[gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Robert Persson]

I am finding that with one particular windows application running under wine 
the graphics are incredibly slow. My question is: Is this something to do 
with wine that I just have to live with, or could it be connected to other 
things on my system, such as the xserver?

The app in question is scribe, a database manager for historians created in 
filemaker pro v.8. None of the problems I am having with it occur when I use 
the wine/reactos notepad (the only other wine application I could locate 
easily that involves typing).

The problems are:

1. Typed text gets to the screen pretty slowly - 200 characters per second or 
so. However pasted text appears more or less instantly.

2. Windows are drawn very slowly - which is pretty annoying because scribe 
opens and shuts a lot of windows.

3. when scribe starts, a considerable part of the screen (both inside and 
outside the application windows) ends up covered in black rectangles. These 
disappear when something is dragged over them or a button underneath them is 
clicked. 

4. There is a slowdown in opengl which persists even when scribe and all 
wine-related processes have terminated. Before starting scribe glxgears will 
clock around 960 fps, whereas afterwards it will only clock up 750 fps or so.


I am using the following versions of things:
x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.99.15-r4
app-emulation/wine-0.9.8-r1
x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.22.5 

Thanks
Robert


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Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...


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Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...

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Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Holly Bostick]

Robert Persson schreef:
> I am finding that with one particular windows application running
> under wine the graphics are incredibly slow. My question is: Is this
> something to do with wine that I just have to live with, or could it
> be connected to other things on my system, such as the xserver?
> 
<snip>
> 
> The problems are:
> 
> 1. Typed text gets to the screen pretty slowly - 200 characters per
> second or so. However pasted text appears more or less instantly.
> 
> 2. Windows are drawn very slowly - which is pretty annoying because
> scribe opens and shuts a lot of windows.
> 
> 3. when scribe starts, a considerable part of the screen (both inside
> and outside the application windows) ends up covered in black
> rectangles. These disappear when something is dragged over them or a
> button underneath them is clicked.
> 
> 4. There is a slowdown in opengl which persists even when scribe and
> all wine-related processes have terminated. Before starting scribe
> glxgears will clock around 960 fps, whereas afterwards it will only
> clock up 750 fps or so.
> 
> 
> I am using the following versions of things: 
> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.99.15-r4 app-emulation/wine-0.9.8-r1 
> x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.22.5
> 
> 
 Robert, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there's a high chance
that you have just run into one of the reasons that people say the ATI
drivers "suck".

I am also an ATI user, and to be flatly honest, there are some things
(effects, usually bad ones) that you *will* get when using an ATI card
under Wine or Cedega that you *won't* get while using another brand of
video card (not even specifically nVidia, but really just any other
brand with decent drivers). I have several programs that I run under
Wine/Cedega that behave oddly or run significantly slower than reports
of that same program running with nVidia cards. Because the drivers
really are not good, and don't do what they are supposed to/expected to
in many respects, for one, and because the driver team has not yet
reached the point where they're optimizing for speed (they're trying to
get the drivers stable first), for another.

So if you have another brand of video card available to you, I would
suggest you give it a whirl and see if the problem persists. It may not.

That said, I suspect you do have an issue with your X server as well...
the 6.8.99-blahblahblah series is buggy and unmaintained. I tried it
myself and had even more problems than I did with 6.8.2-r6, which I
reverted to. So the xserver version you're using may well be
excaberating the problems the drivers already have.

I am (at this very moment, actually) upgrading to Xorg 7.0, after which
I'm going to enable the r300 drivers (I have a 9800SE), and if those
don't help, I'm going to see if the fglrx drivers work better under 7.0
than under 6.8.2. If not, I'm buying an nVidia card (my birthday is
coming, and I am just sick of this after nearly two years; I've had
enough of the "does not work with ATI cards" list on the Cedega Release
notes).

It's an option to take under serious consideration (upgrading to 7.0 and
switching to the open source drivers). I'll keep you posted on my
progress -- meaning, if Wine seems to work better under these conditions.

