Why My SimCity 4 Sluggish?

[Propfam 2,286]

Hello,

I'm on Manjaro 17.1.10 Xfce with Wine 3.7. I have installed the driver for my HD Graphics 3000. The game runs sluggish, even after I put d3dim700.dll to my Wine system32. I suspected this related to CPU and RAM but after closing Firefox (yes, I run the game with Firefox open), the game again runs sluggish. After I replaced the ordinary Wine 3.7 to Wine 3.7 with Gallium Nine patch, the game runs smooth. Why this could happen? As I know, the ordinary Wine translates DX calls into OpenGL, while the patched one runs DirectX calls directly.

Thanks.

@rsc204, @Cyclone Boom, @Handyman

[twalsh102 1,601]

@chfzdn, I'm not an expert on Wine, so I'm going to make a guess here. 

In every post in the forums where graphics rendering modes (and related problems) are discussed, the answer to the choice between Hardware vs. Software mode (as I'm sure you're aware) is always Hardware mode if it will work.  The next question is almost always OpenGL vs. DirectX.  The recommendation there is inevitably to use DirectX as Maxis never fully developed/implemented OpenGL rendering, and therefore the situation is "user beware" if trying to use OpenGL.  The "proof in the pudding" in your case is that you were having problems when DirectX calls were being translated into OpenGL, while everything worked smoothly once DirectX calls were being run directly.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

13 hours ago, chfzdn said:

ordinary Wine translates DX calls into OpenGL, while the patched one runs DirectX calls directly

Looks like you answered your own question. Native support for anything should always run faster than translating to something else, even if your graphics card supports both.

[Handyman 765]

17 hours ago, chfzdn said:

I have installed the driver for my HD Graphics 3000.

 

17 hours ago, chfzdn said:

Wine 3.7 with Gallium Nine patch

I'm a little confused about what graphics hardware you have. Afaik, HD Graphics 3000 is an intel chip and the Gallium patch is to address a AMD Radeon performance problem.