11 Versions Of WINE Benchmarked

Last December we had published benchmarks of seven versions of WINE, which covered up through the WINE 0.9.50 release. We had used two versions of Futuremark's 3DMark suite for testing, and with that we had found the performance to be stable in some cases while in later WINE releases we had found some performance losses. With the WINE project on a consistent two-week release cycle, we are looking at the WINE 3D performance and this time going back with the past eleven releases.

This time around, we have gone back and benchmarked all versions of WINE from the latest 0.9.55 release to WINE 0.9.45. Since delivering our 7-way WINE benchmarks, I/O completion was reached in v0.9.51, the start of emulated disk devices in v0.9.53, proper support for Adobe's Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS2 in v0.9.54, and most recently is new Direct3D work in v0.9.55 that allows the ability to emulate the driver version. In all releases, of course, are many bug fixes ranging from ALSA capturing to Richedit improvements. You can find highlights for versions of WINE 0.9.50 and earlier in our earlier article or from a quick WINE search.

For today's benchmarking we had used Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 Second Edition and Aquamark 3. 3DMark 2001 is a Microsoft DirectX 8.1 benchmark while Aquamark 3 is a DirectX 9.0 benchmark, but with fallback support for DirectX 7 and DirectX 8. The hardware we had used for benchmarking was a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics card with an AMD Phenom 9500 and Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 motherboard with 2GB of OCZ DDR2-800MHz memory. The Linux distribution being used was a daily build of Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit from February 10 and uses the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. The graphics driver we were using was NVIDIA's 169.09 driver. All versions of WINE tested were built from source.