Poor framerate using wine

I finally got my favorite "Zusi" train simulator game running via wine. Unfortunately the framerate is very poor; it is about 3-6 fps even on a quite simple track layout . Running the same game and the same scenery on my desktop PC under Windows XP the framerate is bigger than 40 fps, and my PC is quite old (AMD Athlon 2000+ @ 1666MHz, 512MB RAM, NVIDIA fx 5200 graphic).

Of course, the AAO 110 L is not a "gaming machine", but the performance should be comparable to a 6 years old desktop PC. What is the reason for the poor framerate under wine? How can I tune my AAO to achieve a better performance?

Greetings

Arne

 

I made a thread about the original Age of Empires not running well.

Frustrating, but it's just not good enough for games. :cry:

 

Yes it does sound strange that it runs much slower on similar hardware. I'd put it down to the graphics card in your desktop is a dedicated card rather than the integrated gma's and also the CPU. Although it has a very similar clock speed the atom was designed to favour power over performance (or so I've heard).

 

I finally found some time to check the framerates of the "Zusi" train simulator game on different hardware:

1.) Acer Aspire One A110L, Zusi running via Wine: 3-6 fps
2.) My old office PC (AMD Athlon 2000+ @ 1666MHz, 512MB RAM, NVIDIA fx 5200 graphic), Zusi running under Windows XP: 32 fps
3.) My old office PC (AMD Athlon 2000+ @ 1666MHz, 512MB RAM, NVIDIA fx 5200 graphic), Zusi running via Wine: 11 fps

So it seems that the framerate is reduced by a factor of 3 by Wine, but the larger loss in framerate is cause by the hardware of the AAO. Does this match your experiences?

Greetings

Arne

 

You are comparing apples and oranges. Native performance under XP against an emulation/translation layer like Wine - Wine performance will allways be lower than native Windows performance, especially with regards to graphics. Thats the cost of not running the program under native conditions.

I'm pretty sure that you'd see quite similar hits in fps, if you boot your Desktop machine up in Linux, and run your train sim under Wine there.

Try to install XP on your AAO, then run the train simulator natively on the AAO. You'll be amazed over the difference.
I can see they have a demo version available - I'll just reboot to windows XP on my AAO A110, download and install it, then check the fps and revert back.


Edit: With all the 3D settings in the Intel Driver set to the max, I get between 16 and 21 fps on the first run of the demo. With all 3D settings in the Intel driver set to default values, I get between 20 and 38 fps on the first run in the demo.

That fits with the estimate that the cpu power of the 1.6 Ghz Atom is about equal to a Celeron/Pentium3 at half the frequency.

 

Many thanks for your reply and for your work installing the demo of "Zusi" and running it to tell me the performance on the AAO under Windows XP. Since I only have an A110 with the small SSD, I have no room to install a dual boot system for Linux and Windows XP. Nevertheless I am satisfied with the performance of my AAO for the everyday work since I have not bought it as a portable gaming station.

But in one point I disagree with you:

If you look at my test run #3, you can see, that I indeed have booted up my desktop PC under Linux (Opensuse 11.0) and have run the simulator via wine. The framerate is about three times less than under native Windows XP, but still 4 times better than on the AAO. And if you state, that the performance of the 1.6GHz Atom is about double the performance of the old 1.6GHz Athlon, the reason must be something else. Perhaps the 3D acceleration of the AAO's graphic chipset is only poorly supported under Linpus Linux.