Also consider that Wine is doing a lot of work as they close in on 1.0
(which might be as soon as April if the release schedule holds up), and
the devs are specifically working on ATI issues (I lurk on wine-dev, and
some of the devs working on wine3d and direct x do have ATI cards). Now
I'm sure that scribe doesn't use d3d or OGL (though it might, for all I
know), but surely any work on the directx backend will have some effect
on things like draw speed and rendering. So there's hope from that end
as well.

In any case, hope this helps to some extent.

Holly
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Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Jason Weisberger]

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First off, I'm fairly certain that this application doesn't use OpenGL, so
that will not be of any concern, however it seems that if you have an ATI
card, you'd want to use the proprietary drivers from the ATI website to
increase your performance.  This would increase your 2D performance as
well.  I haven't heard about any specific slowness related to ATI cards
running 2D applications, so it might be a bug in Wine itself.  Please visit
the WineHQ.org website and submit a bugzilla report to see what they can
come up with.  Even if they don't know right away, the problem is noted and
they can work on it in the future.

Thanks!
JBDubbs

On 3/2/06, Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl> wrote:
>
> Robert Persson schreef:
> > I am finding that with one particular windows application running
> > under wine the graphics are incredibly slow. My question is: Is this
> > something to do with wine that I just have to live with, or could it
> > be connected to other things on my system, such as the xserver?
> >
> <snip>
> >
> > The problems are:
> >
> > 1. Typed text gets to the screen pretty slowly - 200 characters per
> > second or so. However pasted text appears more or less instantly.
> >
> > 2. Windows are drawn very slowly - which is pretty annoying because
> > scribe opens and shuts a lot of windows.
> >
> > 3. when scribe starts, a considerable part of the screen (both inside
> > and outside the application windows) ends up covered in black
> > rectangles. These disappear when something is dragged over them or a
> > button underneath them is clicked.
> >
> > 4. There is a slowdown in opengl which persists even when scribe and
> > all wine-related processes have terminated. Before starting scribe
> > glxgears will clock around 960 fps, whereas afterwards it will only
> > clock up 750 fps or so.
> >
> >
> > I am using the following versions of things:
> > x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.99.15-r4 app-emulation/wine-0.9.8-r1
> > x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.22.5
> >
> >
> Robert, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there's a high chance
> that you have just run into one of the reasons that people say the ATI
> drivers "suck".
>
> I am also an ATI user, and to be flatly honest, there are some things
> (effects, usually bad ones) that you *will* get when using an ATI card
> under Wine or Cedega that you *won't* get while using another brand of
> video card (not even specifically nVidia, but really just any other
> brand with decent drivers). I have several programs that I run under
> Wine/Cedega that behave oddly or run significantly slower than reports
> of that same program running with nVidia cards. Because the drivers
> really are not good, and don't do what they are supposed to/expected to
> in many respects, for one, and because the driver team has not yet
> reached the point where they're optimizing for speed (they're trying to
> get the drivers stable first), for another.
>
> So if you have another brand of video card available to you, I would
> suggest you give it a whirl and see if the problem persists. It may not.
>
> That said, I suspect you do have an issue with your X server as well...
> the 6.8.99-blahblahblah series is buggy and unmaintained. I tried it
> myself and had even more problems than I did with 6.8.2-r6, which I
> reverted to. So the xserver version you're using may well be
> excaberating the problems the drivers already have.
>
> I am (at this very moment, actually) upgrading to Xorg 7.0, after which
> I'm going to enable the r300 drivers (I have a 9800SE), and if those
> don't help, I'm going to see if the fglrx drivers work better under 7.0
> than under 6.8.2. If not, I'm buying an nVidia card (my birthday is
> coming, and I am just sick of this after nearly two years; I've had
> enough of the "does not work with ATI cards" list on the Cedega Release
> notes).
>
> It's an option to take under serious consideration (upgrading to 7.0 and
> switching to the open source drivers). I'll keep you posted on my
> progress -- meaning, if Wine seems to work better under these conditions.
>
> Also consider that Wine is doing a lot of work as they close in on 1.0
> (which might be as soon as April if the release schedule holds up), and
> the devs are specifically working on ATI issues (I lurk on wine-dev, and
> some of the devs working on wine3d and direct x do have ATI cards). Now
> I'm sure that scribe doesn't use d3d or OGL (though it might, for all I
> know), but surely any work on the directx backend will have some effect
> on things like draw speed and rendering. So there's hope from that end
> as well.
>
> In any case, hope this helps to some extent.
>
> Holly
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


