Wine vs Windows Benchmarks 286
PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."
The tests are meaningless! (Score:5, Funny)
I say good day to you sir!
Re:The tests are meaningless! (Score:4, Interesting)
Flight Simulator (Score:2)
Does it run Flight Simulator 1.0?
Re:Flight Simulator (Score:3, Informative)
on a dev list (Score:5, Insightful)
chris
Re:on a dev list (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:on a dev list (Score:3, Insightful)
This is only half the story. Our research group tries to get our bleeding edge algorithms into existing software (e.g. text algorithms in scribus, connector routing and graph layout in inkscape). One thing we've found is that when you are developing some code it's easy to get trained into only trying certain pathways through
Re:on a dev list (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the article. These aren't dev-created benchmarks, but standard benchmark suites like 3DMark and Quake 3.
Some of the tests look really weird. For instance, in the 3DMark2000 Fill Rate test, Single Texture on Wine gets 2,402.8 MTexels/s and 11% behind Windows, but on the Multi-Texture test it soars to 6,695.1 MTexels/s and 74.5% in front of Windows. There's got to be some freaky driver code or something implemented oddly or some background process that wasn't noticed.
I don't think these benchmarks were run rigoriously enough to say anything, except that Wine is capable of running 3DMark.
Re:on a dev list (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the key phrase(but you have to look literally). The point is that you need to test the output of the benchmarks, not just look at the frame rates. You can create a REAL FAST benchmark by not implementing some api functions. The output might look reasonable, but if you zoom into some edges you might find additional oddities. That is the main point what is mising in this benchmark.
Rememeber driver writers made some unacceptable shortcuts in the past to increase performance.
no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody said they were doctored; the slashdot editor said "take it with a grain of salt". I see a lot of reasons to do so:
Honestly? The results probably aren't manipulated, but the presentation is very clearly set up with a number of tricks (perhaps without him/her realizing it) to give the impression that Wine "kicked some serious ass", when for the most part, it did horribly.
oops...overwhelming, not overall. (Score:2)
Whoops. That should read "overwhelming", not "overall".
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Insightful)
This benchmark isn't a Wine vs. XP contest, it's a test to see if Wine is at least as good as XP, and it failed in 81 categories, which means there's still some work to be done.
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:2)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:3, Insightful)
My first guess would be that WINE is inconsistent. Especially in the areas where it falls behind. After all, it is still a beta and has not achieved 100% compatibility yet, so the developers might not care too much about optimization at this point.
But Linux or even Windows are also possi
Don't be silly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:3, Insightful)
If I read it right, Wine didn't finish 15 of the tests, and Windows XP didn't finish 3, leading to 18 "no-comparsion" blue results...
But yeah - that Wine should crash out on a DivX compression or a Web Page Rendering(??!!?) test is
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:3, Insightful)
Then there's basic stuff that you can't explain - why the "CPU speed" benchmark is better under wine? A CPU test will, uh, do things with the CPU, it will be CPU bound and the windows api shouldn't involved in that code path.
A
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Funny)
I quite agree. Last time I tried Wine it didn't run any of my favourite Windows applications. I'm not talking crappy shareware utilities that I can learn to live without - I'm talking showstoppers like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Cygwin, all the really critical tools I use every day.
Until Wine can adequately run programs like that, I'm sadly going to be stuck using Windows.
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:3, Funny)
Re:amount of work done (Score:3, Insightful)
To say that Wine developers have it easy is shamefully disrespectful to their efforts. (Unless you take the viewpoint that not having to work with MS code simplifies the work!) For Wine to work at all is commendable - to be (sometimes) faster is truly amazing, IMHO.
Re:amount of work done (Score:2)
Just getting stuff to work at all is quite an achievement, given what you're working with.
Very Impressive! (Score:5, Informative)
I've quite impressed with the performance of WINE, however these stats can be a little deceiving. These stats are based on a game that works. Getting the game to work in the first place can be quite a challenge. But for the part-time gamer that doesn't wanna be chained to Windows, this is a great alternative indeed!
