I get rather crappy performance with this game on Windows as well(Core 2 Duo, GF 9600, but it is CPU limited). Can you compare the in-game race framerate, preferably with a quick race without any opponents? You can show the framerate on Windows with Fraps(http://www.fraps.com/).

I think that my Windows setup is probably broken, as my CPU isn't too old. I get 6 fps in the main menu(both Windows and Wine), which seems wrong to me, but I need some performance data from a different computer to tell if it's my system's or the game's fault.

Ok, my windows installation was broken. I reinstalled it after Mass effect 2 ran at 0.5 fps in the main menu.

Now with a better Windows to Wine comparison I can say that our overall performance in this game is a catastrophe. Just some quick data from the main menu(rotating car, etc): Windows gets 55 fps, wined3d on Windows 19, Wine 6. So we get approximately 10% of the Windows performance. Our usual "crap is this slow" 50% seem so sweet now.

I'm back to debugging this game's performance...

Yeah, it's pretty bad in the main menu.

If it's any comfort, the frame rates seem better in the actual racing 
parts of the game.

Created attachment 30072 [details]
Avoid software blit fallbacks

Created attachment 30073 [details]
Increase the FBO cache size for NFS shift

My performance debugging results were not as fruitful as I originally hoped. The patches I attached improve the performance with wined3d on Windows a little bit(22 -> 27 fps), but it is still a far cry from the 53 fps native d3d achieves.

The first one avoids a software fallback, it is pretty streightforward. However, the blit code is still in pretty bad shape, so I don't want to send it to wine-patches right away. This change may uncover some other problems, e.g. with backbuffer ORM.

The second one is needed because NFS:Shift uses more than 64 different framebuffer configurations in the main menu. The reconfiguration of framebuffers causes performance issues in the GL driver. This is a crude workaround only. For a proper fix we'd want some fbo cache limitation logic that isn't based on a fixed value. Also with growing FBO cache sizes we'll need different approach to organizing the cache, with the current design the cost for finding a specific FBO grows quickly with increased sizes.
(NFS:Shift apparently generates mipmaps with FBO_blit, so it blits bitween many different surfaces. There may be a capability flag issue. D3D supports mipmap autogeneration that would probably be faster. Wined3d supports it too, so if the game knows about it it should be able to use it)

As I mentioned, on Windows this improves the performance by about 20%. On Linux, the non-d3d issues drain all the oxygen set free by these improvements, so the performance was improved from ~16fps to ~17fps. However, the 16 fps were better than the 6 fps I got when I ran the app the last time. Switching to Linux 2.6.34 may have improved things, I can investigate this closer if needed(about 1/3rd of the CPU time is spent in the Linux kernel).

The remaining issues in the main menu are in 3 areas:
*) Blits are very expensive. There isn't a specific blit that is expensive. Some blits are integer RGBA blits, some are float blits, some scale up, some scale down. Filtering isn't the issue
*) Activating the FBOs is expensive, about 10% of total CPU time are spent in glBindFramebuffer(ARB or EXT). I did not find any obvious workaround here.
*) sRGB write correction. This is a GPU limitation, and it won't bother us until we remove the CPU limitations above.

Feels much smoother with the patches, thanks!
In fact, +fps shows the framerate *doubled* in the menu
on my system (e8400, Geforce GT 220, ubuntu 10.04, 2.6.32-24-generic-pae),
from 8.5fps to 19fps.

(However, there's something funky going on with the sound.
I'm not hearing all the sounds I should, and it's possible
that some flaky sound problem is artificially improving things.)

Did the patches double the framerate, or some other change? In my case some other change accounted for most of the improvement(6->16 fps), the patches are just some minor change(16->17)

I ran with and without patches.  The menu was definitely twice as fast with the patches.  I'm going to repeat the measurements on another computer.

The improvements continue on my i7 / gt 240 / 2.6.33-custom gentoo system.
where performance *tripled* on the menu; it went from 9fps with current git
to 28fps with current git + the two patches.

What's the status of these patches?

I just tested this game again, and it's horridly slow without them.

also affected :

Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010 (Bug 31078), Dirt 2 demo (Bug 30655), Dirt 3

(In reply to comment #12)
> also affected :
> 
> Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010 (Bug 31078), Dirt 2 demo (Bug 30655), Dirt 3

This bug affect "Splinter Cell : Conviction".

Tried in 1.7.8 without attached patches. Framerate is normal.
Nvidia driver 331.20

Reported fixed.

Closing bugs fixed in 1.7.9.