![]() Linux and OS X do not face the same battle. Nobody is willing to take the plunge into Linux gaming after the Loki debacle. The Mac game houses are pretty well established and don’t look like they’re going anywhere. You’ve got pretty much a dead scene on Linux. To sum up, on one hand you’ve got a pretty vibrant shareware and commercial games scene on the Mac. iD’s John Carmack has come out and stated that there is no demand for games on Linux and the cost of the port is not recouped by the sales. Loki was in business for a bit, but they went bust. How many similar companies exist on Linux? None. Ambrosia, Freeverse, Macplay and Macsoft. How many shareware game companies are there on OS X, or companies that specialize in porting PC games to OS X? Off the top of my head, I count 4. There is a big difference between Linux and OS X when it comes to games. If every company used Wine as a target in addition to Windows XP/Vista, we would have every single Windows game available to run perfectly and NATIVE on Linux. The only thing required by a company for their games to work perfectly with Linux and OS X is to add Wine to their testing platforms. This means replacing API-calls that are known to work poorly with Cider with something else and make sure that the API-calls that are left work well. What EA is doing is to fix their games so that they run perfectly with Cider. And a substantial portion of the time, the reimplementation is actually slower than the original. This leads to compatibility problems and bugs. Unfortunately, Wine/Cedega/Cider isn’t always a 100% complete and the implementation isn’t always exactly the same as the original. So, if the Wine developers are good and do a good job at the implementation, it could turn out faster than the original. The DirectX to OpenGL “translation” is just what programmers like to call “wrappers”, and if properly done doesn’t have to add any substantial overhead. There is nothing inherit in Wine/Cedega or indeed Cider that means that games have to run slower. ![]() The Wine developers looked at the Win32-API and DirectX API and wrote their own version of it with the same interfaces as the original. Sometimes a reimplementation is faster than the original. It is just a reimplementation of Win32-APIs and DirectX. “Transgaming is faster than running the games native? It’s just fanboys doing what they do best, spinning in order that it might become true.”
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