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:Very Impressive! (Score:3, Interesting)
My sister in law runs ubuntu and I have had a go at getting some windows games running under wine for her son. What I would like to see is a windows environment which she can use to install these things herself.
As it is I have to mount the CD, find the installer executable and run it under wine. This is a bit difficult to explain to a non technical person.
Re:Very Impressive! (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Very Impressive! (Score:3, Insightful)
You might understand it that way, but you'd be wrong. All Wine does is implement the published API of Windows using Linux commands. Absolutely no reverse engineering is done.
What do you think reverse engineering is ? (Score:2)
WINE implements the FUNCTIONALITY of the Windows API. It merely provides the same API.
The implementation is by no means 'published' and therein lies the reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering does not necessarily mean disassembly or anything remotely dark-hattish.
Re:What do you think reverse engineering is ? (Score:5, Informative)
Wine is most certainly a reverse engineering effort. The problem is that you don't fully understand what reverse engineering includes.
Reverse engineering also includes the following process:
This is black box reverse engineering. You treat some piece of software as a block box, write tests for it, figure out what the "box" is doing, and recreate that behavior. No decompilation required, no source code required, just lots of tests and ingenuity. This has the benefit that no copyright violations are required (since you never decompile the original program). This process is also used in clean room design [wikipedia.org], except step 3 is replaced with a documentation step -- instead of code being the result of the process a specification is the result. Compaq did this to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS.
Wine is most certainly doing this, as it's the only way to determine undocumented connections between various APIs. Mono certainly does this ("what's this member supposed to do, and is Mono's version following that behavior properly?"). Another way to think of this is for bugs -- does this Mono code do what the .NET equivalent code does? If not, we'll get a bugzilla [ximian.com] entry for it, and (eventually) fix it. This bug-report/fix cycle can also be considered as black box reverse engineering, since the bug-report is itself a test, through which we can determine what the actual functionality should be.
Decompilation is generally not legal, since it can lead to copyright violations. Black box reverse engineering is legal, and any attempt to limit black box reverse engineering would kill the interoperability market, since no compatible hardware/software could ever be created unless the original manufacturer permitted it.
Re:What do you think reverse engineering is ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Throughout most of my career, I've understood reverse engineering to be what you do when you DON'T have the source code. I think the wikipedia entry mentions that this is the most common interpretation. It can be extremely difficult and time consuming. I've done it on major projects a few times in my career. It is neither easy nor efficient, but sometimes the only choice you have.
It's also common to talk about reverse engineering hardware, where the innards of a chip may be deduced by observing its inputs and outputs. I worked on a project at a startup where we had to do that, because the original hardware developers were long gone, and no VHDL could be discovered, yet we had to write drivers for their (buggy) chips in order to make a deadline. At the same company we had to reverse engineer the workings of a (buggy) Fiber Channel PCI card, because the manufacturer would not give us the support we needed to make our deadlines. They were rather surprised when we talked to them about the details of their (proprietary, embedded in an ASIC) DMA engine that we deduced via logic analyzers and oscilloscopes.
Those projects were SO difficult compared to reading (even obscure) code, that I really think that using the one phrase for both activities is confusing and sometimes even deceptive.
