How do I tell if a Wine application uses hardware or software rendering?

Question

I'm building an appliance/kiosk-type machine which is going to run a single fullscreen Wine application (Synthesia). I'm using Arch Linux running LXDE on an original 7-inch EeePC (well, souped up to 2Gb of RAM, but the CPU is rather slow, something like 633 Mhz).

The game can use either a DirectX or OpenGL renderer and I'm finding it to be quite choppy, especially with the DirectX renderer. However, I remember that the machine was perfectly capable of running Tuxracer and other OpenGL games, and Synthesia definitely should be less demanding to graphics - all it does is drawing a few colored bars.

So, the point is - the display is choppy and the CPU utilization is at 100% when the program runs so I suspect it may be using software rendering.

The video chip is Intel and I have xf86-video-intel installed.

How do I check if the application uses hardware or software rendering? If the software rendering is being used, how do I set it to hardware rendering?

Answer 1

Well, since nobody wants to answer :)

This wiki article, while not completely related, provided useful pointers:

You can easily check if you have 3D rendering ... by installing mesa and running the following command:

glxinfo | grep renderer

If you have no 3D acceleration you'll get some output like this:

[joe@arch64]$ OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer

If 3D acceleration is enabled you'll get a message like this:

[joe@arch64]$ OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV730 9490) 20090101 x86/MMX+/3DNow!+/SSE2 TCL DRI2

Also I had to install xf86-video-intel, libgl, intel-dri, mesa and mesa-demos, and added i915 to the MODULES line in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf as described here.

Everything works perfectly now. Phew...