fglrx and Wine: Compatibility and performance

[Thetargos]

Well, I was bound to ask this sooner or later. I was wondering how is the situation with Wine and fglrx nowadays. It used to be a black art to get wine and fglrx to work nice together. Now I am not talking about running the latest and greatest games on it, but "basic" 2D games like Starcraft and Warcraft 2, and Age of Empires 1 and 2, but since Wine's renderer is OpenGL I was wondering how fast a 2D acceleration for these game could I expect with fglrx, especially taking into account that the GPU on this laptop is but a modest X1200 (RS690), and I'm using fglrx 8.3 and Wine 0.9.56, any thoughts?

[Melcar]

It's "alright". The last Windows game I bothered to get was Oblivion. It "runs" for me, but at very reduced quality. All post processing effects (AA, AF, HDR, Bloom, reflections, etc.) have to be turned off otherwise the game won't run or perform incredibly poor. The highest resolution I can game on is 1024x768, which looks like crap on my 20" WS. The game itself runs fine, with the few exceptions many people experience with the game under Wine (no in game movies, corrupted textures in some areas, bad performance with shaders, etc.) This is with a HD2900XT by the way. I tried it on another PC with a 7900GS, and while the game seemed to run a bit smoother and with a bit less issues, it's still a piss poor implementation. It's almost not worth it either way, since a game like that is meant to be run at maximum eye candy.
All my Wine gaming is done on my laptop now (200M) where I run Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. Both run perfectly (even the 3D acceleration in BGII works).

[Thetargos]

All my Wine gaming is done on my laptop now (200M) where I run Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. Both run perfectly (even the 3D acceleration in BGII works).

That's interesting, back in the days when I still had my R300 Radeon 9500, I had a mixed experience with Wine and fglrx, a lot of applications did work, but many more others did not. I'm more concerned with 2D acceleration than 3D as it has proven to be a weak point for fglrx drivers. I may have done something wrong, but I do perceive performance to be poorer with this X1200 on the 8.3 drivers compared to the available pre-packaged drivers from Lina (8.45.5, AKA 8.2), however that may have a lot to do with the actual configuration... I may be missing some important options in Xorg.conf, as I simply installed the drivers and changed the device driver from "radeonhd" to "fglrx", however I don't have any additional options. And its been so long since I had an ATi GPU that I no longer remember which options are valid, not even if the ones I remember are still valid. So if you have any useful one, I'd be most greateful.

[Melcar]

Nothing fancy. Just using the latest 8.3 with the "normal" options in xorg.conf, VideoOverlay and OpenGLOverlay (set to "on" and "off" respectively). Really wished we had an updated list of fglrx configuration options (the ones above are the only ones I know).

[Thetargos]

I installed a series of games on this laptop to try it out, and quite frankly I'm very disappointed with its performance. I installed Unreal Tournament 1 to see how it would run. It has MAJOR problems with fog and volumetric lighting: in the City flyby when in the NEG building and you see Xan and the challenger emerge from the floor, the FPS drop insanely from about 40-50FPS down to 3-ish. I still have to check other games like Quake 3, but for some reason I don't have much hope that I'll be able to run but very, very simple 3D games on this laptop, at least on Linux and the current drivers. Will have to do some Vista OpenGL benchmarking as well (I'm currently dual booting due to the WiFi card... I only wish Aero had something like Compiz Icon for Two-click disabling).

[Melcar]

I have no problem running 3D games with the 200M, at least the native Linux ones. Tremulous runs at 800x600 at max settings with playable frames; Nexuiz v2.4 can run at 800x600 with medium effects and some tweaking; Alien Arena also can run with medium effects at 800x600. All this is with a HP running a 2GHz Sempron and 2GB RAM (128MB for the IGP). The driver obviously gives out good performance, so the problem is with Wine itself.
Wine may not be an emulator, but it still has overhead. As I said, fglrx with the 200M gives me good 2D acceleration (games that I can play are BG 1 & 2, IWD 1& 2, Fallout 1 & 2, and Fallout Tactics). 3D acceleration may as well not be there when it comes to Wine, since everything performs poorly. The only Windows 3D games I have tried with my HD2900XT have been Oblivion and Doom3; Doom3 runs okay (not as good as the Linux client) and Oblivion runs crappy. I'm planning some day on trying out some Source games, but I hear they also run poorly even on nvidia cards (some report about 1/2 fps loss on some games).

