Is Wine Really Faster than Windows?

Would you believe that Wine, the open-source program that enables you to run some Windows programs on Linux, is faster than native Windows XP on the same hardware?

I have trouble buying that one too, but according to the Wine crews latest benchmark runs, its true.

These were primarily graphic tests. Both systems, Windows XP SP 2 and Gentoo with Wine 0.9.5, were asked to show their stuff on a 3.8GHz Intel 570 Pentium box with an 800MHz FSB (front side bus), a gigabyte of 533MHz DDR2 (double-data-rate 2) RAM, and a 60GB IDE ATA100 hard drive.

If you just look at the top-line results, it looks like Wine isnt just edging out XP, its killing it! It won the majority, 67, of the total tests.

A closer look at the results, however, reveals that while Wine is remarkably good at letting users run Windows applications, its not as good as that top number might make you think.

For example, while Wine does better on most of the 3DMark2000v1.1 1024x768x16 tests, which measures older methods of producing 3-D graphics, its wheel fall off when it tries more complex 3-D manipulations, such as pixel shading and point sprites, as measured by the 3DMark2001SE 1024x768x16 test suite.

Translated from gamer graphics talk, youre not going to be running top-of-the-line 3-D games on Wine anytime soon.

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