Buying a graphics card for Wine: ATI vs nVidia

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Thu May 28, 2009 2:18 pm

Hi all,

I'm planning to upgrade my graphics card soon (I currently have a
onboard Intel X3100)

I'm using Wine to play games under Linux. (I'm currently running x64
Ubuntu, I'm considering switching to sidux / debian testing / gentoo)
I currently play Warcraft III: Frozen Throne, Trackmania: Nations, Red
Alert II (which is really slow) and want to play Generals (too slow to
be playable on the Intel card) and maybe Red Alert 3. (I would also be
upgrading to enough RAM (8GB) to run OpenGL applications under
VirtualBox if neccesary)

I know that nVidia cards are working quite well with Wine. Do thay
experience many problems? (I saw quite a few issues caused be certain
driver version being discussed on the list recently)

How well is ATI cards working for older games? I know that the first
response here seem to be "get a nVidia", but that seem to be the
general response for Intel cards as well, which is working fine,
although really slow for me.

I would prefer to buy ATI to reward them for releasing the specs
needed for open-source drivers (And, under Windows, a few cards seem
to be really good value), but only if their cards are at least usable.
(I would probably be using fglrx and not the open-source drivers...) I
know that their drivers are not as good as nVidia's, but are they
actually usable for most things? If you have an ATI card, ehich card
do you have and what works / does not work on it?

Another question: How much of Wine's better support for nVidia cards
are caused by using vendor-specific OpenGL extensions and how much by
nVidia's better drivers?

Gert

PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's performance issues?

austin987 · Post by **austin987** » Thu May 28, 2009 2:29 pm

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gert van den Berg <[email protected]> wrote:

I know that nVidia cards are working quite well with Wine. Do thay
experience many problems? (I saw quite a few issues caused be certain
driver version being discussed on the list recently)

There's always problems compared to windows. But nvidia is much better.

How well is ATI cards working for older games? I know that the first
response here seem to be "get a nVidia", but that seem to be the
general response for Intel cards as well, which is working fine,
although really slow for me.

Get an nvidia

.

ATI may work for older stuff, but the drivers are crap.

I would prefer to buy ATI to reward them for releasing the specs
needed for open-source drivers (And, under Windows, a few cards seem
to be really good value), but only if their cards are at least usable.
(I would probably be using fglrx and not the open-source drivers...) I
know that their drivers are not as good as nVidia's, but are they
actually usable for most things? If you have an ATI card, ehich card
do you have and what works / does not work on it?

While I agree with wanting to show support for ATI for releasing the
specs, you've got another decision to make. Do you want results now,
or in a few years when the drivers may or may not have caught up?

PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's performance issues?

If it's using DIB's, probably. Try it and see.

--
-Austin

austin987 · Post by **austin987** » Thu May 28, 2009 3:03 pm

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Gert van den Berg <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 21:28, Austin English <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gert van den Berg <[email protected]> wrote:
PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's performance issues?
If it's using DIB's, probably. Try it and see.

Its DirectDraw and without the DirectDrawRenderer = opengl setting
(which seem to flicker a lot, etc) it feels more like chess than a
real-time strategy.

According to http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw the DIB engine is
supposed to help...

I would try it when have some time and figure out the patches...

I've added a howto to http://wiki.winehq.org/DIBEngine

--
-Austin

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Thu May 28, 2009 3:10 pm

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 21:28, Austin English <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gert van den Berg <[email protected]> wrote:
PS: Would Max's DIB engine patches help for Red Alert 2's performance issues?
If it's using DIB's, probably. Try it and see.

Its DirectDraw and without the DirectDrawRenderer = opengl setting
(which seem to flicker a lot, etc) it feels more like chess than a
real-time strategy.

According to http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectDraw the DIB engine is
supposed to help...

I would try it when have some time and figure out the patches...

Gert

Danila Sentiabov · Post by **Danila Sentiabov** » Thu May 28, 2009 3:19 pm

Broken links to git and Bugzilla in the last section.

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 00:02, Austin English <[email protected]>wrote:

I've added a howto to http://wiki.winehq.org/DIBEngine

--
Best regards,
Danila Sentiabov aka dsent
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austin987 · Post by **austin987** » Thu May 28, 2009 3:25 pm

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Danila Sentiabov <[email protected]> wrote:

Broken links to git and Bugzilla in the last section.

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 00:02, Austin English <[email protected]>
wrote:
I've added a howto to http://wiki.winehq.org/DIBEngine

Thanks! Fixed.

--
-Austin

Thunderbird · Post by **Thunderbird** » Fri May 29, 2009 11:49 am

For Red Alert the DIB engine is not a solution. The game can be very fast using opengl and that's the way to go. There are several things which are holding it back for both gdi and opengl rendering.

One of the main issues is that Red Alert uses 'LockRect / UnlockRect'. Using these calls a game can directly access video memory. What happens in Wine is that for each change (even when it is just a minor one) we refresh the whole frame. We need to track what areas have really changed (that's what is happening on Windows too) but it is very tricky as you would need to trigger 'segmentation faults' for this.

In case of opengl one extra limitation is that the game is multithreaded and that means we have to switch opengl contexts dozens of times a second which is very expensive.