https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39421
--- Comment #18 from Ken Thomases ken@codeweavers.com --- (In reply to Jonas Maebe from comment #17)
(In reply to Ken Thomases from comment #16)
Right. That wasn't expected to help this. That one is still about GDI drawing, not GL/D3D drawing.
FWIW, with DirectDrawRenderer=gdi it also doesn't seem to have (much of) an effect (just mentioning this in case it might have affected that, as I don't know whether the D3D->GDI path uses the same flushing/updating functionality as plain GDI).
What version of OS X are you running? I've recently found that OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) introduced an issue where programs which overdrive the Cocoa display mechanism have problems due to synchronizing with the window server's refresh cycle. That's largely what motivated the CVDisplayLink stuff.
So, I'd expect that the game would have encountered problems with DirectDrawRenderer=gdi on El Capitan prior to that commit and be back to normal with that commit.