I can't say much about the Lord of the Rings game -- never played it or tried it with Wine. I can likely help you with the Steam related content however. First, here's a how-to that I wrote for installing the Orange Box: http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151354 Check out step 8 specifically. You might just need to change the heapsize or dxlevel options. Second, see my post from a few weeks ago: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=4641 There are tons of details in there about tweaks that can be done. Specifically, you might want to look at adding the Direct3D registry key and all of the values (well, most of them) that cloudef posted (see his picture in the post from Wed Apr 29, 2009 9:36 am). I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) on a test partition and then installed Wine. Oddly enough it seemed like all of the tweaks from that thread had negative effects on my 32-bit partition, but worked beautifully on my 64-bit partition. Since you're using a 64-bit kernel I would recommend trying all of those registry tweaks -- they made a world of difference on my 64-bit system. My advice would be to try setting heapsize and dxlevel in the game properties like so: -heapsize 1048576 -dxlevel 81 Then try playing the game and see how it does. After that, start trying to add the values in the Direct3D registry key one at a time and see what happens. Obviously the heapsize and dxlevel won't help LotR much, but the registry tweaks might. If you're running Compiz then temporarily disabling that while you play a game should also help.
