http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13101
--- Comment #68 from Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k@gmx.net 2008-07-04 07:05:22 --- I emailed nvidia a summary of the issues with a link to this bug. Nvidia is free to change the internals of their drivers and this is most likely what they did in order to fix issues like the compiz black window bug and other issues.
Most of the time you enable multisampling from nvidia-settings as most apps don't offer such settings. Some games do offer them but those use it in a different way than Wine. First of all 'classic' GLX programs select a pixel format and create a toplevel X window using this format. In case of Wine we aren't rendering GLX to a toplevel window but to a subwindow of this toplevel window. The reason for this is that in case of GLX you need to specify the pixel format at window creation time whereas on Windows you do it afterwards. This behavior is something the Nvidia drivers might not like. Second Direct3D allows you to 'reset' the pixel format of a Window which again OpenGL doesn't offer, so we kill the subwindow and then create a new one. Perhaps again this is something the drivers don't like in all cases.