Yes, it makes a major difference. Gallium 9 is only usable with Mesa drivers that use Gallium3D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D

So if you want to use it, your best bet is to switch to AMD. Which might be a good idea anyway. Mesa has improved a lot in the recent times. I switched from Nvidia to RX 480 around a month ago, and so far it worked out very well.

Game: Dark Reign
Installer MD5: de5364689416a936f9049f58b2f095e8 setup_dark_reign_2.1.0.46.exe
WineHQ AppDB link: retail

Distro: Ubuntu Mate 16.04 64-bit
Kernel version: 4.4.0-57-generic x86_64
Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce GT 240
Graphics driver & version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 340.98
Wine version(s) tested: Wine 2.0rc2-staging via PlayOnLinux, tested with and without virtual desktop

How well does it run: no it doesn't, it installs and runs, but complains can't find the CD, and menu is corrupted with only undefined strings, and won't single player won't load. Downloaded the 1.7 patch and it suffers the same, tested the mods that come with 1.7 and they fail also.

Thanks it worked. :)

Vega is coming out next year. At some point in 2017 I expect AMD with Mesa to start performing comparably or even better than Nvidia closed blob.

Have you tried running this with ant wine newer as 1.9.17, as that's the last one that works for me (mind you I'm playing the steam version). 1.9.18 and up the sound starts to stutter as soon as the game loads and won't go past loading area.

EDIT: found the problem, from 1.9.18 you need to install Quartz else it'll complain about: err:quartz:ACMWrapper_Receive Cannot prepare header 512

Weird. I remember testing it some time this year and it worked well. But now I get the same problems in wine and crossover.

Game: Racer Driver - GRID
Installer MD5's: 035a1fe8d2d57b7146cb26422c6d7878 setup_race_driver_grid_2.1.0.8-1.bin
b9fb8635c41d2b13e898df2c80283dde setup_race_driver_grid_2.1.0.8-2.bin
1f4a7a2c36212a3ede5915c700578c74 setup_race_driver_grid_2.1.0.8.exe
WineHQ AppDB link: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28327
Distro: Linux Mint Mate 17.3 (64bit)
Kernel version: 3.19
Graphics card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 2GB
Graphics driver & version: Proprietary / version 375.26
Wine version(s) tested: Wine 2.0rc-3 Staging

Winetricks: d3dx9_36 (native then built in), also installed the redistributable Dx9 package and the OpenAL that came with the game.

How Well Does It Run: Unless you set the Shadows to Low or Disabled the game will crash within the first few seconds after starting a race. With CSMT/Game's Ultra Settings (minus Shadows)/1920x1080 Res, game runs very well however it will crash after about 30 minutes of gameplay.

Just a general observation with some modern 32bit games on Wine: They tend to crash once the virtual memory hits 4GB. A couple of them that come to mind are:

Guild Wars 2 (32bit client), thankfully they created a 64bit executable for this popular MMO and now I can play it for well over 5 hours without a single issue, but the 32bit client will crash after 1 hour or so of gameplay.

Path of Exile: This one's well optimized, took me 3 hours straight of gameplay to get it to crash.

As for GRID itself: I've ran the game a second time, approximately 22-28 mins after I after I started it, it crashed again producing the following error: It is worth nothing that despite the message it's the virtual memory that becomes full, not the physical one, the game itself uses less than 1GB of physical ram.

I installed Cultures 8th Wonder of the World with the Porting Kit from Paul the Tall. Every time I start the second Tutorial the game crashes. All other tutorials work. I don't know if this is a problem with wine or if thats a bug of the game. I can't test the game on a windows pc, if it works there properly.

Just a point of interest: I tried out my old retail Windows install of KotOR in Wine, which had all three enabled, and grass worked just fine. I didn't test stability as I only ran around Dantooine for a few minutes. Copied that prefix over to this AMD PC and broken grass everywhere.

I played KoTOR without disabling stuff - and it worked well.

Just tested it now with RX 480 (Mesa / radeonsi). The grass on Daantoine looks fine to me.

Technically you didn't ask me. ;p Dupe reports are fine. If it's just a this still works in newer version Wine X.x that's better of as a me too post. E.G. less workarounds required (or new ones needed) or other differences are more likely to be updated. OS X-specific reports depends on whether yours is more complete or not. I may request the OR to update their report mentioning the OS X-specific bits and linking to your entry (which would be more coherent).
If you look at the thread title you will notice it does not say "...run in Wine under Linux". More reports are always better. Particularly when with different GPUs/drivers.
Interesting. In my case it was with older Mint/Ubuntu drivers: Perhaps that is a driver bug. Think it happens for Intel GPUs as well...

Actually they were seeing it with nouveau drivers.