WINE & Performance
 

I'm new to Linux and I'm curious about Wine: Has anyone ever achieved the same performance in Linux that they would in a Windows machine on a Windows-based modern day 3D engine game like WoW, COD4, etc...? Or is it pretty much assumed that you will always have some to major loss in performance playing through Linux/Wine and not Windows when dealing with Windows native games?

I haven't tried to use Wine for games, but I have extensively tried to run memory consuming WIN applications with it. So far, I can only say that it takes slightly longer to load the app and it is somewhat slower than might be expected on WIN machines. Nevertheless, if you really want/need to run you WIN app on a Linux machine than that's OK, I guess. That's the price you have to pay for using a superior system. ;-) Sometimes the menus become badly encoded or you cannot execute a particular function, because the required library is not coded into Wine.

The same goes for Crossover Office, which has better support and many standard applications that work on it. Unsupported programmes generally still run on CXOffice, but some functionality might be lost (e.g. a drop-down menu might be blank or if you click on a menu it gives an empty pop-up and is stuck if you click to proceed).

So, if you have a slightly outdated processor with not too much memory and you want to run a heavy duty game/app, than Wine/CXOffice might not be able to render it as fast as you'd like. Nevertheless, you can always try and if you're not happy, just uninstall it. No problem.

In most games if they are rated gold or platinum you will get the same or better performance on games, however some features must be turned off because they are not yet supported, such as bloom and reflections.

However, there are oddball games such as age of empires which use certain features that have not been fully implemented, these will run unusually slow, but they are rare.

It depends on the game.

Wine is not an emulator, it's an alternative implementation of the Windows api. If a given function is implemented in a smarter way in wine, it will be faster, if a given function is implemented in a worse way, it will be slower.

It depends on the concrete pieces of code that a given game uses. However, a big bottleneck usually is the video driver. They usually do not have the quality of their windows counterparts, and wine nor linux can solve that, since these drivers are closed source. So: blame ati and nvidia. :p

Wine is usually very wisely implemented (the bits that are not missing, of course). As an example, I can tell you that in my case, the native linux neverwinter nights client will run worse than the windows one under wine.

i have little issues with some games - they usually take a bit to load but after that they run pretty quickly :)

I found a wiki on Wine (in particular it was geared towards World of Warcraft which happens to my main game of choice right now.)

They recommended (if you dual-boot) to tie WINE directly to your Windows drives and run the game straight from the Windows drives. I tried this, but got no where pretty quickly.

Fortunately they also suggest re-installing the game separately from Linux. I'm still looking for my damn CDs so I can do just that, I really want to know if it will work.

It should. Lots of people use it on wine and it works.

There's a huge thread about it on the Gentoo forums, in case you have some problem and want to take a look:


http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...start-600.html

Definitely! Thanks for the link!

i have to say that i found some games to work slower, some works faster, and some dont even work at all like cs. anyway try the game you want and see for yourself is the best bet.

Debian Development

if you are really interested in playing WIN games then wine is OK but why don't you try Cedega that is specifically meant for making life easier for anyone who wants to play WIN games. Give it a try and I'm sure you'll find it really useful.
Have a look over these,
http://librenix.com/?inode=5567
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-199399.html
and oh yes http://www.cedega.com
At last I must mention one thing that you always have to pay a price for running these WIN apps in terms of high memory, so you should be prepred for that. Thanks.

Well my system was built for high-performance Windows gaming so I dont think specs will be an issue, I'm actually thinking about bumping my 2 GB to 8 GB (64 bit CPU/OS of course.)

Don't you have to pay for Cedega? I don't know where, but I thought I read something that said Wine's recent update makes some games perform better and with less hassle than Cedega.

You have to pay for cedega (if of course you're not a pirate), but it is based off of wine, and it is unimpressive I have to tell you. It's kind of a waste of money. Many times while trying it out I've found wine to run games better and more stably than cedega. So, go ahead and try it, you'll find this out too. Oh, and BTW, cedega is wine-based so they do have to release most of the source code, but you'll be damn lucky if you can get it to compile, lucky for you they have not included any instructions on how to do so, and last time I checked no makefile either.

Not really. Wine is superior to cedega nowadays in every bit, except for the anti-copy support. Which can be circunvented in many -legal- ways. Concretely, it's update every two weeks or so, and the direct3d support is way better. Wine aims for better support of the wine and directx apis in general, cedega only cares about the most voted game, and nothing else.


The memory overhead for running wine is ridiculous. Note that you are going to be using alternative implementation of the windows api, you would get a similar ram "waste" on windows. For the rest, the binaries (for the game, program or whatever) are the same, and will take the same space in ram. So, I am not sure what are you talking about.

Being that said, if he has a valid windows license I would just dual boot if wine doesn't work, instead of paying for a cedega license.



Yep, it's a paid product which requires a valid license to work.


Cedega (or more correctly, WineX) forked from wine at some point. Right now wine and cedega (the sucessor of winex) share almost nothing in common. It's been long since they diverged on different products.

I am not expert in cedega, I guess that you are talking about some cvs code that remains on their repos. It's old and it will be difficult to use nowadays because most requirements will not be compatible with a modern system. I am not sure the kind of license that cedega has, but I guess it's not open, because the source code is not available as far as I know.

Anyway, there would be no reason to use it, wine has outperformed that long ago. It even outperforms the most modern cedega versions, so, no reason to use old winex or cedega code.