Quote:
Originally Posted by Romanc  Wine adds an overhead to Linux, it's always best to run native code whenever possible. Wine is best used for running specialized Windows apps so one doesn't need to run Windows any more. Games need all the oomph they can get. |
Untrue. Wine is just another set of API and communicates directly with X, you'll be surprised how faster some Windows apps install and run on Wine vs Windows. Wine's poor performance is mostly due to unimplemented API functionality, Wine is a bit behind in implementing DirectX 9.
But for those that are implemented, it runs just like Windows.
http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMark-0.9.5 Quote:
Myth 1: "Wine is slow because it is an emulator"
Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor. It will thus not be as slow as Wabi which, since it is not running on a x86 Intel processor, also has to emulate the processor. Windows applications that do not make system calls will run just as fast as on Windows (no more no less). Some people argue that since Wine introduces an extra layer above the system a Windows application will run slowly. It is true that, in theory, Windows applications that run in Wine or are recompiled with Winelib will not be able to achieve the same performance as native Unix applications. But that's theory. In practice you will find that a well written Windows application can beat a badly written Unix application at any time. The efficiency of the algorithms used by the application will have a greater impact on its performance than Wine.
Also, and that's what people are usually interested in, the combination Wine+Unix may be more efficient that Windows. Just as before it's just how good/bad their respective algorithms are. Now to be frank, performance is not yet a Wine priority. Getting more applications to actually work in Wine is much more important right now. For instance most benchmarks do not work yet in Wine and getting them to work at all should obviously have a higher priority than getting them to perform well.
But for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss, except for some slow graphics due to unoptimized Wine code and X11 driver translation performance loss (which can be a problem sometimes, though).
Myth 2: "Wine is bad for Linux"
One undeniable fact exists: there is a vast software library that works with Microsoft's operating systems. Many of these applications already have Linux equivalents, however for most people there remains a handful of programs keeping them tied to Windows. Some of these programs have almost no chance of getting ported to Linux (e.g. Microsoft Office), others simply can't be ported because they've become abandonware (e.g. TurboTax 1999). Would I want to have Windows just because someday I may need to access an old tax program? The fact that Wine exists won't prevent companies from porting their software, but having less than a few percentage points of marketshare will. Wine puts more free software into the hands of people who would otherwise not use it. In turn, history has repeatedly shown that larger marketshare leads to more commercial development. More commercial development has always led to more efforts to develop better free software equivalents.
|
Wine HQ - Debunking Wine Myths 
May 12th, 2008, 06:30 PM
Valve porting Source to Linux 
Linear Mode