--
Jason Weisberger
jbdubbs@gmail.com

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Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Robert Persson]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 04:58 Holly Bostick was like:
>  Robert, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there's a high chance
> that you have just run into one of the reasons that people say the ATI
> drivers "suck".

Hee hee.  I'm not 100% surprised.

My CAD$50 from my mother-in-law for my birthday is either 1/3 of a microphone 
or 1/4 of a laser printer. I'm already in an agony of indecision about it 
all. I think the nvidia card will have to wait.

On the other hand I do have a voodoo banshee pci card. It's currently disabled 
because I don't know how to configure X to use both it and the ati drivers. 
If I could get it going might I be able to open those awkward programs on the 
second monitor?

And can I, in fact, actually get a multi-head setup mixing ati and x.org 
drivers? I tried in the past and failed. I'm unsure about how to lay out the 
xorg.conf because the radeon 9200se is itself a multi-head card (i.e. vga and 
tv out).

Anyway, many thanks, Holly, for a very useful and informative reply.

Robert



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Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...


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Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Robert Persson]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 08:08 Jason Weisberger was like:
> First off, I'm fairly certain that this application doesn't use OpenGL, so
> that will not be of any concern, however it seems that if you have an ATI
> card, you'd want to use the proprietary drivers from the ATI website to
> increase your performance.  This would increase your 2D performance as
> well.  I haven't heard about any specific slowness related to ATI cards
> running 2D applications, so it might be a bug in Wine itself.  Please visit
> the WineHQ.org website and submit a bugzilla report to see what they can
> come up with.  Even if they don't know right away, the problem is noted and
> they can work on it in the future.

I am actually using the ati driver. Overall it has been an improvement on the 
x.org radeon driver, but, as Holly said, it still sucks a lot of the time. 
The x.org driver may be slow and hopeless at 3D, but it is reliable in other 
ways.

I may try messing about with my x.org versions again. It worked before when 
another wine application was playing up in a similar way. That was what 
prompted me to upgrade to my current version.

Robert
-- 
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Conspiracy Bears:
Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...


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Re: [gentoo-user] opengl (?) weirdness in wine

[Robert Persson]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 04:58 Holly Bostick was like:
> I am (at this very moment, actually) upgrading to Xorg 7.0, after which
> I'm going to enable the r300 drivers (I have a 9800SE), and if those
> don't help, I'm going to see if the fglrx drivers work better under 7.0
> than under 6.8.2.

I have just upgraded to X.org 7.0 and there is still a problem (using fglrx) 
with black rectangles, although not as bad. However the slow typing problem 
has become much less severe, which means (Hooray!) that Scribe under wine is 
now usable.

While I was waiting to get the new xorg version running I tried to run the 
program remotely using Apple X11 (Panther version) on a clapped out 
Wallstreet II Powerbook. It was hard to see exactly what was going on with 
speed because of an unrelated problem to do with fonts, but it certainly 
looked like the boxes were getting drawn very slowly indeed. As Apple X11 is 
based on an earlier version of XFree86, this suggests that the slow screen 
rendering problem was with the version of XFree/X.org used, rather than with 
fglrx as such.

Any many thanks, Holly, for showing me the way.

Robert
-- 
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Conspiracy Bears:
Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...

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