Does wine slowdown opengl ?

I'm trying to run a racing simulator. It installed and runs ok but refuses to run above 800x600. Increasing to 1024x768 results in less than 1fps. It's impossible to know the maximum fps at 800x600 because the game deliberately caps at 36fps.
Running glxgears simultaneously with the game glxgears runs 22fps and the game slows to 15fps. Have no idea if this is a legitimate way of testing.
The video card is a budget 64mb geforce4. It normally runs glxgears at 1370fps.
Is this a normal wine problem or is the game likely configured wrong ?

edit: How to test if 3d acceleration is working in wine ?

Nevermind. I did a quick windows install to see how this game would run. My machine just barely has enough power to run this fullscreen with nvidias latest drivers. Expecting wine to to run fullscreen is probably asking to much.