Wine 1.3.5 Betters Its Shader Model 4 Support

Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

This second Wine 1.3.x development release for October brings support for animated cursors, printing being handled directly through CUPS rather than LPR, Microsoft Office 2010 installer fixes, man MSXML3 improvements, improved Shader Model 4 support, and proper icons in the built-in Internet Explorer. With Wine 1.3.5 there's also the usual roundabout with translation updates and various bug-fixes.

While the Shader Model 4.0 improvements are nice to see, the state of Direct3D 10 support in Wine is still dire and Direct3D 11 support is virtually non-existent. We certainly hope soon the Wine developers will end up hooking in optional support for the Direct3D state tracker in Gallium3D that was introduced last month and there's already optional Wine DLLs to use it, albeit the D3D 10/11 state tracker is not yet complete and these Dynamic Link Libraries are currently living within Mesa's repository rather than Wine. Using this state tracker would allow for a more complete Direct3D implementation in Wine, likely less buggy than Wine's Direct3D status quo, and would have less overhead and be faster as Direct3D calls simply wouldn't be converted into OpenGL.

The Wine 1.3.5 release announcement can be found at WineHQ.org.