After further review of Bugzilla, I now understand the behavior I'm seeing. I stopped using wine for a little while so I missed the introduction of a some of the new features. Allow me save the rest of you who are having similar issues some time by attempting to summarize. The new DIB engine, which now makes the Steam client silky smooth, appears to incur higher CPU usage than before when the Steam client was extremely clunky and annoying. See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19889#c38 Also, there's some issues with "dynamic buffers", starting sometime around wine-1.3.18, which appears to incur additional CPU overhead for games. See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30019#c4 I game almost exclusively thru Steam. So for me, it appears to be a "double whammy", so to speak, since I *must* run the Steam client and the game simultaneously. I'm incurring overhead from both affected apps. I hope my summary is accurate and I hope this helps anyone who may be scratching their heads as to why everything seems so much slower than before. Thanks again.
