New DIB Engine still slow compared to the MAX engine?

[Induane]

I've been using the Max version of the DIB engine for a long time now, and it was always useful because it sped up everything so much. There were of course occasional glitches graphically (noticeably a few font colour issues though these were still less severe than the font color issues without max's engine). Once Huw started work on the new DIB engine that was going to go into the main wine source tree I was pretty excited. A ways into the project they closed bug 421 and marked it as fixed so I got excited and moved off to try the new DIB engine out to see how it compared to the Max engine.

Sadly it was a horrible disappointment. Other than adding a few weird acid trip color problems it didn't seem to be much different at all. All of the slowness bugs that plagued wine before the DIB engine was added remained. As near as I can tell it doesn't actually fix or speed up much of anything. At least not with AutoCad or the Age of Empires series games, there is no progress, and perhaps regression.

My guess is that the DIB engine can be used for font drawing speed-up and that the new DIB engine doesn't implement font drawing. The new DIB engine has identical text colour issues to the old wine without a DIB engine. The Max engine made noticeable changes to the font colours and I think as a result of doing the font drawing in his DIB engine, a VERY noticeable improvement in the applications responsiveness and overall speedy feel.

My computer has two Quad core socket 1366 Xeon Processors where each core is hyperthreaded, 48GB of DDR3 ram, and dual 15k RPM SAS drives in Raid 0. Age of Empires II plays incredibly slow which is just weird to me. How much processing power can a game of that age actually need, even if the drawing method is inefficient?

Anyway, I'm kind of I guess just wondering if there are any plans to actually include the font rendering in the new DIB engine? Is that part of the plan? I had initially assumed so, but then they closed the bug as fixed and I started wondering if that meant work was pretty much complete.

[dimesio]

Anyway, I'm kind of I guess just wondering if there are any plans to actually include the font rendering in the new DIB engine? Is that part of the plan? I had initially assumed so, but then they closed the bug as fixed and I started wondering if that meant work was pretty much complete.

Comment 436 in bug 421 clearly says:

Yeah, the basic dib engine is there now. Any problems
or inadequacies in it deserve new bugs.

If you have a specific problem, file a bug for it if one has not already been filed.

[Cloudef]

In wineconf, it was stated that the dib engine that is implented is very basic currently, and lacks lots of functinality like certain color conversions which cause the font issues, etc..

So pretty much it's not implented yet fully. But yeah, go ahead and fill bug reports for the issues.

[jjmckenzie]

In wineconf, it was stated that the dib engine that is implented is very basic currently, and lacks lots of functinality like certain color conversions which cause the font issues, etc..

So pretty much it's not implented yet fully. But yeah, go ahead and fill bug reports for the issues.

Improvements have been made to Wine 1.3.31, which was released today. Hopefully, this is moving in the correct direction.

Please give it a go after the distro releases happen.

James

[PommeGolden]

hope things will improve over time.

[Induane]

I've noted that each wine release does still seem to have some patches streaming in for the DIB engine, I guess patience is a virtue I am not practising with as much tenacity as I should.