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Doom 3 - Linux, Multi-Monitor, DirectX 8 Solutions
nukem996 writes "While the official port of Doom 3 to Linux is still not complete and we still do not know when it is going to be out, other then 'in a few days after the Windows release', Linux users can finally play Doom 3 on Linux with the help of Wine." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader points to a post on the GideonTech forums explaining multi-monitor Doom 3 play, with the caveat: "Doing this with only 2 monitors completely sucks. You want atleast 3, or 5.. or any odd number of monitors (so your center of playing field isn't split between two monitors)." Finally, toasted_calamari explains: "We have written a guide to optimizing Doom 3 for DirectX 8 systems, particularly older ATI Radeon cards. This guide should assist owners of older hardware in running Doom 3 more effectively without upgrading."
Actually, no it's not.
Yes it is.
Wine merely implements the Windows API.
Bochs merely implements the Intel 386 opcodes.
Emulation, with relation to computers, generally involves taking machine language instruction-per-instruction and emulating the physical environment
That's not the definition of "emulation". You are referring to "CPU emulation", which is a specific subset of emulation. Software can be emulated too- "emulate" merely means to copy something else; to do what it does. Humans generally have 2 arms and 2 legs; but that doesn't make it OK to say "Max Cleland is not a human"- a statement that is equally as correct as "Wine is not an emulator".
Ask yourself if Wine is just "implementing the Windows API", or imitating Windows. If there's a bug in Windows XP where it doesn't obey it's own API docs, do you think the Wine developers will follow the docs, or the real behavior?
But that's got nothing to do with actual hardware emulation.
No, it has to do with software emulation. Wine emulates Windows, but is not a clone of Windows, because it doesn't have all it's own OS kernel and video drivers (it gets those services from Linux instead). As such, Wine will always have at least one additional layer of function calls beyond what real Windows would have, and that means it will be slower. The only way Wine could meet the speed of Windows is if Microsoft had made a real error in their own implementation.