“This week’s release of Ubuntu 7.10 is a significant win for the free software community. Not only does this release incorporate an updated package set – most notably with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and GNOME 2.20, but it also delivers on new desktop innovations from BulletProofX and displayconfig-gtk to Compiz Fusion being enabled by default on supported systems. However, for those business professionals and gamers that remain dependent on some Windows-only binary applications, the WINE project has been making some excellent headway into supporting Windows applications on the Linux desktop. With Ubuntu 7.10 and WINE 0.9.46 in hand, we had set out to compare the performance between Windows XP and Gutsy Gibbon with WINE on two popular DirectX benchmarks.”
Cool that wine implementation of directx is catching up. But the coolest part of theese benchmarks i think, is the last page with essentially the cpu performance of the linux kernel vs windows running the same benchmark and hardware. About 15% faster… just mind blowing.
It’s hardly ‘mind blowing’.
Ubuntu + wine comes nowhere near the performance of windows, and you call that mind blowing?
Don’t get me wrong, i only use linux (opensuse) and i think wine is a great program, but it simply sucks for games.
Ubuntu + wine comes nowhere near the performance of windows, and you call that mind blowing?
Because:
a) This benchmark is done using 3D mark which is a windows application running on Linux through a 3rd party compatibility layer (not developed by Microsoft) which was eventually put together after years of hacking and reverse engineering. The simple fact that games do run is mind blowing all by itself. And then, as a final demonstration of supremacy, Linux even surpasses Windows XP in the CPU benchmarks. And all this running though a compatibility layer. Which leads to…
B) What if this benchmark had been done using a native Linux port of 3D Mark, running OpenGL instead of DirectX, and the drivers available on Linux where given the same amount of polish and care as the ones found Windows. What then? World domination?
It is an extremely outdated Benchmark and thus the results are meaningless. You will not succeed getting gamers to use Linux by saying “hey, you can play those games from 2000 now!”. By the time Wine will run 2007 games we will have 2020.
Screw wine gaming… what we need is native ports! It’s about damn time we have’ em if you ask me….
Nah, actually we need to have native ports of Applications, not games. I want to see Ableton, ZBrush, DAZ|Studio ported to Linux and i know a ton of Webdesigners/Webprogrammers who would be using Linux now instead of Mac if there would have been an Photoshop port (i just don’t get why they aren’t using gimp instead).
Because the Gimp, in all its beauty, it has serious usability problems (too many menues, palettes, etc.) compared to the industry standard (Photoshop), which also has a UI that leaves a lot to be desired, but again, it’s a “standard”.
And more importantly, The Gimp only support RGB; this is probably not related to web*.* but anyways, a lot of people in the printing industry *could* be using The Gimp, but you do not send something to a printing shop using RGB.
There is very little difference between Gimp and Mac-Photoshop. The difference is bigger between Gimp and Win-Photoshop (the latter being a complete disaster).
The only possible explanation I find for your affirmation is that you never used Photoshop plug-ins. On neither platform.
We were solely talking GUI-layout. And nothing else than that. Not that you are incorrect about plug-ins, it is just irrelevant in this context.
Hmm… No. Colour spaces were also being discussed (http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18795&comment_id=279554), layer effects and file format capabilities (http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18795&comment_id=279611), so that’s hardly a discussion on UI layout.
Being that the case, I’m surprised I got modded down on my previous comment, having started at 2 points per my trusted user status. I didn’t go off-topic (as demonstrated), nor offended anyone (AFAICT), nor advertised anything (but I sure can do cool stuff on Photoshop, despite not being my professional field of expertise). So, what gives?!
(p.s.: I’m truly, really hoping it wasn’t you, dylansmrjones; as you can see it’s been quite some time I added you to my friends list, so I definitely don’t hold anything against you, on the very contrary, I usually find your comments spot on. This one I found a major slip, hence my comment. I still find zero need for anyone, anyone, to have modded me down. Colour me puzzled.)
The GIMP may be full-featured but it’s hardly anything near Photoshop in usability or workflow functionality. I’m making an attempt to use it but it seems a programmer’s delight and a designer’s nightmare.
It would really be nice to see a lot of software ported to Linux, once there is one GUI (or one API) for professional (or other) applications. Consistency is useful in developing graphical applications.
