Ubuntu – How to give Wine / Crossover games access to LAN

You may not want to hear this but if you enjoy a lot of Windows-only software and need it to perform as well as it would on Windows then dual-booting - having an actual bare-metal Windows installation - is the best way to achieve this.

Any kind of emulation layer, and Wine is an emulation layer despite what people say the name stands for these days, has the potential to degrade performance.

In particular, DirectX is a big and complicated beast and providing an entire emulating API for it adds a huge amount of weight, so any 3D game is going to suffer greatly under Wine. Subroutines that are hardware-accelerated in Windows may be emulated in software under Wine, or they may be hardware-accelerated but in a different, and less efficient way. The bottom line is a lot of the time you will get severely degraded performance.

Wine is a great exercise in providing API compatibility for Windows applications, and should be admired for the success it has had in doing so, but one should never expect anything to perform as it would in Windows itself.

Note: some decent games are natively available for Linux, through Steam or otherwise, and should run well enough on Linux. What won't run as well are games released exclusively for Windows, particularly if they use DirectX which will be the heavier, slower emulation on Wine.