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Wine "PBA" - A new project for better Direct3D over OpenGL
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Avehicle7887 Feb 24, 2018
Posting this here for more awareness and contribution: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-PBA

The project was started by University student Andrew Comminos which improves Wine performance. A new Staging branch based right off 2.21 has been added which you can find at this link: https://github.com/acomminos/wine-pba

I've tried to build it from source however it aborts a few steps through the process, the error has been reported already, hopefully will be fixed soon.

You can also read more on the author's personal blog: https://comminos.com/posts/2018-02-21-wined3d-profiling.html

Huge thanks to Andrew for his work and to Phoronix for bringing this in the spotlight. :-)
PlutonMaster Feb 24, 2018
I've found this from Phoronix website. Looks promising.
Avehicle7887 Feb 24, 2018
Post Update -

I gave this patch a spin earlier yesterday morning, Downloaded Base Wine 2.21 > Applied Staging 2.21 patches > Applied Andrew's patch. Didn't have much luck. Games ran, sound audible but with a black screen.

I recompiled it again using latest patches, black screens are gone and there are some serious improvements this time (also a regression):



As you can see above, Witcher 3 improved a lot for Nvidia, however all the characters (including Geralt's horse) are invisible. Also noticed an important factor - my GPU usage peaked to about 80%.

Will keep posting with updates :)


For the moment I can't seem to manage to build a WoW64 Wine build (32+64bit combo) so all my tests will either be a Pure 32bit or 64bit build.
Shmerl Feb 25, 2018
I wonder if there is any work duplication going on, since Wine developers are now also working on fixing buffer pool performance.
GloriousEggroll Feb 25, 2018
This also needs to be tested on AMD gpus. My experience on AMD gpus with these patches was atrocious sadly. My wow framerate droped from 60+ to about 10-20 in sunstrider isle newbie area with dx9 and dx11
sterky Feb 25, 2018
Hey. I also gave these patches a run, but with League Of Legends.

Quick summary here:

staging-2.20 avg: 83.83
staging-2.21 avg: 83.65
staging-2.21+pba patches avg: 104.77


Links to plotted fps graphs etc are in reddit post:
Link to my Reddit post
tpau Feb 25, 2018
Quoting: ShmerlI wonder if there is any work duplication going on, since Wine developers are now also working on fixing buffer pool performance.

Have you asked the wine developers and the pba guy this? It might make more sense on #winehackers or wine-devel than here to wonder about it.
andda715 Feb 25, 2018
Tested on TW3 w R1700 och GTX1080:

 ~7 fps wine master latest
~20 fps wine master latest with (new) buffer patch
~20 fps wine staging 2.21
~13 fps wine staging 2.21 with PBA patches


PBA patches gives invisible Geralt etc as already reported (using 4 from: ae1cb0d Fix constant buffer invalidation).
Not sure why the Nvidia performance improved so much for Avehicle7887 but not for me. :-/
sterky Feb 25, 2018
Rebuilt wine-pba with latest patches and ran League Of Legends again, same test full bot game.
It was a bit shorter game tho but i did see around 100-130 fps most of the time.

staging-2.20 avg: 83.83
staging-2.21 avg: 83.65
staging-2.21+pba patches avg: 104.77
staging-2.21+pba patches (rebuild with latest) avg: 113.23  


link to plot
Avehicle7887 Feb 25, 2018
I have re-tested Witcher 3 under different CPU cores active, using just the first 4 cores produced almost same performance as running on all 16 threads. GPU load peaked 83% usage in about 10 mins of gameplay. I'm in the process of building the 32bit Wine version atm, so I can do more tests.
Shmerl Feb 25, 2018
Quoting: tpauHave you asked the wine developers and the pba guy this? It might make more sense on #winehackers or wine-devel than here to wonder about it.

Someone already asked this question in this bug: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42592#c75
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