Well, after looking to the issue of 2D DirectDraw games running too slow under Wine with the fglrx drivers (Starcraft, Age of Empires 1 & 2), I started looking into how to tweak their performance. I found some very helpful hints on how to speed things up, except, now I've got a whole new problem, only a portion of the screen is visible...
Any one seeing similar stuff with these kinds of games?
Jepp, I've observed exactly the same problem with StarCraft on a mobility 1300: if I set the DirectDraw renderer to OpenGL, only the upper third of the screen is visible and the rest is corrupted or black. I haven't found a workaround, however, StarCraft works find with the default setting (GDI) for me.
As people mention this works for them in the wine AppDB, I suspect this is a problem of the combination wine/fglrx.
The GDI renderer is unbearably slow on this system. I was hoping that the OpenGL renderer would actually be good solution if it did work, however GDI is fast enough paradoxically when running with compiz (though both panels show, and running in Compiz has the advantage I can make the panels be transparent)
Hmmm, it may have something to do with color depths and pixel formats; afaik (feel free to correct my if I am wrong) one of the advantages of compositing via AIGLX is that the color depth of a surface is decoupled from the physical color depth without introducing a huge software overhead.
I am on a Thinkpad T60 with a core duo (no 2) at 1.8 GHz, with AIGLX and composite enabled but without using a compositing windows manager, just plain kwin. GDI works fine for me with great speed, although the game loads one core at 100% (I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the renderer though).
Last edited by DirtyHairy; 03-19-2008 at 06:55 PM.
Starcraft overloads one core on dual core systems (I'm on a Toshiba Satellite with a Turion X2 L58 CPU), it does it too on my home PC as well with an nVidia graphics card. However I've noticed that I can lock the CPU speed to the slowest supported one and the game will still perform just fine (on my desktop PC) and I'm sure on the laptop that will certainly mean more battery life. At any rate, even though it is a good thing that SC runs fine with a compositing manager, it'd be much better if it worked also in 2D without acceleration and only using X acceleration infrastructure (EXA, etc).
Wine and 2D DDraw games with fglrx
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