I have to agree with dylansmrjones. Mac Photoshop is much better in term of usability than Windows version and I have no problem using Gimp on either platform. After intensive use, Gimp shortcut/hotkeys are more logical since some of them are based from browser. Since it is possible to customize hotkeys and shortcuts, usablitily is not an issue but the possible inability for designer to adapt on different application.
That’s great but isn’t it preferable to send along an RGB when you’ve been using embedded colour management than to do a cruddy job of the conversion yourself, the latter seems like a common mistake, photoshop can convert to CMYK and because it’s P$ the automated process must be flawless…
Better to do the CMYK conversion before sending stuff off to the printers, so you can at least proof the colors. Printing presses are very busy, so making them do the conversion isn’t the best use of their time.
I think one major hurdle for graphics designers switching to the GIMP is the lack of Pantone color-matching, which is patented.
You are correct. Ideally, a fully color managed workflow would insist on attaching the ICC profile with the native format (ie RGB for items digitized using an optical sensor) and then only at the output stage would convert these to LaB and then to the format for the output device (CMYK, CcMmYK, CMYKOG, etc..).
However, it has been my experience that very few professional designers are even aware of proper use of color management. I don’t believe TheGimp natively supports ICC profiles which would be a huge issue as well.
In addition, you start to run into a color space issue as well. If you are doing all of your work in RGB then output to a CMYK device, no matter how well your color management is, the CMYK color space is not nearly as large as the RGB space .. as a result, when working in your application, you would most definitely want to SEE how the output would look in the smaller color space without necessarily degrading the quality of the file (ie through an RGB -> CMYK conversion).
I’m not one of the web developers you know, but I know that I, and all of the ones I know, don’t use the GIMP because its user interface sucks rabid donkey’s balls.
I’m sure it’s very capable—possibly just as capable as Photoshop for web development (comparable layer blending effects, adjustment layers, flawless round-trip editing of CS2 and CS3-saved PSDs and PSBs), but unless the UI improves significantly all of that will be for nought.
(Also, I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t have flawless round-trip editing of CS2/CS3 PSDs and PSBs, which means it’s a non-starter for anything but one-man-bands).
Beyond that, every Linux distribution I’ve come across since 1994 when I first started using Linux has required far too much effort to tweak and tune in order to be a comfortable working environment. I don’t know about where you work, but at our place there simply isn’t time to spend dicking around to make it both useable and pleasant and stable. For web developers, Mac OS X is out of the box (which is handy, because if it wasn’t we’d be stuck using a crappy platform of some kind in order to run the tools required).
Edited 2007-10-21 19:19
They don’t use Gimp because they want Photoshop. The two are different enough that they’re in no way a drop in replacement for each other.
But Photoshop works fine under Wine, so there’s no excuse to not use Linux if this is the only issue.
Ableton would be really cool. I would love to see more Music apps make it to windows. Does anyone know why there isn’t MINE (mine is not an emulator) a MacOSX compatibility library, one would think it would be easier to do, and there are plenty of music apps on OSX.
Does anyone know why there isn’t MINE (mine is not an emulator) a MacOSX compatibility library, one would think it would be easier to do, and there are plenty of music apps on OSX.
There was an attempt to do this back in the MacOS 8.x and MacOS 9.x days, unfortunately it fizzled due to A) lack of developer support, B) technical limitations, and C) being surpassed by other solutions.
A) The guy who started the project began working on making a MacOS on Windows API layer and had actually gotten as far as hacking together capability for a few apps when he got a job offer that required him to sign a NDA and a waiver assigning rights to all work done while an employee to his new corporate masters. Thus he was forced to put the project on hold….
B) The only way he’d managed to get even as far as he did was by basically writing compatibility hooks for each app one at atime and then there’s the whole issue with converting from one endian to another due to the MacOS being on the PowerPC architeure…
C) While he was on hiatus emulators such as Basilisk II and Sheepshaver along with eventually the appearance of PearPC made any API attempts more or less useless due to there already being a better solution available. The move from PPC to X86 architecture eventually made the whole issue moot due to the release of OSX86 among the hacking community…
As to why no one has managed to get a MacOS X project of the type you’re talking about up and running? Well, most of the people who would insist on something like that have bought Macs and use them with GPL OSS and think they have the best of all worlds….
