Linux Gaming: Native vs. Wine vs. Windows 7 Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Gaming: Native vs. Wine vs. Windows 7 Performance

Linux gaming has a bright future ahead with the forthcoming Unigine games, successful indie campaigns, and many other Linux-native game titles being just out on the horizon. Right now though if you are a dedicated PC gamer looking to satisfy your entertainment appetite under Linux, more than likely you find yourself using the Wine program so that you can run many Windows programs under Linux. What is the performance impact though of using this method? In this article, we have a couple benchmarks comparing the performance of Wine, native Linux game binaries, and the native Microsoft Windows 7 Professional performance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15567

[birdie]

Michael, before you start testing "Direct3D-rendered games" and draw any conclusions about WinAPP[Direct3D] -> Wine -> Linux[OpenGL], please, remember that Wine's DirectX implementation may be incomplete.

Thus the same game may run faster under Linux/Wine than it runs natively only because Wine doesn't completely pass through all DirectX calls into OpenGL calls.

So, IMO such an article just ... doesn't make any sense at all - unless you also compare graphics quality (pixel by pixel).

[Shining Arcanine]

With Urban Terror, the Ubuntu Linux performance again came out ahead of Windows 7.

Your graph shows WIndows 7 being faster at Urban Terror, not Ubuntu.

[Chol]

Testing games that are natively available for Linux does not make much sense in my opinion, as nobody is interested in running them with Wine. What about comparing games from the Wine Platinum and Gold top lists? http://appdb.winehq.org/

[curaga]

One conclusion is that Wine 1.3.9 is consistently slower than 1.2.1. I wonder if the Wine project would appreciate a fps regression bisect.

[KDesk]

Interesting.
Could you also test an AMD gfx with the proprietary driver?
Could you also add the CPU usage?

[photon]

How do you do to make the UrbanTerror exceed 125 fps, which is the limit of the game engine?
You measure fps much higher than 125 fps, how? using a modified version of the game?

[Michael]

Testing games that are natively available for Linux does not make much sense in my opinion, as nobody is interested in running them with Wine. What about comparing games from the Wine Platinum and Gold top lists? http://appdb.winehq.org/

Read the article... it's explained.

[NomadDemon]

nice test, want more

[Michael]

How do you do to make the UrbanTerror exceed 125 fps, which is the limit of the game engine?
You measure fps much higher than 125 fps, how? using a modified version of the game?

Run the Phoronix Test Suite.