Setting Performance Expectations For Wine Direct3D

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 4 February 2014 at 02:47 PM EST. 19 Comments
WINE
For those that haven't dabbled with upstream Wine lately and aren't sure of what's realistic performance expectations for Wine when dealing with its Direct3D layer for Linux OpenGL graphics drivers, here's some fresh comments from a CodeWeavers employee who deals with Wine's graphics stack.

Stefan Dösinger is one of the CodeWeavers employees largely responsible for the graphics work in Wine, in specifically the WineD3D layer that covers the Windows' Direct3D calls to OpenGL commands for executing by the Linux (and OS X/Solaris) graphics drivers. He does a lot of Wine graphics / game benchmarking -- using our benchmarking software -- and is also the one responsible for the ongoing Direct3D command-stream patch-set.

One year ago he talked about the good and bad graphics drivers in dealing with Wine while now he has some fresh comments in a new Wine development thread in discussing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Linux performance on Wine.

Aside from recommending performance-concerned Wine gamers try his still out-of-tree D3D command stream patches, Stefan shared some current performance expectations of upstream Wine. In general on a dual-core machine running Wine you can expect about 50% performance under Linux with Wine compared to directly running Windows, but it's largely dependent on the actual game and driver. When using the NVIDIA binary Linux driver you can more likely expect around 60% the performance of Windows or if using the open-source Radeon driver there is a 30~40% performance expectation.

Of course, you could also try Catalyst with Wine but to many users on different hardware and driver versions that is a very buggy experience. There is also the open-source NVIDIA driver (Nouveau), but its main performance issue is the lack of re-clocking / power management, which basically makes any gaming a non-starter on this driver for most GeForce GPUs. Intel Wine meanwhile should work out fine on Wine but no performance numbers were shared.

For those with more curiosity about Wine's gaming performance, Stefan had mentioned in an email to me that he will be sharing his slides from the FOSDEM 2014 presentation in the days ahead.
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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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