Poor wine performance

[Passiday]

Hello,

I wanted to give wine a test (never used it before), so I went forth and installed it on my - humble but not too lousy system:

CPU: Intel Pentium M 1.80GHz
Memory: 512MB
Graphics controller: ATI RV350 (Mobility Radeon 9600 M10)

While I had Windows 2000 on it, I was able to run the good old HalfLife2 pretty nice, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This site gave me confidence that it's at least possible.

What I experience, however, is quite depressing. I managed to install and run Steam, but the preformance is apalling. Even though I finally was able to go and start installing the app (will take some time to download), the Steam crashed shortly after that and any subsequent attempts to launch it again result in terrible system performance (ie, browsing the web on Firefox at the same time is almost impossible), very active use of HDD, and even after hours of intensive HDD digging and system resource hogging there is no visible result - the wine apparently has aborted.

I'd be happy to hear how should I diagnose the problem. Or, maybe my system is just too poor to run HL2 over wine in Linux. Maybe there is some problem in some settings?

[Thunderbird]

In Wine we emulate Direct3D using OpenGL. This emulation is not that bad (70% or more of Windows performance) as long as the OpenGL drivers are good. Unfortunately most open source drivers aren't that fast which limits performance. Make sure you are using recent DRI drivers.

[hellork]

The performance might be because another copy of wine is still running and hogging memory. To make sure no wine instances are running:

$ wineserver -k

Check memory and CPU usage:
$ top

With only 512MB (and usually over half that to run the desktop) you may have to stop a bunch of services, run a lighter desktop or enable a bigger swap to run some games.

I can't explain it better than "man swapon", "man mkswap"

[Passiday]

Ok, well, there was no swap space at all. I kind of relied on my ubuntu to manage this on it's own, but perhaps that's not the best strategy. So I established swap file of 1GB and now things run much smoother.

So I could install the HL2, and even launch it, but when it starts loading that blurry start menu, it crashes at some point, and throws me out to the desktop, at lousy 800x600 resolution.

Is there any way how to diagnose the cause of this crash? Perhaps I can run the execution command in console and then check the console log?

[vitamin]

So I could install the HL2, and even launch it, but when it starts loading that blurry start menu, it crashes at some point, and throws me out to the desktop, at lousy 800x600 resolution.

See general troubleshooting HOWTOs for Steam and HL2 in AppDB. In general:
- Make sure your sound is working
- Disable steam in-game community
- Start HL2 with "-nointro" command line option to skip initial video
- Start HL2 with "-dxlevel 80" command line option

If none of that works - your video card and/or your drivers are not good enough to run HL2.