Re:What do you think reverse engineering is ? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, if we're going to take Wikipedia to be gospel, then let's read all of it, including:
The Samba software, which allows systems that are not running Microsoft Windows systems to share files with systems that are, is a classic example of software reverse engineering, since the Samba project had to reverse-engineer unpublished information about how Windows file sharing worked, so
Re: Very Impressive! (Score:3, Informative)
Let me doubt that - there's many "hidden functionality" in windows (ie: bugs created in windows 95 and that apps started to use and need it to work reliably and that they were kept because of compatibility reasons. Remember all those 0x0000blah numbers in Windows\system.ini? Each 0x0000blah number activates a special hack neccesary to ke
Re: Very Impressive! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, that can't be true. The Win32 documentation is fairly comprehensive, but it is absolutely horrible on the fringes. There is NO WAY you could implement an API from it and expect it to be able to run real world apps. The docs for RPC, OLE, Shell, Common Controls, Win16 are particularly atrocious. More likely you code to the API a
Reverse engineering is... (Score:5, Interesting)
That sentence came from the Oxford American Dictionary. To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is. All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals. Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow. You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now. Instead Intel has now adopted the AMD64 instruction set that AMD came up with which is basically just x86 extended to 64 bit. The 'Mono' implementation of the Microsoft
You did raise an interesting point about limited reverse engineering which is probably true. In order to clear up inconsistencies and undocumented features in the Windows API the Wine team probably did some analysis of Windows. Surprisingly enough I recenty found out that this is actually permissable under copyright laws, at least in my own country, if the manufacturer is reluctant to issue full and comprehensive documentation and it is vital to the success of your project and you are not attempting to replicate the internals of the undocumented product just determine how it works to fill in patchy documentation which is the case with Microsoft and the Wine team in this case, they are not making a bolt for bolt replica of Windows. From what I can tell Wine is not doing anything illegal or unethical if they were producing line for line copies of Windows system binaries by reverse engineering Windows source code that would be another matter.
Re:Reverse engineering is... (Score:3, Informative)
That's why Intel has tried to sue the pants off AMD and has failed. Clean room reverse engineering is a technique that DOES permit invasive inspection of decompiled binaries and has been upheld as legal and legitimate, in possibly the most famous example of reverse engineering in moderm computing: the IBM/Compaq BIOS case. [jmusheneaux.com]
Re: Reverse engineering is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Reverse engineering is in fact almost always used for cloning. However, that's exactly what Wine is: a clone of various Windows components.
> All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals.
Reverse engineering isn't concerned with the in
Re:Very Impressive! (Score:2)
It allows to compare how M$ Windows executable under Wine performs relatively to native Linux executable and to native Wind0ze executable under Wind0ze.
Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predict (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats to the Wine devs!
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Gentoo really does feel faster. Compare say a Debian system (which is compiled purely for st
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't make fun of your hair do I?! So stop making fun of my favorite distro!
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry if I'm a bit sensitive about this, but Slashdot is the last place I expected to get a hard time about my hair.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2, Insightful)
They often do things under very specific conditions and are useless elsewhere. If you're not a compiler expert (which I definately am not), it's unlikely you'll have any apreciable performance gain. It's quite possible that you'll see a performance loss if things aren't done correctly. Even an expert may or may not get a gain.
I love Gentoo myself, but I'm not delusional about performance gains. I do it for the customizability it offers. For instance, last I checked, you could get a Debian package that con
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
I used Fedora, Debian, and others for many years, having resisted Gentoo due to time constraints (I had better things to do than compile an entire distro), but then one day I had some free time and tried it.
The lack of RedHack's Gnome customizations was enough for me to be converted. It's *amazing* how much faster Gnome runs without all the useless RedHat garbage clut
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Nearly all of the software that ships with gentoo is bloated. For example, gentoo's interpretation of cp includes an option to draw a progress bar while the file copies! That's not in the GNU codebase, that's something gentoo added. Bloat that gentoo added.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
On the larger components such as Gnome, things suffer from considerably less featuritis than in any other distribution I've laid eyes on.
BTW, if you don't want the progress bar, you can always disable the Gentoo-specific patches... I don't recall exactly how to enable it offhand, but there *is* a "build from original, unpatches sources" option.
--S
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me why my package manager giving me the option of setting compiler optimizations for packages it builds pisses so many people off? I went Gentoo for the init scripts, anyways...
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:5, Informative)
*shrug* same site it was two years ago. Yes, Gentoo is swarming with clueless n00bies; I was a clueless n00bie once and so was everybody else. If it gives them something to play with, keeps their interests, and gets them learning about Linux, it's worth having to deal with "why doesn't -Os -f-unroll-loops work?" when I talk to one (and I try to help them, because plenty of people helped me back in the day -- that's the whole spirit of GNU, right?).
