http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17606
--- Comment #7 from Ville Aakko ville.aakko@gmail.com 2010-04-20 15:03:58 --- I think this bug is not actually solved. This is on wine-1.1.43 (tried several older but quite recent wines too).
I've also noticed that this might have something to do with resolution and / or scaling in the game. There are always slowdowns when running in a window, but in fullscreen the slowdowns are sometimes very slight or (in my setup rarely) completely absent.
However there is no way to control this behavior since there is no way to set the resolution to which the game scales to - instead, I believe the game chooses a resolution (more or less randomly) from whatever is available. Usually, if I start the game at fullscreen, it chooses 1024x768. But if I switch to a window, and then back to fullscreen, it set's the resolution to 640x480, but sometimes to 512x384!
The bottom line is, that I think that at some resolution, the slowdowns do appear but at some other resolutions, they don't or are less severe. So, depending on your setup you might get a resolution that works better.
I never got Amphisbaena to run at enjoyable speed, also Sakit (the Giant) was annoyingly slow, but playable depending on which resolution the game happened to run at. Anubis caused the game to run at 2FPS or so, no matter which resolution I was in! I also still get the slowdowns when going to any doorway (Xelpud etc.) - but if running at 640x480 if fullscreen, the doorways work at seemingly 100% speed. It is easy to miss the slowdown if you don't compare it to windows, however, since usually it is only around 1.5x - 1.8 slower in full screen.
To get a good test case, try running in a window, (if you don't get slowdown, resize the window to something else than what it chooses by default) and going in the tents in the very first village! Maybe this is a scaling routine (or something) that doesn't work very well in wine, when there are transparent sprites or some other tircks in use?
I think I got backup save games to Amphisbaena and Anubis, if someone with the skills want's to try to fix this one.