Why are games that I install with wine so slow?

[cravengemetzel]

I have an HP laptop with a quad-core AMD A8 (Opteron/K8 ) 64-bit CPU, and dedicated 2GB split/hybrid DDR3 Radeon graphics and 8GB of RAM. My entire system is compiled from source (obviously) so everything else runs lightning-fast. I use Openbox so it can't be a desktop environment consuming all my memory; with firefox open, ncmpcpp (mpd) playing, and a couple of urxvt terminals open conky registers a ~5-10% load on each of my CPUs. With Minecraft running on Wine and the above programs open, they register ~50-60%. I set the "radeon" useflag in /etc/make.conf, but with other DIY operating systems (including Gentoo) I have had trouble running X without xf86-video-fbdev, mesa, and xf86-video-vesa installed, so I have them as a precaution. (I really have no idea if the open-source radeon driver is working or not.) I have opengl and openal set in my /etc/make.conf, yet Minecraft runs slightly faster when I set openGL to OFF.

I had to install the Windoze-native binary of Java with Wine in order for Minecraft to even work, I don't know if this is where I went wrong?
I mean, I still have the gentoo with icedtea compiled as my "main" Java implementation.

Here are some specs:

[PaulBredbury]

AFAICT, Wine is slow mainly because wineserver is a separate app. Wine has an interesting architecture.

Edit: A choice quote:

[DaggyStyle]

first, for proper radeon usage you need to configure kms (including the right fw) in the kernel and install mesa, libdrm and xf86-video-ati.

as your card is relativly new, I'd recommend going live on the mentioned above pkgs and latest unstable kernel.

wine is a windows to linux api, not all of it is implemented and some might be missing, also there are some opengl extensions that might be needed and aren't implemented.
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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

[The Doctor]

Wine basically works by translating windows system calls into linux system calls. This takes some time. On some games, like Star Trek: Bridge Commander, this does not significantly affect the speed. Some games, like Myst, slow down.

You can check the winehq wiki FAQ for more. I would post a link, but it seems to be down.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[baaann]

Minecraft is available natively via overlays

see http://gpo.zugaina.org/Search?search=minecraft

and for info on using overlays

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/userguide.xml

[baaann]

I forgot to mention there is an extensive forum thread dedicated to minecraft as well

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-857083-highlight-minecraft.html

[cravengemetzel]

So I isntalled the java-overlay, ran into a few mask issues but resolved them, then I started minecraft and it said that the game was not downloaded (as expected, as the ebuild is for dependencies only). Then I looked at what was in ~/.minecraft, and copied the missing files from my install with wine to the ~/.minecraft directory, and the game is still slow and unplayable?
I omitted copying any files in the ~/.minecraft/bin/natives, and left ~/.minecraft/bin/lwgl.jar untouched as these were built by the ebuild to be compatible with Linux, I have no idea if this was the right way to do this or not.

[baaann]

I haven't had it installed in some time so I would recommend posting your issues in the dedicated forum thread above, they seem quite responsive