Wine-Staging Has Been Revived, Working Towards New Release

[iyxwsoekthsv]

Well, my hardware is sh*t also, FX CPU, that's where nine helps the most, 18 months ago, let me tell you something, when I've first tried gallium nine, it was in fglrx days, and I did prefer CSMT over nine because nine was buggy as hell and not worth it, but improvements made it different. You should definitively try it again, assuming you did everything properly you will be suprized (but as I noted, it's not all perfect ofc., one example Split/Second, but there are probably more examples).

One quick measurement ( fr-025: the popular demo; video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBpo5GHcmsE ) just now shows exactly equal performance between wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2.8 and winedri3 (sarnex; Gallium enabled) on mesa 18.1.0 (Oibaf PPA) when running its benchmark mode.

Another quick measurement is that neither wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2 nor Gallium Wine on Oibaf can run campaign 2 ( http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Palermo ) of Prison Architect really well on my hardware. The start of that mission has a lot of fire running wild and for some reason or another, both CSMT as well as Gallium Wine have a lot of trouble rendering the fire with any kind of speed. The Linux build of PA does it fine, full speed.

Rimworld ( https://rimworldgame.com/ ) runs basically the same between the two.

These were just a couple of quick measurements I did just now. Don't really have the hardware to run heavier titles. Will keep testing things though. Compatibility might be interesting to try out as well. Last time I checked, Spore started having issues rendering properly in recent Wine versions. Maybe Gallium Wine will fare better.

[duby229]

One quick measurement ( fr-025: the popular demo; video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBpo5GHcmsE ) just now shows exactly equal performance between wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2.8 and winedri3 (sarnex; Gallium enabled) on mesa 18.1.0 (Oibaf PPA) when running its benchmark mode.

Another quick measurement is that neither wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2 nor Gallium Wine on Oibaf can run campaign 2 ( http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Palermo ) of Prison Architect really well on my hardware. The start of that mission has a lot of fire running wild and for some reason or another, both CSMT as well as Gallium Wine have a lot of trouble rendering the fire with any kind of speed. The Linux build of PA does it fine, full speed.

Rimworld ( https://rimworldgame.com/ ) runs basically the same between the two.

These were just a couple of quick measurements I did just now. Don't really have the hardware to run heavier titles. Will keep testing things though. Compatibility might be interesting to try out as well. Last time I checked, Spore started having issues rendering properly in recent Wine versions. Maybe Gallium Wine will fare better.

Monitor CPU while benchmarking, even in those scenarios you'll see gallium nine uses much less to achieve those results.

[iyxwsoekthsv]

Monitor CPU while benchmarking, even in those scenarios you'll see gallium nine uses much less to achieve those results.

And? The end result is what matters here. I don't have compile jobs running in the background while playing a video game. I'd love to but I just don't have that kind of hardware. Nor do I have encoding jobs running in the background. Nor do I stream. Again, not the hardware for it.

So, heck, if those titles max out my CPU all the time with CSMT but not with Gallium Wine but their actual in-game performance ends up being exactly the same... what does it matter? Not much. Really, I would love to be able to be in the position to care about spare CPU cycles but, honestly, my hardware is just that crap. I can't do anything on the side. Even if I did have the cycles to spare. The room to spare is just that small.

[Dukenukemx]

As long as it remains optional to use Gallium-Nine. I've not run across a single title where Gallium Enabled Wine actually beats Wine CSMT. Not a single one. And combining them? Current version of WineDRI3 ( https://launchpad.net/~commendsarnex...buntu/winedri3 ) obviously uses Wine Devel and since devel enabled CSMT by default, it means that WineDRI3 uses both Gallium as well as CSMT. Results? Dreadful. I'd rather stick to base Devel at this point, most stable performance.

WTB Staging sans Gallium, please.

Not sure what games you've used but in my experience Gallium-Nine makes a big difference. Particularly in Project Cars. And it renders the game properly, where CSMT doesn't. From unplayable to playable.

I use Sarnex's Wine to get Gallium Nine but it would be nice of the Wine-Staging could also come with this feature.

[iyxwsoekthsv]

Not sure what games you've used but in my experience Gallium-Nine makes a big difference. Particularly in Project Cars. And it renders the game properly, where CSMT doesn't.

Older titles or indie titles. Don't have the money to keep up with heavier PC titles. I would love to be in a position to get more relevant hardware (kind of keen on the R5 2400g) but, maybe later this year.

PC titles evolve so hard, so quickly as far as hardware requirements are concerned.

[leipero]

One quick measurement ( fr-025: the popular demo; video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBpo5GHcmsE ) just now shows exactly equal performance between wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2.8 and winedri3 (sarnex; Gallium enabled) on mesa 18.1.0 (Oibaf PPA) when running its benchmark mode.

Another quick measurement is that neither wine devel 3.2 on mesa 17.2 nor Gallium Wine on Oibaf can run campaign 2 ( http://devwiki.introversion.co.uk/pa/index.php/Palermo ) of Prison Architect really well on my hardware. The start of that mission has a lot of fire running wild and for some reason or another, both CSMT as well as Gallium Wine have a lot of trouble rendering the fire with any kind of speed. The Linux build of PA does it fine, full speed.

Rimworld ( https://rimworldgame.com/ ) runs basically the same between the two.

These were just a couple of quick measurements I did just now. Don't really have the hardware to run heavier titles. Will keep testing things though. Compatibility might be interesting to try out as well. Last time I checked, Spore started having issues rendering properly in recent Wine versions. Maybe Gallium Wine will fare better.

