Generally you should consider yourself lucky if you can run any old game. Even games that sold dozens of millions of copies and were released ten years ago are full of glitches, such as the early GTA series.
Wow, I never would have thought they could run better. I'm thinking of old titles, AoE II, Starcraft, etc. They have good ratings but I'm just wondering if it would be anywhere near as bad as when I used to run VMWare on my old Mac.
Both AoE II and Starcraft play totally fine now. But they used to run poorly on old wine releases from 6 years ago.
Any software that is around 15 years or older has a really good chance of running, I would say even more than Windows 10.
Newer DirectX 9 games, specially with the wine-staging patches, have a good chance of running, but nowhere near what current Windows can attain.
Anything newer with DirectX 10, 11 or 12 is pretty much a train-wreck. Unless the game runs OpenGL or Vulkan, like DOOM 2016, which after removing the DRM and some patching from devs runs like a dream.
> Anything newer with DirectX 10, 11 or 12 is pretty much a train-wreck. Unless the game runs OpenGL or Vulkan, like DOOM 2016, which after removing the DRM and some patching from devs runs like a dream.
Unless you run wine with the gallium-nine patches (which implements DirectX 9, 10, and parts of 11 natively on top of the gallium driver system, providing native DirectX performance on AMD and the open source nvidia drivers).
Sadly, the wine maintainers prefer their ugly hacks for their DirectX implementation, so it’ll likely never be merged.
VMWare has historically used emulation for kernel/privileged code when the host CPU doesn't allow for direct virtualization. VMWare also emulates peripheral hardware. Wine doesn't emulate any hardware.
As a general rule, assume that there will always be a performance penalty. It will be good enough to be playable, but you'll notice the difference, and you'll have to adjust the graphics down one or two notches (go down from "Max" graphics settings to "Medium" or similar). If you can live with this, you're fine.
Some games, in particular old games that don't rely much on 3D (I'm thinking of Age of Wonders right now), work really well, or well enough that you don't notice the difference.
I have some games that are unplayable, but thankfully those are rare (or I am just lucky). X3, for example, is glitchy as hell and the performance is very bad. Some games are also inexplicably slow: there are some PopCap games (very casual and "lightweight" games) that are just unplayable, for some reason.
However, with regards to being playable, I think that the graphical bugs will be the showstoppers, not performance.
Critically, WINE outperforms VirtualBox, especially if you account for starting up (or the overhead of constantly running) a virtual windows machine. Being able to run a few apps without switching off your dual boot machine or firing up a vm is nice.
On my laptop with an NVidia GTX 880m, under Windows 10 many DirectX 8 games run horrendously slow. Under wine these games run perfectly smooth as you would expect. It seems either Windows or NVIDIA did a lousy job of their DX8 compatibility.
