Hacker News Reader

Comment by eahman05 | Hacker News Reader

If you use Wine to play DirectX 9 games, try the d3d9 fork. It's a fork with patches that give a much increased performance with DirectX 9 games which aren't merged into the Wine mainline because of the usual bikeshedding reasons. I use it to play WoW and I get better performance than on Windows.

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-emulation/wine-d3d9

View on HN

> I get better performance than on Windows

as anecdotal as it might be, I used to get better performance from wine'd dwarf fortress than with it's osx port, which is interesting I guess.

I don’t know how it is today but Microsofts compiler used to produce much better code than the free compilers used on Linux and Mac OSX

Just because the compiler is good, doesn't mean the OS's CPU scheduler is any good. Nor does it mean the graphics drivers for that OS are any good. Same for the filesystem. etc.

I’m not sure how that has anything to do with the difference in performance between running the Windows version on OSX and running the OSX version on OSX.

clang is doing pretty nicely compared to MSVC these days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17504197

That’s great but Dwarf Fortress is a 2006 game, It was probably compiled using gcc.

Back in the days of vanilla... WoW client has built-in native OpenGL support and was working perfectly under Wine.

BTW. Same with W3

I don't know why it is in my case, but I suspect it's because Wine and/or the AMD drivers on Linux don't implement as many visual effects as there are on Windows, which makes the game easier on the GPU.

I think that wine also used to drop silently shaders/features that couldn't emulate, so each single frame is easier for the gpu.

Borderlands 2 is known for running better on wine than on Windows. IIRC the reason was the filesystems (ext4 vs ntfs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com