–bornagainpenguin
PS: For more information on the old MACE project check these links via the wayback machine…
http://web.archive.org/web/20030712065917/macehq.cx/news.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20041204162838/www.macehq.cx/about.html
ditto buddy, i second that.
only wow isn’t on my priority list
pro evolution soccer is 
i greet the UT, QW and others which are being ported as we speak
It may be that long before we can rull all 2007 games reliably without thinking about it, but plenty of such games run now. Command and Conquer 3 is working great. STALKER is almost there. Slightly older stuff like Far Cry, Prey, Grand Theft Auto: SA, Warcraft 3, WoW etc all run fine.
Heck, I can even join a game in the Crysis beta and see my surroundings. It’s basically unplayable (as per your point) but this game is a graphical beast, and it sorta runs without even being released yet.
I think Wine is slowly getting there. Even more so with regular apps. WinMX, WinRAR, TMPGenc, Deep Exploration, etc etc. I can run almost any app from my old programs directory and it works, getting better with each release.
Sure, native apps are the way to go, and Wine will bever get there (in terms of being “done”) but it isn’t as bad as all that.
And besides, games from 2000 aren’t all that bad
Deus Ex (which runs just fine) is still my favorite game ever. I’m quite happy being able to play it even if I can’t play Lost Planet or whatever blingfest came out last week.
Wine needs to do some catch-up in the DirectX area. But if they continue like they are doing now, they might be able to catch up pretty soon!
Wow, you’ve really been drinking the Linux koolaid, eh?
Step back for a moment, and realize that Linux lost all but one of the benchmarks. That’s mind blowing? Yeah, all the way back to XP.
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I believe you are misunderstanding the meaning of the post. Considering that we are talking Windows games, optimized for “real” Windows, being benchmarked on an OSS platform which has not received any assistance from MS or the game vendors, I’d say the results are, well, perhaps not mindblowing, but impressive. Years ago, (pre-Unreal Tournament) I got the original “Unreal” going under the (then current) version of wine. It ran perfectly. I played the game through twice, which represents *many* hours of play, and I believe I had *one* crash during that whole time. I did not do formal benchmarks, as I have not run Windows in years, but comparing my results with those of Voodoo3 owners on comparable hardware and Win98, my numbers actually came out about the same or slightly *better*.
But then, you were not really wanting a reasoned response, were you, your provocatively worded post having little constructive value?
Well, these are by no means cutting edge games, but I use WINE to run StarCraft and WarCraft 3. I cannot run them smoothly in Vista for some reason, and yet they run really nicely in WINE.
Specifically, Warcraft 3 is really laggy at times at 1024×768 in Vista but runs smashingly at the same res in WINE.
What does it mean? Who knows.
Your Results May Vary.
This doesn’t suprise me. We found running several apps under wine was usefully faster than on Windows alone. It is amazing and a great demonstration of open source engineering.
Well done, I say. Microsoft, take note.
I am curious about what would happen if the comparison was between wine and Windows Vista and if Cedega was included also.
well consider the fact that some of the benchmarks run at half speed on ubuntu with wine. Yes Vista is slightly slower than XP on older games but cedega still doesn’t get anywhere near the native direct x implementation. Oh and on top of that Cedega has no change of running direct x 10+ games … so comparison of the proposed configurations is completely pointless. Get over it direct x was designed for windows and if you want to use programs that have implemented it you HAVE TO use the OS as well. The problem with linux is not that direct x games run slower than on windows ( or don’t run at all ). The problem is that the few OpenGL games that exist hardly run on linux and even when they do the performance is horrible compared to windows. Now that is something to rave about … but I guess that’s what you get when you use ancient drivers …
The problem is that the few OpenGL games that exist hardly run on linux and even when they do the performance is horrible compared to windows.
Might want to be careful with blanket statements like that. Take the Unreal family for example: On older systems it used to run better on Linux than on Windows, and there’s virtually no difference at all on newer systems.
Well, it seems that myth about Wine being fast and capable Windows replacement for gaming is definitely BUSTED.
Are you agree width me, Jamie ?
😉
Yah. Busted.
:-[)
Edited 2007-10-21 13:14
Windows compatibility of Wine is still so bad that it is virtually useless except for the very few windows apps that it is optimized to support and those apps are imho a very poor choice, because those are the apps that have good oss alternatives (internet explorer, MS Office, Photoshop).
I could add 40tude Dialog newsreader to that list. Beside being a PC gamer I am addicted to Usenet in good old “client” way. IMHO there is no really comparable newsreader in Linux environment to Dialog. Claws Mail is good in functions and scoring, but is also very slow and cannot handle more than 10.000 articles in one newsgroup, even on my 3200 Pentium in EMT64 mode.
