I'm abit confused as to what WINE is capable off when it comes to running windows game on Linux.

It's pretty common to expect lower performance when running a game through WINE because of the compatibility layer between the OS and the game. But what about the graphic quality?

Is wine capable of rendering out the same graphics on Windows max settings on linux but with just a performance hit or is both the performance and visual effects reduced?

Well in theory the graphics shouldn't be worse, that would be the code not working as written, which doesn't really make sense.

However. When you're dealing with GL and the likes, you're cutting a lot of the work to the hardware. I had a bash at Portal last week, and the graphics were perfectly good "quality" however they didn't work. If you're familiar with Portal, the portals themselves were always drawn on the top layer of the screen, even if they were meant to be hidden behind a wall or 10, they were still perfectly visible etc.

I'm not speaking from direct gaming experience here, but AIUI, if the graphics are opengl, then they should be rendered directly, but if they are directx, then they have to be translated into opengl calls for rendering, so there may be a small amount of slowdown. Plus I don't think all of the directx rendering features have been implemented yet.

On the other hand, I don't think it's guaranteed that performance under wine will be significantly worse than native. While there is a bit of overhead due to the compatibility layer, the wine developers are quite good at what they do, and some of their libraries are better-written than the native MS versions. It's said that you may therefore even see improved performance in some cases.

In the end it all comes down to the individual game.

Yea, I knew bits of this from various sources but thanks a lot for the clarification. I didn't know about potential for better performance in some cases though.