177.70 (BETA) WINE Slowness

[rnejdl]

I am testing the new 177.70 beta driver and have found that it significantly improves KDE4 performance and stability. What I have run into is this:

When playing movies in mplayer, using the nv driver is choppy and has black boxes throughout it when using the desktop effects in KDE4. Changing the driver to gl2 solves this. I'm not sure if this is the recommended solution but it works for me.

In WINE, I am having absolutely horrid performance with opengl rendering of direct x. Playing Heroes of Might and Magic IV, it just crawls at around 2 frames a second in battle. Downgrading wine had no effect. I know this ran smoothly in previous wine and previous nvidia driver but have not had time to test the driver.

Any suggestions or is this something others are seeing? I spoke to some other people on Linux and they said that their glxgears frame rate dropped dramatically with this driver so it doesn't seem that this is completely unknown. For them, .68 does not have this issue.

Thanks!
Rusty Nejdl

[rnejdl]

A few more things I have found:

wine 1.0 and wine 1.1.4 both perform poorly.

the 173.14.12 driver seemed to do a bit better in wine but not very well at all.

GLXGears performs at around 10800 fps in both drivers.

When I enable the desktop effects of KDE4, the frame rate drops to less than 5000 fps in glxgears.

I haven't tested KDE3 with this yet, but I am wondering if it will do better because at one point back here, this all ran fine.

As far as relevant parts of xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
#Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
#Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
Option "PixmapCacheSize" "2000000"
Option "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"
EndSection

InitialPixmapPlacement set to 1,2,3,4 and had no effect on wine performance although drastic changes to KDE performance. 2 seems to be the best for me.

Thanks!
Rusty Nejdl

[olivier69]

Well, I always had problems running 3D accelerated apps with desktop effects (with beryl or compiz, and older nvidia drivers). I heard games under Windows Vista perform less well when desktop effects are enabled, too. So I just disable desktop effects before launching games under FreeBSD.

Do you have problems with 177.70 + wine without desktop effects, or do you have problems only when destop effects are disabled ?

[rnejdl]

I tested this with and without desktop effects and found no noticeable difference. I also tested back on KDE 3 and found performance poor there. I don't know when this got so slow but everything is quite fast and zippy except for direct x (HOMM4) in WINE. World of Padman and Q3 run really fast at 1280x1024.

Rusty Nejdl

[zBeeble42]

I have had to use the 'gl2' mplayer driver to get acceptable performance using any of the 177 series. My XPS-1730 laptop has 8700M-SLI in it.