Some Quick Basic Gaming Tests With Wine/Wine-Staging vs. Linux vs. Windows

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 30 August 2016 at 11:00 AM EDT. 30 Comments
WINE
With having just wrapped up the Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance benchmarking roundabout, I decided to run some very quick tests with Wine and Wine-Staging while gauging interest to run a larger Wine comparison.

After finishing up the AMD tests for the multi-OS/driver comparison, I installed Wine 1.9.17 followed by Wine-Staging 1.9.17 on the Ubuntu system while using the latest open-source Radeon driver (Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12.1-dev) and carried out some basic tests. Of the games I ran for the earlier article, I just chose The Talos Principle and Tomb Raider for now to gauge interest and because they ran cleanly out-of-the-box with Steam on Wine without having to deal with any hacks or extra steps... Tests were done with the Radeon R9 Fury.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS vs. Wine - Radeon

Aside from these quick teaser results, if you're interested in seeing some fresh Wine benchmarks, feel free to let me know via the forums or twitter -- particularly if you are a Phoronix Premium member, tipper, or non-ad-block user. Currently contemplating different options for a fresh comparison time permitting.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS vs. Wine - Radeon

With using TTP's OpenGL renderer, the Wine performance is actually slightly faster than the native Linux binary on the same hardware/software stack but still shy of the Windows numbers with Radeon Software Crimson Edition or even Ubuntu with AMDGPU-PRO.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS vs. Wine - Radeon

Obviously when using Direct3D there is greater overhead with Wine in needing to translate the calls to OpenGL, but at least for the rest of Wine compared to native Linux the OpenGL performance numbers are good. D3D CSMT and Gallium-Nine testing are possibilities for the future comparison if there's enough interest and support.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS vs. Wine - Radeon

With Tomb Raider on Wine the performance was on-par with the native Linux numbers while still coming up well short of the native Windows performance.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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