Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Holly Bostick]

Robert Persson schreef:
> I am finding that with one particular windows application running
> under wine the graphics are incredibly slow. My question is: Is this
> something to do with wine that I just have to live with, or could it
> be connected to other things on my system, such as the xserver?
>
<snip>
>
> The problems are:
>
> 1. Typed text gets to the screen pretty slowly - 200 characters per
> second or so. However pasted text appears more or less instantly.
>
> 2. Windows are drawn very slowly - which is pretty annoying because
> scribe opens and shuts a lot of windows.
>
> 3. when scribe starts, a considerable part of the screen (both inside
> and outside the application windows) ends up covered in black
> rectangles. These disappear when something is dragged over them or a
> button underneath them is clicked.
>
> 4. There is a slowdown in opengl which persists even when scribe and
> all wine-related processes have terminated. Before starting scribe
> glxgears will clock around 960 fps, whereas afterwards it will only
> clock up 750 fps or so.
>
>
> I am using the following versions of things:
> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.99.15-r4 app-emulation/wine-0.9.8-r1
> x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.22.5
>
>
 Robert, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there's a high chance
that you have just run into one of the reasons that people say the ATI
drivers "suck".

I am also an ATI user, and to be flatly honest, there are some things
(effects, usually bad ones) that you *will* get when using an ATI card
under Wine or Cedega that you *won't* get while using another brand of
video card (not even specifically nVidia, but really just any other
brand with decent drivers). I have several programs that I run under
Wine/Cedega that behave oddly or run significantly slower than reports
of that same program running with nVidia cards. Because the drivers
really are not good, and don't do what they are supposed to/expected to
in many respects, for one, and because the driver team has not yet
reached the point where they're optimizing for speed (they're trying to
get the drivers stable first), for another.

So if you have another brand of video card available to you, I would
suggest you give it a whirl and see if the problem persists. It may not.

That said, I suspect you do have an issue with your X server as well...
the 6.8.99-blahblahblah series is buggy and unmaintained. I tried it
myself and had even more problems than I did with 6.8.2-r6, which I
reverted to. So the xserver version you're using may well be
excaberating the problems the drivers already have.

I am (at this very moment, actually) upgrading to Xorg 7.0, after which
I'm going to enable the r300 drivers (I have a 9800SE), and if those
don't help, I'm going to see if the fglrx drivers work better under 7.0
than under 6.8.2. If not, I'm buying an nVidia card (my birthday is
coming, and I am just sick of this after nearly two years; I've had
enough of the "does not work with ATI cards" list on the Cedega Release
notes).

It's an option to take under serious consideration (upgrading to 7.0 and
switching to the open source drivers). I'll keep you posted on my
progress -- meaning, if Wine seems to work better under these conditions.

Also consider that Wine is doing a lot of work as they close in on 1.0
(which might be as soon as April if the release schedule holds up), and
the devs are specifically working on ATI issues (I lurk on wine-dev, and
some of the devs working on wine3d and direct x do have ATI cards). Now
I'm sure that scribe doesn't use d3d or OGL (though it might, for all I
know), but surely any work on the directx backend will have some effect
on things like draw speed and rendering. So there's hope from that end
as well.

In any case, hope this helps to some extent.

Holly
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