Wine, pulseaudio, Starcraft problems

[stan]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:27:22 -0600
Reid Rivenburgh <reidr at pobox.com> wrote:

> To follow up, I did manage to get wine to use alsa (it's important to
> install the i686 packages as well as x86_64), but it's still running
> very slowly for me.  So I have sound in the game but still just a few
> (< 5) frames per second.  I'm pretty sure pulseaudio is out of the
> equation now, so I'm not sure what else could be wrong.  Even with
> alsa, the audio is a little choppy.  At least it's playable and the
> sound never cuts out.  (It's the same with a different account, by the
> way.)

It sounds to me like alsa might be doing rate conversion. That is, the
alsa device has been opened at one rate, say 44100 frames/second, and
the game is playing audio which requires 48000 frames/second.  The
higher the numbers are, the more conversion work the CPU has to do in a
shorter time, and that could impact your user experience.

It is also possible that there is something running in the background
that doesn't have a low enough priority and is preventing the interrupt
for alsa from operating in a timely manner.  I think there is a way to
set niceness so that alsa is very high priority, a config file
in /etc.  Can't remember the name, a search should turn it up.

The wine api that pretends it is the sound device in windows might also
be causing a problem in some way as it passes the data through to linux.

Just some more possibilities.