "emulator" (compatibility layer) at this moment at
all, if you wanna play Windows games on Linux, you always have to pay the price
with lower performance.

See related topic somewhere in topic's list, I created "What about
performance..."

As I realized, the Wine is a kind "layer" between linux kernel and
between Direct3D (that games extremely using), transforming system calls to
understandable in Linux OS to further processing, and It takes CPU time.

Anyway Wine is better (in speed) than any virtual machine for now.

I believe that Wine developers also dreaming when they could reach the higher
level with speed of applications work, comparable to native. As they reached
that Wine become more stable.
And I believe if they would have much money (more sponsors) and much more people
for development, they could do fantastic things  :)

Maybe you can find some useful info about the game in AppDB?

Yeah, thanks for the answer.
Then I have a new question.
Does Palit GeForce GTX 550 Ti work alright under Wine and Linuxes in general?
It seems to be a good buy for me.

Yes, I have that one, just it is not "Palit" but "Gigabyte".
I noticed that NVidia cards usually give more speed (performance) and
compatibility compare to ATI analogs at same level.

Sure, overall performance depends also on CPU, RAM type and its amount... )

Davvvve wrote:
> Try wine 64 bit .

This is only useful with 64bit games, correct? There are only a handful of
those.

I see people with dual-core processors playing IV.
So I don't think the problem is my processor, since it's maybe 70% in
use when playing IV: it still has some resources.
Waiting until May to buy a new card, thx for your help to all.