Seriously, what should n00bies do, then? Gentoo is a largely user-configured operating system with unbelievably simple and hand-holding documentations. Yes, #gentoo is always full of n00bs asking why they can't boot now that they disabled all block devices in their kernel. But then again, that means it's full of n00bs who have configured and compiled a kernel; other distros I've seen say "WARNING WARNING ELITE USERS ONLY" about that. Why? People point out (rightly) that you can install Gentoo and still be an ignoramus. However, if you're actually interested in learning, you can also learn from the installation procedure the commands for fdisk, the options to hdparm, how chroot works, what /etc/resolv.conf is, blah, blah, blah.
funroll-loops is half-right. Gentoo is not simply a ricer distribution; it's a hobbyist distribution. It's the kit-car of distros. There are plenty of people who are doing the software equivalent of bolting a huge spoiler on their Civic. But there are plenty of us who are just having fun. And, anyways, the point of free software is that we're free to do what we want with it, even if that means being a moronic jackass.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:4, Insightful)
Gentoo evokes that era for me, and you can't have a go at people for breaking something when they're busy learning. So what if they over-optimise compiler flags and break things? When they fix them up they're learning a valuable lesson, and that lesson isn't 'next time use a binary distro'
Anyway, today's school-age gentoo n00bs are tomorrow's crop of system admins.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, the question was whether he'd see a marked improvement changing from debian/ubuntu -- and given that Debian uses the same kernel as gentoo, and the same apps, it's very unlikely that there will be any difference in performance unless it comes from the "-fmad-compile" options. [In my experience, the -fmad-compile won't make any difference in practice either unless you're talking about very specialized balls-to-the-wall code like scientific computing or whatever.]
The "0 swapping happening" is an attribute of the linux kernel, not the distro; I notice the same thing under debian (in fact I generally see no disk i/o at all unless I'm writing files, because of linux's excellent disk caching). If the OP is having problems with swapping it means that he doesn't have enough memory for the apps he's using; a distro change is unlikely to help with that.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:3, Informative)
There are precompiled packages av
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:2)
Obviously the laptop has a much simpler hardware config, less services that it needs to run, and because I reboot it fairly often I actually bothered to clean out the rc files. In Gentoo at
wine or driver test? (Score:5, Insightful)
i think a wider suite of tests would be required.. and not just the preformance/gaming orinted stuff.
Re:wine or driver test? (Score:2)
Re:wine or driver test? (Score:2)
Well that is implying that the Nvidia drivers for Windows are much better than for Linux, which is essentially the opposite of my experience with video.
Obviously graphics is the bottleneck, so perhaps it's a case of WINE not translating the video instructions as well as it does for other instructions.
Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I tried Codeweavers' "Crossover Office," essentially a pre-configured Wine with graphical configuration and installation tools, and everything changed. I currently use all of the following under Fedora Core 4:
- Microsoft Office XP
- Wordperfect 12 (word processor only)
- Photoshop 6
- Framemaker 7
They all installed using the standard CD install, without my having to jump through any crazy hoops or type a single command, and they all run flawlessly and are great for serious work. They sit right in my KDE menu like all other applications and it's a real head-turner to be able to show up to work with my laptop running Linux and then pop into Word XP and Framemaker.
Wine works incredibly well after all, it's just more "raw material" than "finished product." Get someone to write a user-friendly front end for it (ala Codeweavers' Crossover Office) and it offers a very high level of Windows compatibility to Linux users.
WINE not a Windows replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you run a Windows-only compiler on Linux? But, more importantly, #2:
Why would you run an allegedly platform-dependent runtime on an emula^H^H^H^H compatibility layer?
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:2)
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:2)
As to VS.NET not building for other OS's, I run VS.NET-compiled binaries all the time under Mono. Works just fine. And VS is (IMO) FAR better than any currently-available Linux dev environment C# or C++.
