Wine CXGames and Windows 7 Performance Comparison

Written by Tom Wickline

Friday, 08 January 2010 11:39

I blog more than a little about Wine software. In the past I have run benchmarks between the most current pieces of Wine technology out there and how they compare with each other. However one important question many gamers have when looking to game on Linux is not so much how do the different Wine technologies compare with each other so much as how do they perform compared with the program(s) running natively on Windows? Since I finally installed Windows 7 I figured I would take a look into just how well my favorite non-emulators stack up against the native platform for a few 3D applications.

The Tests: I ran both a synthetic benchmark (3D Mark 2001se) as well as some actual game applications (TF2, L4D, & L4D2). Each test was run several times under Wine/CXGames/Windows to ensure that the scores are as accurate as possible.

The Hardware: While my hardware is not fastest in the world it is (as of posting this) relatively new and decently quick. Processor - Intel p9700 2.8ghz Dual Core, RAM - 4gigs of DDR3, Video Card: nVidia 260m with 1gig DDR3 dedicated memory.

Operating Systems and Drivers: Ubuntu 9.10, running the nVidia 190.53 driver & Windows 7, running the nVidia 195.62 driver

The Wine Software: Wine version 1.1.35 (with extra fonts and the d3dx9 packages installed via Winetricks) and CXGames 8.1.4 - both of these are the latest versions as of my posting this.

The Results:

3D Mark 2001 SE

Resolution: 1680x1050
- Wine Scored: 18497
- CXGames Scored: 18538
- Windows 7 Scored: 31573
Resolution: 1024x768
- Wine Scored: 22141
- CXGames Scored: 23265
- Windows 7 Scored: 35508

Team Fortress 2

Resolution: 1680x1050
- Wine: 65.11 fps
- CXGames: 61.78 fps
- Windows 7: 87.13 fps
Resolution: 1024x768
- Wine: 81.82 fps
- CXGames: 70.68 fps
- Windows 7: 101.88 fps

Left 4 Dead

Resolution: 1680x1050
- Wine: 13.76 fps
- CXGames: 27.36 fps
- Windows 7: 63.48 fps
Resolution: 1024x768
- Wine: 19.93 fps
- CXGames: 35.38 fps
- Windows 7: 65.65 fps

Left 4 Dead 2

Resolution: 1680x1050
- Wine: n/a
- CXGames: 38.45 fps
- Windows 7: 72.04 fps
Resolution: 1024x768
- Wine: n/a
- CXGames: 56.46 fps
- Windows 7: 111.68 fps

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better wine

bob 2010-01-09 00:03:07

Wine is 2 times slower :(.
Is it possible to optimize Wine code in future and change it?

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John Stephenson 2010-01-09 01:53:28

I'm glad to see this is getting attention, but why didn't you use the nVidia 195.22 driver under
Ubuntu?

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Stephan Sokolow 2010-01-09 12:13:51

If memory serves, the only place where Wine doesn't match or beat Windows in more specialized
performance benchmarks is 3D, so that'd be where to focus the optimization. Doesn't surprise me. I
more or less confirmed a related problem just by getting Portal to run. (DX8 fast, DX9 slow)

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User space

Max 2010-01-13 10:37:40

You should consider that wine runs in user-space mod in linux and windows runs in Kernel-space, so
logically windows must be fater than wine. if we try to run wine in kernel space ( that's a
dangereuos thing to do, as a matter of security) we can see wine running faster.

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Windows-paid Wine-mostly volunteer

William 2010-01-30 21:55:18

It doesn't help that Microsoft coding resources trumps that of Codeweavers. And trying to
convert DirectX calls into roughly equivalent OpenGL is slow and inefficent. Wine needs programmers skilled in OpenGL to keep pace.

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Multicore rendering?

David 2010-03-11 22:02:50

As noted on the L4D2 page at WineHQ (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClas...), were these benchmarks performed with multicore rendering enabled and the included
patch? Apparently they offer huge performance improvements.

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Tried Every Trick in the Book

Jeff Hoogland 2010-03-12 21:49:20

I tried patching Wine with both of those mentioned changes and could not get L4D2 to even load under
it. And FYI on my machine under both Windows & CXGames multicore rendering was enabled by
default.

~Jeff

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