Hello there,
while stumbling through the net today, I came upon this [1] little tool. It will, among other things, allow you to run apps that are overly picky about the level of hardware support your graphic card offers. I found that some things (like disabling textures, forcing wireframe mode) work in wine 0.9.56 as well, whereas things like lying about the shaders seems to fail. Perhaps it can be of some use to those who have to deal with D3D.
regards, Daniel
[1] http://www.tommti-systems.com/main-Dateien/files.html (3D-Analyze, click on the image)