Originally posted by Hi-Angel
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The video card table is one of those nasty things where you cannot extract from opengl or even if you had raw hardware access the information applications demand.
1) You have like opengl have 1 text description for a video card and direct x having a different one. Of course you find windows applications that do strings operations on the video card description to decide on what optimisation it should use.
2) due to copyprotection/anti cheat stuff. You have to report the right dll and version numbers for the video card in use of course there is no way to automatically guess that. This is information that has to be manually collected from windows installs or if lucky out of windows driver install packages..
3) There has to be a list of opengl quirks maintained. What are these quirks it where we know the opengl drivers says I can do X feature. But you attempt to use X feature and complete opengl stack collapses on top of you because that feature does not in fact work this first set of quirks.
4) There is a direct x list of quirks that has to be maintained where if you tell application that it has X card and display extra features you can end up with programs going down impossible code paths again this is not something that can be purely automatically collected.
5) Now wine has allowed by registry for you to set a particular card but if that is having quirk applied that you don't need that hurting performance but that also does not prevent applications probing for anti-cheat/copyprotection/registration and getting upset because graphics card and reported information does not match yes you see games saying please update drivers.... At this point you are in totally stuffed with old version.
Of course if you are able to avoid all the above problems this does not avoid the other issues like when freetype updated and the result was all versions without the patch to support that no longer worked. With the number of dependencies wine has something will get you sooner or latter if you attempt to stay on a old version for too long.
Doing a regression test where really old version reported working and new don't at times means backport a lot of different wine patches and hoping that they are not the cause. Its way better if reports are early and tested at the time.
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