Wine has almost equal performance compared to Windoze !

My current and past desktop machines both have/had NVidia drivers, my laptop has an ATi card. Even with my previous machine (build in '00 i believe) the nvidia install was very smooth.

My laptop was another story, I was already fairly seasoned by the time I tried to install Gentoo on it ('03 as I recall) and I still had a devil of a time getting the drivers to work properly.

I then set about benchmarking the thing against my desktop. My desktop was a 1 GHz AMD Thunderbird with a GeForce2 GTS 64MB, my laptop was a 1.7 Pentium M with a Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB. glxgears (the defacto openGL benchmark in Linux ) showed that my desktop's openGL was nearly three times faster than my laptop! I then tried another benchmark (this time, a cross-OS benchmark in the MATLAB computational tool). In Windows, my laptop predictably beat my desktop by a noticeable margin. Back in Linux, both machines ended up with roughly equivalent scores! The desktop's performance from Windows to Linux was very consistent, but the laptop's performance had dropped. To explain the results, the overall scores were roughly the same, however in every subcategory except 2 the laptop again trounced my desktop: 2d was tied and 3d easily went to my desktop.

To be fair, I haven't updated my laptop drivers since the AMD takeover, and considering AMD's chipset support in the kernel, things very well may turn around, but I was still left with a sour taste in my mouth over the whole thing.