Arch Linux

janvaletin

Member

Registered: 2011-07-30

Posts: 39

WINE extremely slow

Howdy, y'all.

I'm having trouble getting WINE to run some games properly. They run extremely slow. I'll admit that my hardware has never been exceptionally powerful, but these are games that I was running in Windows 7 without any issues (Morrowind and Painkiller).

The games are running at 1-3 FPS. I am not sure what is going on here. Does anybody know what might be going on?

Haptic

Member

Registered: 2009-09-03

Posts: 149

Re: WINE extremely slow

You should expect a performance downgrade from windows to wine. Also, what graphics driver are you using? If you have radeon/nividia and are using the open source drivers, you will suffer anothere big performance downgrade.

yawns

Member

Registered: 2010-05-31

Posts: 68

Re: WINE extremely slow

What hardware are you working with?

I found all the tweaks and hoops necessary to get Game X working well in Wine to be too much of a hassle, and instead bought Crossover:

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/

It's free to try so you can test it out and see if it works for your computer/games or not. It's updated pretty regularly, they jump on stuff that gets broken by updates, and the user support is pretty good, too.

I run TF2 and Morrowind without any trouble on a pretty weak system:

AMD Athlon II X2 240, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7950 GT (nvidia drivers).

Here is an old thread I started on the subject, which also suggests a free alternative called PlayOnLinux:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=98983

Edit: For the record, I don't notice any performance decrease between what I saw in Windows and what I get now.

Last edited by yawns (2011-08-07 22:08:08)

janvaletin

Member

Registered: 2011-07-30

Posts: 39

Re: WINE extremely slow

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T6500  @ 2.10GHz, 4 GB RAM. integrated graphics processor.

I know it's not great, but I was able to run Morrowind and Painkiller just fine in Windows. If I recall correctly, Morrowind worked OK for a while in Kubuntu, then behaved the same way. I know that WINE doesn't have the same performance, but from what I've read, it's not supposed to be this dramatic.

I am actually getting a new computer soon since my laptop is actually starting to fall apart (lid cracking for the 2nd time), but I'd rather not resort to dual-booting with Windows.

EDIT: I wanted to add that the slowness I see is present everywhere throughout the game, including simple things like the game's starting menu.

Last edited by janvaletin (2011-08-08 02:43:09)

SataMaxx

Member

Registered: 2011-08-07

Posts: 25

Re: WINE extremely slow

Is it just Morrowind that is being slow, or any other game played in wine ?
If it was running fine on that same computer using wine before, it might be because of your wine version. Check on http://appdb.winehq.org/ if people can get it working with the same version as you, or which version is the most suited.
You can also try installing it using PlayOnLinux which will choose the most adapted wine version and configuration tweaks.
If all games are now slow on wine, the problem might be elsewhere, in wine configuration (then using PlayOnLinux should fix it as it creates wine prefixes, little sandboxes for each game), or maybe something to do with your videocard drivers.
If you are running compiz, that might also be the source of a slowdown, as both compiz and wine will compete over grabbing the display. Try running a different window manager (you can easily start a new graphic session parallel to your desktop with this command :

$xinit /usr/bin/twm -- :1

which will open a twm session with basic window management. You can switch back and forth between sessions with Ctrl-Alt-F7/F8.

Last edited by SataMaxx (2011-08-08 04:51:52)

Enverex

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-06-13

Posts: 159

Website

Re: WINE extremely slow

Check the terminal. A framerate that low sounds like it's falling back to software rendering. Wine will tell you (in the terminal output) if anything has gone horribly wrong.

I have no issues playing Morrowind on my onboard Intel at 1920x1080 with all settings maxed.

hasufell

Member

Registered: 2009-06-20

Posts: 38

Re: WINE extremely slow

you got an IGP?

how do native games like Nexuiz or Warsow behave?

Enverex

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-06-13

Posts: 159

Website

Re: WINE extremely slow

Sorry for not responding, didn't get an email notification.

Drivers for the new Sandybridge graphics can be sketchy at times but it's much, much more powerful than previous Intel integrated chipsets. I've not tried Warsow but I get decent framerates on Nexuiz. I can get you a bench when I get back to that machine. I got an average of 74fps on Medium at 1024x768 last time I tested if I remember correctly.

The chipset is capable of much more but as I said, the drivers are pretty bad at the moment (GLSL support is almost non-existent from what I've seen).