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Both options should be very fast, but Wine will generally have lower overhead (no hypervisor) and in some cases the app will run faster in Wine than it does on Windows. In VirtualBox the app will always run slower than it does on just Windows.

Wine also gives programs much better access to the GPU.




> in some cases the app will run faster in Wine than it does on Windows.

How is that possible ?


It's in the name -- Wine Is Not [an] Emulator. ;)

Everything is 100% native and executed directly on the processor, there is no intermediate layer or translation occurring like it would for a VM.

When you run Wine, you are not running Windows, you're running unrelated code that just happens to do the things that Windows programs expect. For example, when a Windows program asks for a window, it asks in the Win32 API. Wine knows this API and responds to the request with an X11 window, like any other program on your system would get. Wine does this for almost all Windows API calls; it takes them and handles them in a way that makes sense for a POSIX system. The application being executed never realizes it's not on Windows because the API is fully satisfied, and Wine makes sure that function calls that mean "give me a window", "make a sound", and "write to a file", etc., all do things that make sense, just like MS Windows does when the same applications make the same requests on a system that runs MS Windows.

Because Wine has its own implementations of these functions and isn't just executing Windows code on a virtual processor, Wine's version of the function may be faster or slower than the MS version because it may satisfy the request with more or less work. All that matters is that the implementations meet the caller's expectations.


For example Linux filesystems being a lot faster in some cases.




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