Pan is fast and somehow similar to Dialog, but falls behind in scoring mechanisms.
Dialog runs almost acceptable under Wine, but there are still some issues, especially width windows resizing and some other stuff.
I did not try to run Dialog on latest Wine, but I have experiences width one from Ubuntu 7.04 repos.
I know that feeling of really wanting to use your favorite app, but i have given up on that a long time ago and now just use the available Linux alternatives.
I could live without games on Linux, but there are some apps that i need that don’t have any Linux alternative at all and none of those runs usable in Wine and i stopped believing they ever will.
I could live without games on Linux, but there are some apps that i need that don’t have any Linux alternative at all and none of those runs usable in Wine and i stopped believing they ever will.
You haven’t even named these apps, and I’m guessing you haven’t even filed bugs. How are wine developers supposed to help you out?
Simply not true, I’ve had my far share of games running in WINE just great, the point being they are playable and thats the goal. Tomb Raider Anniversary(picking one for example) plays just about flawless and smooth.
That’s because once you get above 30 FPS, it doesn’t matter much anymore, and above 60 FPS people can’t even tell the difference. A game running at 200 FPS will not appear smoother than one running at 100 FPS…
As a reference, movies are projected at 48 FPS (each frame is shown twice) and no one complains about them being “laggy”…
In other words, as soon as you hit 30 FPS, it’s “good enough”, and if you get 60 FPS, then it’s “as good as it gets”.
Thats where *virtually* comes into the game. You wouldn’t spend 50$ (or whatever games cost where you live) on a game on the tiny chance that it might probably run playable. Even if it runs on other Distributions doesn’t even give you the certainty that it will run on your Distribution. Even the games that have a Platinum rating on winehq often don’t run, because they where only tested with pirated copies. Diablo 3 for example only runs in pirated version.
Not that i care that much for games… i’d be happy if the 3d Apps that i need would work.
I’m curious, what would replace Photoshop. The GIMP although a good program by itself is no way a replacement for photoshop.
It’s good enough for the person who comes and buys a computer with Ubuntu on it, Photoshop is way to advanced for them. The GIMP is a image editor that dont get enough credit for what it does.
Photoshop is the cool application to have even though they mostly have no clue how to use it’s features, if you want to pay £300-£400 on it for cropping photos then got right a head.
Edited 2007-10-21 21:59
That depends on what you are doing with it. I found usability increased a lot with 2.4 and imho will now suffice for most people.
Do you mean the 2.4 release candidates? 2.4 has not been released yet. Improved usability would be quite welcome! 🙂
Yes, i use the rc3 and found that those things that made working with gimp so slow are much better now and i didn’t had a crash so far. I don’t even mind the lots-of-windows interface anymore.
I’ve been using Pixel for about 6 months now and it’s been a good replacement for me. It’s not free, but the price is fair, with the added benefit that it’s cross-platform and all variants are included in the price. Well worth a look…
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12
I wasn’t expecting to see terribly good performance but it would have been good to see some baseline native benchmarks too just to make sure both systems are on par with a common test with no bottlenecks, Q3 maybe.
The CPU performance difference is very interesting, i’d expect the opposite so even as D3D support improves in mainstream wine the CPU performance should remain more efficient than native windows.
I agree that it would be interesting to get Cedega and Codeweavers crossover running on there, maybe even the new beta of VMWare workstation too, to get a definitive comparison.
So, performance isn’t great but at the same time doesn’t suck that severely for tasks which wine is far from optimised for, it’s not too terrible.
Personally, I don’t care that much about WINE. I have it installed. I even used it the other day because some idiot California government agency posted a technical document as a PDF inside a self-extracting EXE. It worked fine.
And if Phoronix’s habit of proving ad nauseum that Xorg/DRM drivers perform half as well as Windows drivers eventually leads to the graphics vendors doing something about it, all the power to them.
However, by far the most interesting and impressive part of this article is the link to another article on the SplashTop feature of the Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard. It’s a stripped-down Linux-based graphical desktop environment with Firefox, Flash, and Skype that runs in the BIOS, complete with encrypted 802.11abgn support. You can’t access the hard disk or play CD/DVD media, but it seems surprisingly well done for a first iteration.