[Thetargos]

UT I installed (or more like cloned) my natively installed client. I have not yet tried any other native games like Glest 3, but frankly I don't have much hope. All I'm attempting is native, and there is little hope, I'm afraid. Still I want to conduct tests on Windows to see how degraded the performance really is.

[Melcar]

I haven't bothered to compare Windows vs. Linux performance on the 200M, aside from that Ozone OpenGL benchmark (ran it with Wine for Linux testing) which gave me very close results (forgot the exact numbers but they were withing 5%). I have, however, been running timedemos from games such as Nexuiz and Doom 3 on both Windows and Linux to compare the performance for my HD2900XT and the Linux runs came out about 80% or so of the Windows runs on average.

[Thetargos]

Yeah, that's kind of what I have in mind, comparing say UT99 windows OpenGL and Linux OpenGL performance, Quake 3, etc. For some reason I'm starting to think that the performance delta may be somewhere in the 50% between Linux and Windows on these old games. Just ran Glest 3 native and was surprised that it started off right at native resolution of 1280x800 and ran acceptably OK (at the title screen, I feat that more than a couple units will choke the system).

[Thetargos]

Well, what do you know? 8.3 on Windows perform just as bad! The drivers with which the laptop was shipped with Vista performed much, much better in UT99 (in OpenGL) than the 8.3 drivers. I have yet to try the game on Vista in Direct3D mode, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the game will perform much better in D3D than OpenGL.

Edit

Ouch! That was humiliating! I even edited the .ini to resemble some (more demanding) settings used with the OpenGL renderer. The result? total humiliation! The mean FPS in D3D with all "demanding" settings (volumetric lighting, no precache, 32-bit textures, detail textures, etc) was ~58FPS (looks horrible, though, especially the fog), in OpenGL with the very same settings the mean FPS are less than half of those 58FPS, though does look much better. The OpenGL performance in Linux and Windows is very much so comparable. I really think ATi's OpenGL performance in this last batch of drivers leaves much to be desired, at least when compared to the immediate previous release on the same hardware on two operating systems showing the new driver actually offers less performance than the last release. Is it possible to "downgrade"? And by that I mean if there is some sort of archives for the fglrx drivers from AMD.

[d2kx]

Source engine DX9 render never worked with fglrx. So there clearly is something wrong with it...

[Melcar]

I guess it depends on the card. On all my machines (HD2900XT, HD3850, 200M) performance seems adequate on "new" games, on both Windows and Linux. I should mention, however, that games like the original CS won't even run anymore with the new driver sets (on Windows and Linux).

[Thetargos]

But I'm not discussing DirectX performance at all, I'm discussing OpenGL performance... With the figures I've seen with UT99, I'm afraid games such as Doom3 will be but a horrible experience if it ever runs in the first place!

[Melcar]

Doom3 runs fine on my HD2900XT and even on a old 9800PRO I use on a backup PC. On both, performance isn't that different from Windows. I never had any problems running any native Linux games with my ATI cards (while using the new drivers that is); Wine will always give you a big performance hit, which seems to be more pronounced with ATI cards.

[Thetargos]

My main interest in Wine would be 2D acceleration (traditionally not a strong point of the fglrx drivers)... I'll see how does Starcraft run, though.

[Thetargos]

Well, Starcraft does install, but runs incredibly slow. I remember there were some hacks to make Starcraft run faster (like switching from OpenGL driver to X11, and few others), but I don't seem to find information on how to actually do that.