Measuring game FPS in wine/windows?

[Austin English]

Howdy,

I've been testing some games lately on Windows/Wine, and wanted to see
the difference in framerates. On windows, I've been using Fraps, which
works decently well, but not under wine (and it doesn't work for
Assassin's creed). I found D3DGears online, which supposedly works for
Assassin's creed on Windows (haven't checked), but doesn't work under
wine. Does anyone know of a standalone application that works under
wine?

Thanks!
-Austin

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Austin English  wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I've been testing some games lately on Windows/Wine, and wanted to see
> the difference in framerates. On windows, I've been using Fraps, which
> works decently well, but not under wine (and it doesn't work for
> Assassin's creed). I found D3DGears online, which supposedly works for
> Assassin's creed on Windows (haven't checked), but doesn't work under
> wine. Does anyone know of a standalone application that works under
> wine?
>
> Thanks!
> -Austin

The easiest thing you can do on Wine is run using WINEDEBUG=+fps :)
(assuming the game uses double buffering which all modern games do)

There are also other ways but I'm not sure if they work with Wine at
this point. Basically tools like Fraps inject themselves into the
Direct3D/OpenGL call which is responsible for showing a new frame. In
case of Linux apps the best you can do is hook into glXSwapBuffers but
Wine loads opengl at run-time, so that doesn't work. The +fps channel
calculates the framerate around that call in the Wine code.

If you want to more detailed measurements also try to use WineD3D on
Windows. It could give you an indication how big the impact of the
drivers is and perhaps Wine is. If you are using Nvidia the OpenGL
drivers should be the same (perhaps there would be a difference of a
few percent but you could ignore that), so in that case the
performance we are losing is due to Wine/Linux.

Roderick

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am 17.03.2010 um 17:38 schrieb Roderick Colenbrander:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Austin English  wrote:
> > Howdy,
> >
> > I've been testing some games lately on Windows/Wine, and wanted to see
> > the difference in framerates. On windows, I've been using Fraps, which
> > works decently well, but not under wine (and it doesn't work for
> > Assassin's creed). I found D3DGears online, which supposedly works for
> > Assassin's creed on Windows (haven't checked), but doesn't work under
> > wine. Does anyone know of a standalone application that works under
> > wine?
> >
> > Thanks!
> > -Austin
>
> The easiest thing you can do on Wine is run using WINEDEBUG=+fps :)
> (assuming the game uses double buffering which all modern games do)

Usually the games themselves offer a way to show the framerate, or offer a sophisticated benchmarking mechanism. For example, in Source engine based games(and the old Goldsource ones) you can show the framerate with "cl_showfps 2", and do proper benchmarks with timedemos("record <name>", then play a little, "stop" to stop recording, "timedemo <name>" to play back).

Obviously this is a game specific thing, but pretty much all multiplayer capable games have a way to show the framerate, and all games based on a game engine that is separately sold have a timedemo-like mechanism.