What kind of performance was this guy expecting?
Wine is an API implementation but there isn’t a DirectX clone. Wine has an on-the-fly DirectX to OpenGL API translator for that.
That is where the massive loss of performance is coming from. Unoptimized code in some areas might not help either.
Benchmarks don’t mean much when Wine and it’s derivative products are the only solutions outside virtualization with 2D/3D acceleration support.
The performance is generally reasonable. Once you know Wine supports a game, ensure the system significantly exceeds the minimum requirements for smooth game play.
If you bought a $5,000 gaming PC and expect to squeeze every percent of framerate out of a game, try Windows or native OpenGL Linux games.
Edited 2007-10-21 15:15
5000 dollars? Does that come with a diamond-coated chassis?
You can already have a killer machine for $3000 and below.
What you say about the FPS is very true though, in my experience.
I can’t find information how the demo rendered on linux (or it has been already perfectly rendered for a long time?)
I am kind of tired of these A vs B benchmarks. Never trust a benchmark that you havent done yourself. We all know that Linux performs at least as good as any other “big” OS (if not better).
And I don’t really see the point of WINE either. Is there really THE killer application that does not have a counterpart linux-side? And I am talking of home-use here (so dont start with Photoshop). And don’t tell me anyone is seriously gaming on WINE. It is an interesting project from a technical point but pretty useless. Either you switch to Linux or you don’t.
Cheers!
There are no killer applications. “The Killer Application” concept is a myth.
Care to explain that statement some more?
What about things like Dreamweaver, Aperture, Cubase, Cakewalk, Final Cut, … ?
Care to explain how these are killer applications? Neither of those are use by Joe Average. Sure, they’re good applications in their field but neither are used by the majority of computer users.
Ehm, they might be killer applications for that particular target group. If said persons wanted to change to another OS, what software would they switch too?
Right, in that target group. I can find killer apps for equally small groups that has no suitable Windows (or OSX etc) counterpart.
So “killer apps” (I really don’t like that sales drone term) are really just important for small, homogeneous groups instead of for the computer users in general.
“So killer apps’ (I really don’t like that sales drone term) are really just important for small, homogeneous groups instead of for the computer users in general.”
True, true… but you can hardly call ‘web designers’ or ‘audio professionals’ a small group… well I guess you can in the grand scheme of things. I’m just saying these groups are not unimportant if an OS wants to attract more users.
I don’t like the term either, just as I dislike the term ‘users’… seems little respectful, wouldn’t know what else to call them though.
While alot of people put alot of emphasis on frames per second counting, it must be said that now days, this is pretty much only marketing hype..
The human eye can only perceive so much, and monitors can only output so fast.
Motion picture, while only low resolution compared to a PC monitor generally gets filmed at 24 FPS and sometimes 30 and 60 FPS.
A 60Hz monitor refreshes 60 times per second, a 75Hz Monitor refreshes 75 times per second, meaning that they redraw themselves only that often, and for a video card to run faster then the refresh of the monitor in FPS means that there are simply scenes you never get to see.
When I looked at those benchmarks, I do not look for ‘top dog’ scoring, I look for useability, and all I can say is, most of the Ubuntu scores – even the ones that the graph makes ‘look’ terrible are going to be a very good gaming experience.
Indeed, but gamers are a different breed. If it says on the box of the graphics card that the games run better and faster and you die less, they will buy it.
It is the same thing for digital camera users. Here is a site that explains it in camera terms..
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/mpmyth.htm
True, my 5.1 megapixel digital camera creams most 7-8-9-10 megapixel cameras when it comes to image quality
I’m (somewhat) a gamer but I pretty much only play single-player games… yet the visual quality of games when comparing two cards (my ‘old’ 6600GT 256mb and my new 8800GTS 640mb) is much better; old(er) games tend to play smoother too.
While the 60+ framehunt is pointless indeed, just look at those benchmark results. Those are for *ancient* games, and results are horrible. Now, noone cares if a game runs at 30fps on wine instead of 100fps on Windows, because both mean playable. Now if you take a game that isn’t that old, we quite probably are talking 10fps on Wine compared to 30 fps on Windows, and that simply means non-playable on wine but playable on Windows. Also, heavy shader usage quite likely will make those numbers even worse and no one wants to buy a high end Box to play games that you probably can’t even buy as budget anymore.