Hint to folks with more time on their hands than I've got: build a VS.NET clone, bring lots more people to the Linux world.
--S
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point you have to ask yourself why you are running Linux at all.
-matthew
Note that XP Wins the Tests that Count (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Note that XP Wins the Tests that Count (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you go and say "well run Ventrilo under wine!" let me tell you that i have tried and it did not work. I dont know why it did not work and i dont care. Even if it was a relati
Re:Note that XP Wins the Tests that Count (Score:2)
I'd much prefer a couple days of tweaks to get a Linux/BSD system up and working properly, rather than spending hour after hour of my life putting up with an operating system that is incredibly slow for absolutely no reason, is terribly unstable, needs to be scanned constantly for viruses and
Of course wine's better... (Score:5, Funny)
oh, wait, you were discussing software?
Re:Of course wine's better... (Score:2)
Perhaps you should move to the country? =P
Strange choice of benchmarks... (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is the case, the results in regard to game performance are out-dated at best.
Re:Strange choice of benchmarks... (Score:2)
Re:Strange choice of benchmarks... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Strange choice of benchmarks... (Score:2)
But still, for an open source project to even accomplish what Wine did in the last couple of years is pretty good. I got Cedega Transgaming and it works pretty well too.
Funny statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
So whatever this is measuring (and I concur that it seems to be mostly Linux graphics drivers), it's not reporting the results particularly well.
Re:Funny statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Funny statistics (Score:2)
That sort of confusion occurs whenever percentages are used. The solution would be to take that same data, and compare the log of the ratios. Or if we follow what's typical in audio and electronics, take ten times the log of the ratio. That's the sort of comparison that's going on whe
These tests don't really put Wine in a good light (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:These tests don't really put Wine in a good lig (Score:2, Informative)
Re:These tests don't really put Wine in a good lig (Score:2)
Filesystem, graphics driver (Score:5, Interesting)
The other wonderful thing I've found about Wine is the graphics abstraction layer. My laptop has a GeForce FX5600 (mobile) card in it. It's actually rather spiffy for most games still, but sucked ass at Battlefield 2 in windows, popping up the warning that my graphics drivers were out of date. Well, it seems that the drivers are tied to the laptop in windows to co-habitate with the power-saving etc etc... so I couldn't update from the official NVidia ones. And of course, my laptop vendor doesn't offer updates for anything over a year old it seems.
In linux, however, the normal NVidia accelerated driver works. The game runs on that faster than in windows, and with better detail levels. I don't know if it's just that the Cedega HAL does a better emulation for the software bits, or if it's due to the more-up-to-date driver, but it's a much less painful experience in Linux.
Lastly, my soundcard. SB Live 5.1. Abit dated, but with livedrive still a very nice functional card, except that the windows drivers will eventually/randomly freeze in most directX intensive games. Running in linux... no problemo. That's actually why I switched to Cedega/Debian almost completely (too many losses in Warcraft from lockups).
Missing the most crucial test (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Missing the most crucial test (Score:2)
I agree. It's the only reason I have a Windows partition. Can people please post any Wine vs XP benchmarks they have, along with their machine specs! Also for CS:Source, if anyone has it working. Thanks.
Phillip.
DirectLinux (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a feeling that unless some major changes are made to the X Window System (and maybe Linux drivers) that WINE will not catch up with WindowsXP and DirectX, but that just means I w
DirectX: vendor-lock-in and avoid paying to SGI (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes. Vendor-lock-in is what Microsoft generally does well.
Re:DirectX: vendor-lock-in and avoid paying to SGI (Score:4, Informative)
Love the 'personal' theories...
Microsoft did not even have an alternative to OpenGL in development when Microsoft pulled out of OpenGL. Microsoft pressed for OpenGL to enhance low level hardware support with intention of doing more than cad/engineering and supporting 3D rendering environment conducive to gaming and directly access video card hardware for gaming.
OpenGL told Microsoft to go pound sand, and that OpenGL was not for games or going to support direct hardware features for gaming.
