Hi,
I'm testing some apps installation with either the free WineHQ, WineX, Crossover Office, and many times I see buttons and other GUI related stuff in the wrong size or place, and I understand it's a GDI related issue, so here's 3 questions..
1. Is the GDI implementation is so bad that it needs hacking per app to make it look ok?
2. Is there a way to take GDI parts from native WIndows and use it in Wine?
3. Funding - can any company (transgaming, CodeWeavers, others) can estimate the cost of rewriting a better (and faster - the speed of Wine graphics today is something in magnitude of 486 PC!) GDI?
Thanks, Hetz
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
Hi,
I'm testing some apps installation with either the free WineHQ, WineX, Crossover Office, and many times I see buttons and other GUI related stuff in the wrong size or place, and I understand it's a GDI related issue, so here's 3 questions..
Nobody's perfect... :)
- Is the GDI implementation is so bad that it needs hacking per app to make
it look ok?
No, it's not the GDI, but most likely either our x11drv driver (for the window management), or just poor controls implementations. A window management rewrite is planned, I'm trying to fix the controls, when I have time ;)
- Is there a way to take GDI parts from native WIndows and use it in Wine?
You can use comctl32 from Windows, yes. But the window management is our stuff only. Windows doesn't have a window manager.
- Funding - can any company (transgaming, CodeWeavers, others) can estimate
the cost of rewriting a better (and faster - the speed of Wine graphics today is something in magnitude of 486 PC!) GDI?
Yeah, the GDI is slow. I'd be interested to see a quote from one of the Wine-based companies.
Yeah, the GDI is slow. I'd be interested to see a quote from one of the Wine-based companies.
How much slower is it? I know it'll be slower than the MS native implementation simply because it's not been fully optimized, but most apps I run under Wine have perfectly acceptable graphics performance. The most noticable problems are related to flickering in fact. Are we talking raw API performance or real world stuff that users would notice?
Mike Hearn wrote:
Yeah, the GDI is slow. I'd be interested to see a quote from one of the Wine-based companies.
How much slower is it? I know it'll be slower than the MS native implementation simply because it's not been fully optimized, but most apps I run under Wine have perfectly acceptable graphics performance. The most noticable problems are related to flickering in fact. Are we talking raw API performance or real world stuff that users would notice?
There used to be a benchmark suite called "Winbench", that tried to load real world applications and see how fast the performed various operations. Anyone has a recent version?
Shachar
On 04 Feb 2003 10:29:02 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote
Yeah, the GDI is slow. I'd be interested to see a quote from one of the Wine-based companies.
How much slower is it? I know it'll be slower than the MS native implementation simply because it's not been fully optimized, but most apps I run under Wine have perfectly acceptable graphics performance. The most noticable problems are related to flickering in fact. Are we talking raw API performance or real world stuff that users would notice?
Slow slow! try anything related to moving graphics (photoshop, macromedia, explorer with flash) the performance is VERY slow. Want to see how slow? install a Trident or a Cirrus Logic graphics card (ISA) and see the speed ;)
Thanks, Hetz
Slow slow! try anything related to moving graphics (photoshop, macromedia, explorer with flash) the performance is VERY slow. Want to see how slow? install a Trident or a Cirrus Logic graphics card (ISA) and see the speed ;)
Thanks, Hetz
Well, I just tried a simple comparison of the Adobe SVG plugin under Wine and IE6 on Windows XP. Wine _is_ slower by a visible amount when doing repeated bitblts such as the plugin does on an animation I have, but it's certainly not something that'd actually affect real world usage. I don't think GDI performance is really an issue at present, most apps don't do these kind of repeated double-buffer switches (i assume flash doesn't actually use the gdi to render into its backbuffer?) so it only affects apps like photoshop and director/flash.
In particular when I run the SVG plugin, I can see a FIXME talking about a potential optimization, so really the issue is just a case of elbow grease for optimizations (esp in bitblt) rather than a rewrite I'd guess.
A bit offtopic, but I find it fascinating that one guy commented earlier on how an MS sales rep claimed the "linux emulations" didn't always run Windows apps. Presumably this guy was just a normal sales team member, so it makes me wonder how well briefed MS employees are about Wine. It'd be fun to go through the mailing list system and extract hits from *.microsoft.com addresses, they probably mirror it internally if they monitor it at all. I know when I met a veep from the Passport department he was all too aware of Wine, which surprised me because he wasn't directly connected with the OS division, which makes me wonder how up to date their knowledge is. In fact, he was almost scared of it. Left an impression on me for sure.
A bit offtopic, but I find it fascinating that one guy commented earlier on how an MS sales rep claimed the "linux emulations" didn't always run Windows apps. Presumably this guy was just a normal sales team member, so it makes me wonder how well briefed MS employees are about Wine. It'd be fun to go through the mailing list system and extract hits from *.microsoft.com addresses, they probably mirror it internally if they monitor it at all. I know when I met a veep from the Passport department he was all too aware of Wine, which surprised me because he wasn't directly connected with the OS division, which makes me wonder how up to date their knowledge is. In fact, he was almost scared of it. Left an impression on me for sure.
You'll be surprised, but I think that there are at least 10+ people from MS here in this list, and they watch this list as well others (like WineX and ReWind) very carefully, and of-course, they inform people about Wine progress. (hi guys ;)
BTW - most of those people don't use their .microsoft.com email address..
Thanks, Hetz
did you try to run it with the fixmes disabled ? debug messages are cause of slowness in some cases...
In particular when I run the SVG plugin, I can see a FIXME talking about a potential optimization, so really the issue is just a case of elbow
grease for optimizations (esp in bitblt) rather than a rewrite I'd guess.
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You'll be surprised, but I think that there are at least 10+ people from MS here in this list, and they watch this list as well others (like WineX and ReWind) very carefully, and of-course, they inform people about Wine progress. (hi guys ;)
BTW - most of those people don't use their .microsoft.com email address..
Thanks, Hetz
How do you know that? Or is it just a guess? I seem to remember in one of the Halloween memos they referred to an "egg" box which contained mirrors of many open source projects mailing list archives, Samba in particular, which I guess would make far more sense than having everybody subscribed using personal accounts.
On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:10:35PM -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Yeah, the GDI is slow. I'd be interested to see a quote from one of the Wine-based companies.
I'm looking at fixing up the DIBSection handling. Will probably submit something this year at least :)
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Dimitrie O. Paun -
Hetz Ben Hamo -
Hetz Ben-Hamo
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Johan Gill -
Mike Hearn -
Shachar Shemesh -
Sylvain Petreolle