Linux Gaming: Native vs. Wine vs. Windows 7 Performance

"Linux gaming has a bright future ahead with the forthcoming Unigine games, successful indie campaigns, and many other Linux-native game titles being just out on the horizon. Right now though if you are a dedicated PC gamer looking to satisfy your entertainment appetite under Linux, more than likely you find yourself using the Wine program so that you can run many Windows programs under Linux. What is the performance impact though of using this method? In this article, we have a couple benchmarks comparing the performance of Wine, native Linux game binaries, and the native Microsoft Windows 7 Professional performance.

"With this testing we ran eight games/benchmarks natively under Ubuntu 10.10, the Windows binaries under the stable Wine 1.2.1, the Windows binaries under the Wine 1.3.9 development snapshot, and then finally under Microsoft Windows 7 Professional. The test profiles used had included OpenArena, Urban Terror, Warsow, Nexuiz, Lightsmark, Unigine Sanctuary, Unigine Tropics, and Unigine Heaven. The OpenGL renderer was used with all of them. With each of them, they were tested at 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, and 2560 x 1600 to look at the impact that the resolution scaling has on the overall performance in these different areas."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Processor Whispers: About 16 and 17-core processors(Dec 07, 2010)
• The High Road to HPC Tools: Lunch with Intel’s James Reinders(Dec 07, 2010)
• Daily Linux Kernel Benchmarks For A Year(Dec 06, 2010)
• Testing farm pushes real-time Linux into the mainstream(Nov 23, 2010)
• Benchmarks Of Debian Etch, Lenny & Squeeze(Nov 18, 2010)