So no difference at all? I'm starting to suspect you don't even have nine enabled (it's not enough to just download some package), I mean I've assumed that you know that, and that's not resonable to assume, so please double check if nine is actually enabled for your games. Also, I see you keep calling it "gallium wine", gallium is what 3D driver part of Mesa is called, "nine" state tracker is part of gallium, so we get "gallium nine" name, but, "nine" relates to DirectX 9 (nine), it's useless if you run it in DirectX 8 or DirectX 10+, however, it doesn't harm anything, since it simply loads "regular" wine libraries.

I don't know much about those games you named, also, I'm not sure if git package (Padoka?) have enabled nine, because I remmeber that Ubuntu repositories do not have nine enabled by default (for some reason...), it's just one flag in configuration "--with-nine" or something among those lines. What I do know is that Oibaf PPA have nine enabled, I'm not using Ubuntu for a while, so that might changed in case of Ubuntu repositories and Padoka/git PPA. For that reason, it might happen that you do not have it enabled.

If anything, it is good for compatibility (just in case), since there is no harm to have it enabled, but you should see performance advantage, especially on lower-end hardwer, so I'm puzzled.

[nomadewolf]

Please don't say such comments on topics you don't know actually what happened. Reality is completly different story than yours. Thanks.

The legend says the gallium nine authors prefered to die rather accpet the changes...

[PluMGMK]

Great news!
Re Gallium Nine, it's the only way to play Rayman Origins properly – Wine's D3D implementation fails to render "long" sprites in that game, which sometimes include platforms.

[iyxwsoekthsv]

So no difference at all? I'm starting to suspect you don't even have nine enabled (it's not enough to just download some package), I mean I've assumed that you know that, and that's not resonable to assume, so please double check if nine is actually enabled for your games.

If I can switch between different Mesa stacks on a dime (which actually involves purging them, to negate configuration misshaps) and such, do you honestly think I would miss something as simple as a Checkbox? I think I know what I'm doing when installing Wine. For each of these tests, I do purge the entire wine prefix and start afresh. Call it part of my experience debugging software and diagnosing illnesses. The process of elimination requires changing single variables.

And I call it Gallium Wine because it's quite a bit shorter than calling it "Gallium Enabled Wine" or "Wine with Gallium Nine Support". It is supposed to hint at the combination of a Gallium enabled Mesa stack + Gallium enabled Wine, which is even a lot longer than Gallium Wine. Call it shorthand, if you will. I'm 40, I don't have time to type out everything.

Regarding the other point you made, about the titles in question -- It is conceivable that for some reason or another, Gallium Nine simply isn't used by Gallium enabled Wine as it's defaulting to a different DX version. Which further proves my personal preference -- To largely just ignore Gallium Nine. As it's targetted at just 1 version of just 1 API. A version that is slowly being completely abandoned by the game developers and the engine developers.

Oh, and one more thing -- Gallium enabled Wine + Gallium enabled Mesa makes for a hell of an unstable combination. At least one of the games I mentioned (Rimworld) suddenly has trouble closing in a clean manner. Forcing me to drop into a TTY (ALT+CTRL+F1) to do a kill -9 -1, to force-log me off. Since X (the display server) is a mess as well and just ends up all confused.

TL;DR -- No, you're not going to catch me in a noob mistake. You are however going to catch me actually confirming my original hypothesis -- Gallium Nine isn't worth it. Not for me at least. 0 gain, whole lot of headache.

[duby229]

If I can switch between different Mesa stacks on a dime (which actually involves purging them, to negate configuration misshaps) and such, do you honestly think I would miss something as simple as a Checkbox? I think I know what I'm doing when installing Wine. For each of these tests, I do purge the entire wine prefix and start afresh. Call it part of my experience debugging software and diagnosing illnesses. The process of elimination requires changing single variables.

And I call it Gallium Wine because it's quite a bit shorter than calling it "Gallium Enabled Wine" or "Wine with Gallium Nine Support". It is supposed to hint at the combination of a Gallium enabled Mesa stack + Gallium enabled Wine, which is even a lot longer than Gallium Wine. Call it shorthand, if you will. I'm 40, I don't have time to type out everything.

Regarding the other point you made, about the titles in question -- It is conceivable that for some reason or another, Gallium Nine simply isn't used by Gallium enabled Wine as it's defaulting to a different DX version. Which further proves my personal preference -- To largely just ignore Gallium Nine. As it's targetted at just 1 version of just 1 API. A version that is slowly being completely abandoned by the game developers and the engine developers.

Oh, and one more thing -- Gallium enabled Wine + Gallium enabled Mesa makes for a hell of an unstable combination. At least one of the games I mentioned (Rimworld) suddenly has trouble closing in a clean manner. Forcing me to drop into a TTY (ALT+CTRL+F1) to do a kill -9 -1, to force-log me off. Since X (the display server) is a mess as well and just ends up all confused.

TL;DR -- No, you're not going to catch me in a noob mistake. You are however going to catch me actually confirming my original hypothesis -- Gallium Nine isn't worth it. Not for me at least. 0 gain, whole lot of headache.

You certainly have a valid opinion, for sure. Lets hope the best for VK9 and the other directx on vulkan attempts. Gallium is a dead end so I really do wish the best for Vulkan. Phoronix often reports on their status and it seems like their progress is coming along nicely. Hopefully wine integration with upstream or with some kind of staging branch will be possible.