http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33062
--- Comment #8 from Andy Beamish andy@positality.com 2013-03-10 14:40:04 CDT --- When the original program was written the target hardware was assumed to be at best a shared memory, on-board GPU rather than a dedicated card from around 10 years ago. Performance is no issue for the hospitality market (relative to games) so the programmers have no priority on graphics efficiency.
Again, it's not so much an issue of WINE supporting off-screen surfaces as explicitly not allowing them when attempting to create them. My knowledge of the WINE source code is poor but it doesn't look to me as if any validations are done on creation only on use.