So i can’t find any enthusiasm about the fact that the cpu benchmarks came out little better, because that is the one that matters the least these days.
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1. Good games don’t rust or rot. Quake 1 is as enjoyable as it ever was.
2. Not all modern games stress modern hardware to the limit. In fact, the vast majority don’t.
3. Wine’s performance on modern games is an unknown until someone does some benchmarks. I would be hesitant to guess at the results.
No one is claiming that Wine is a hardcore gamer’s dream come true. All it has to be is good enough to let most people play most of the games they want to play.
Which means, from a compatibility standpoint, that Cedega is probably a better choice than vanilla Wine for gaming. On that note, does anyone have a comparison of Cedega vs vanilla Wine’s performance? Is there any difference?
“1. Good games don’t rust or rot. Quake 1 is as enjoyable as it ever was.”
True… I was running Prince of Persia 1 under Wine yesterday. Lots of fun even though once in a while there are some small lighting/clipping problems; this plays near-perfect. As well as Secret Files Tunguska; which plays perfect.
“2. Not all modern games stress modern hardware to the limit. In fact, the vast majority don’t.”
A couple do though, at least if you want the best quality.
“3. Wine’s performance on modern games is an unknown until someone does some benchmarks. I would be hesitant to guess at the results.”
I would not call the Phoronix tests much of a benchmark either… it’s more of an ‘indication’ for me.
“No one is claiming that Wine is a hardcore gamer’s dream come true. All it has to be is good enough to let most people play most of the games they want to play.”
True this. As for me, I mostly play Adventure games, which generally do not need lotsa Oomph in the hardware.
“Which means, from a compatibility standpoint, that Cedega is probably a better choice than vanilla Wine for gaming. On that note, does anyone have a comparison of Cedega vs vanilla Wine’s performance? Is there any difference?”
This would be interesting, I agree.
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I just recently had a lot of fun with “Flight of the Amazon Queen” and “Beneath a Steel Sky”. Oldies but goodies which run under the OSS ScummVM engine and which have distributable game data. Very clever and witty little adventure games.[1] And they were new to me! 🙂
The engine and game data are available for Fedora and Ubuntu from the usual repos, and no doubt other distros include them, as well. Enjoy! 🙂
[1] Some of the puzzles are really tough, though!
Too late, I played them a long time ago… on Linux
Day Of The Tentacle is great too. Not sure if you can get it free legally (as you can with the 2 you mentioned), I think so but not sure.
Here are some other games you can play with SCUMMVM engine (according to the forums, you might be taking your chances when you actually try them):
Loom
Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis
Monkey Island 1-3
Day of the Tentacle
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Full Throttle
Also Gabriel Knight II works great under Wine. Great game, although I liked GK1: Sins of The Fathers the best.
Edited 2007-10-23 06:27
true, but if you’re getting an average of 30fps that probably means it dropped into the noticeable range a handful of times, and that’s what you’re trying to avoid.
the push for higher and higher FPSes is in reality more of a push to lower the chances of dipping into that noticeable range of <25fps or so.
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the push for higher and higher FPSes is in reality more of a push to lower the chances of dipping into that noticeable range of <25fps or so.
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Seems like an inefficient way to do that. What if the driver was made smarter, so that if a frame takes too long to render, it can back off on quality on the next one to keep the frame rate above 25? That way, the player gets the best quality possible that still keeps the framerate acceptable at all times.
Never saw that one coming…..
as unfair as compare a woman with a transexual…
sorry I can not think in a best analogy.
sorry my english.
And all i can say is WOW. I way dying to try out the etqw beta. I had already tried to run in under windows XP with the newest nvidia drivers for my 6600GT- and performance ways uggh…sluggish…ie. bareley playable fps(20-25) with all of the options turned low/minimum-this after using nvtune to optimize my AthlonX2 w/1GB DDR2 and 530 GB HDs (Sata/IDE)-the Asus A8N SLI-Premium board uses almost all nvidia parts(except for audio).
I then got etqw beta running under wine on the same machine. Unfortunately I could not do so on my 64bit Gentoo install, I expect it was a 64bit bug, I had to switch to my older 32bit install. Suddenly I got 40-50 fps with the settings turned on high…..obviously such results will vary greatly from one game to the next, from one wine version to the next and from one graphic card to the next. But making a general claim -Wine sucks for games, is pretty obviously false, particularly given the hundreds of thousands of Linux Wine game players.