Microsoft started stringing together a set of technologies that were called WinG, mainly a 2D form of rendering with plans for a new model that was a 3D rendering solution with direct video access on par of what the current DOS based games were used to, but in the Windows environment.
If OpenGL would have not 'played catch-up' to DirectX, and instead took Microsoft's recommendations at the time Microsoft was a big OpenGL proponent, there would never have been a DirectX, as OpenGL would be what Microsoft would be using, and contributing to instead.
The vendor lock in, was just a bonus in the long run, it was others involved in OpenGL that made the choice to not go for gaming.
But you can say it was about paying to SGI or a diabolical plan to take control of the gaming industry, but the facts don't support it.
The second part of this topic is that DirectX evolved to be more than an alternative to OpenGL, as it encapsulates everything from input devices, networking, to sound and voice.
When DirectX first existed it was the only game in town for any standardized interface to video for accelerated graphics in gaming. Now it is more than just Video...
Impressive results (Score:2)
transgaming (Score:2, Interesting)
Example of distorted statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Most of Wine's wins are in the 0-2% mark. Means nothing except _inconclusive_; otherwise where is the variance, num tests to justify this?
2. Wine's perf is bad in the tests it lost
3. Old test suites were used
4. As some one said, If Wine is 90% faster it means it is 90% faster. If it is 90% slower it means it is 10 times slower!!!
BUT, what is really impressive is that Wine actually managed to run all the tests. The compatibility is indeed impressive. This benchmark would have been very credible had it not played with the numbers and colors.
Maybe a troll, but here is my argument against Wine:
Windows is moving to WinFX. Then it makes more sense to emulate WinFX's API than Win32 API. (WinFX does use Win32 extensively underneath, but why emulate 2 API's??). In the longer term, the answer to Windows compatibility is not Wine, it is MONO [mono-project.com].
Re:Example of distorted statistics (Score:2)
It didn't manage to run all the tests. FTA:
The breakdown for that is 3 for Windows and 15 for Wine.
Re:Example of distorted statistics (Score:4, Informative)
This test was never intended to show up on sites like Slashdot. The page was made with Wine's developers in mind to have a place to watch performance differences between wine versions. Nobody is trying to say Wine is better than Windows. It's not supposed to be a 'credible benchmark' for the purposes some of you are using it. The main idea behind it is so that in future versions of wine we can run these tests again and see how the results changed. How we represent the numbers is not important. What's important to us is how the numbers change over time.
To reiterate, this benchmark is really for comparing versions of wine against other versions of wine; it is not intended to be a good or thorough comparison between wine and Windows.
Configuration? (Score:2)
Not that bad, not that good - It's a start (Score:2)
We also need to know what version of the NVidia driver was used, on XP and on Linux, as this will make a huge difference. It'd also be good to know some other stuff about each setup (eg: DirectX version and patch lev
On related news... (Score:3, Informative)
almost classic (Score:2, Insightful)
Shame it was not "Spelling Check" but on still quite amusing.
In all seriousness, interesting and makes me want to revist Wine as it looks a lot better than when I last tried it (given I run pretty low spec hardware, performance is key rather than stability).
Though I do think "Wine or XP aborted on 18 tests" was a bit cheeky as it was 3 XP aborts, 15 Wine aborts...
Only... (Score:2)
Look it up in the Application DB (was Re:cool!) (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is repeat info for most people, but for the newbies...
There's actually an online application database where people have submitted their experiences/successes in getting Windows apps to run under Wine. If you want to see how well Office 2k3 works under Wine, this'd be the first place to look. Conversely, if you have success running a given Windows app, be sure to submit your experiences. Feedback to the App DB not only helps other Wine users, but is helpful feedback for Wine developers on outstanding compatibility issues.
The URL is: http://appdb.winehq.org/ [winehq.org]
Re:cool! (Score:2)
it runs word 2003, excell 2003 and powerpoint 2003
I myself use office 2000 under codeweavers because, in my experience that one runs best, and 2003 support is pretty new.