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.”

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