Tutorial on Wine: Gallium 9, possibly doubling your framerate

Wine is a great system to running programs, but there are many alternatives in Linux. The biggest thing people use wine for is games and the most common complain about games running under the WINE compatibility layer is performance. Naturally, most people would default to the propriety drivers to try to optimise performance, which has been the case for a long time until…

Gallium Nine, demonstrating increased performance for Direct3D 9. 

To install

Install the mesa OIBAF PPA and Patched gallium wine PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/gallium-nine
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:commendsarnex/winedri3 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install wine1.9

Enable

sudo apt-get install mesa-vdpau-drivers

You will need to specify to use open source drivers.

Edit Registry in Wine

Fortunately this can be done on a GUI. Run winecfg Select the Graphics tab In the 3D Acceleration group select “Prefer native Direct3D 9”

The option will not appear if your version of wine is not patched.

Recommendations

I would recommend that those using ATI/Intel drivers consider using the Gallium 3D drivers as the open source drivers are often more stable than the propriety options. As for NVIDIA cards, I recommend weighing the benefits before making the switch. Not having the latest NVIDIA propriety drivers may conflict with some games on Steam.

Update: Rendering Issue Fixes

You may have to add the following parameter which may fix some rendering issues:

thread_submit=true

So the command should look like

env WINEARCH=win32 DRI_PRIME=1 thread_submit=true wine program.exe

or on PlayOnLinux:

DRI_PRIME=1 thread_submit=true PlayOnLinux --run "filename"
(single program, you may create a shortcut for that matter)

or in the POL Console

POL_Config_Write BEFORE_WINE 'DRI_PRIME=1 thread_submit=true'
(affects all POL programs)

To uninstall PPAs

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo ppa-purge ppa:oibaf/gallium-nine
sudo ppa-purge ppa:commendsarnex/winedri3

Edit: Code modified to reflect version 1.9 for WINE. Thanks sarnex.