Wine CXGames and Windows 7 Performance Comparison

Written by Tom Wickline

Friday, 08 January 2010 11:39

I blog more than a little about Wine software. In the past I have run benchmarks between the most current pieces of Wine technology out there and how they compare with each other. However one important question many gamers have when looking to game on Linux is not so much how do the different Wine technologies compare with each other so much as how do they perform compared with the program(s) running natively on Windows? Since I finally installed Windows 7 I figured I would take a look into just how well my favorite non-emulators stack up against the native platform for a few 3D applications.

The Tests: I ran both a synthetic benchmark (3D Mark 2001se) as well as some actual game applications (TF2, L4D, & L4D2). Each test was run several times under Wine/CXGames/Windows to ensure that the scores are as accurate as possible.

The Hardware: While my hardware is not fastest in the world it is (as of posting this) relatively new and decently quick. Processor - Intel p9700 2.8ghz Dual Core, RAM - 4gigs of DDR3, Video Card: nVidia 260m with 1gig DDR3 dedicated memory.

Operating Systems and Drivers: Ubuntu 9.10, running the nVidia 190.53 driver & Windows 7, running the nVidia 195.62 driver

The Wine Software: Wine version 1.1.35 (with extra fonts and the d3dx9 packages installed via Winetricks) and CXGames 8.1.4 - both of these are the latest versions as of my posting this.

The Results:

3D Mark 2001 SE