http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21515
--- Comment #62 from P.Panon ppanon@shaw.ca 2010-02-10 15:14:12 --- What Cùran said. :-) BTW, the slow performance on high quality demos may be inidcate use of Gallium3D features that are still only supported via the software pipeline.
There are a limited number of OpenGL applications for Linux for the Mesa developers to work with, and a lot of them are based on a small number of FPS engines. If we get this running, then I would think that they could start running Direct3D apps in Wine to generate OpenGL traces and have some new test scenarios to work with for quality assurance on rendering.
So yeah, right now the open source drivers only give your $200 card the performance of a RIVA TNT2, but a year ago it would have been a 3D door stop without the fglrx binary drivers. If we get this in place, it's another step towards increasing that effective performance. Maybe we can suggest to this guy - http://free3d.org/ - to start using Wine&3DMark2001 to replace GLX Gears. It seems to me that Quake III Arena was pretty commonly used as a graphics benchmark once upon a time, and that should run natively on Linux, so I'm not sure why he's not using that.