Wine 9.9 Brings ARM Improvements, Drops Obsolete WineD3D Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 9.9 Brings ARM Improvements, Drops Obsolete WineD3D Features

Wine 9.9 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.9-Released

[ayumu]

I am missing something here.

When these "obsolete features" are removed, what happens to the Windows programs using them?

[timofonic]

I am missing something here.

When these "obsolete features" are removed, what happens to the Windows programs using them?

I'm quite confused about it too.

Can anyone elaborate what does it mean?

[duby229]

I'm quite confused about it too.

Can anyone elaborate what does it mean?

https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Fixed_Function_Pipeline

This is the kind of stuff getting removed.

EDIT: As long as you aren't using a fixed function card then it will work just fine. And if you are using a fixed function card you aren't using wine for anything graphics related anyway.

EDIT: Elizabeth Figura seems especially gifted at getting really old 90's era windows games working on wine and it seems like she is doing this work.

[ssokolow]

I am missing something here.

When these "obsolete features" are removed, what happens to the Windows programs using them?

From the changelog:

wined3d: Remove the offscreen_rendering_mode setting.
wined3d: Use wined3d_resource_is_offscreen() directly in ffp_blitter_clear_rendertargets().
wined3d: Remove no longer used support for drawing to an onscreen render target.
wined3d: Remove the no longer used render_offscreen field from struct ds_compile_args.
wined3d: Remove the no longer used Y correction variable.
wined3d: Remove the GL FFP vertex pipeline.
wined3d: Remove the GL FFP fragment pipeline.
wined3d: Remove the NV_register_combiners fragment pipeline.
wined3d: Remove the ATI_fragment_shader fragment pipeline.
wined3d: Remove the ARB_fragment_program blitter.
wined3d: Remove the ARB fragment pipeline.
wined3d: Remove the ARB shader backend.
wined3d: Remove no longer used support for emulated non-power-of-two textures.
wined3d: Remove no longer used support for rectangle textures.
wined3d: Remove texture non-power-of-two fixup.
wined3d: Remove the last vestiges of ARB_texture_rectangle support.
wined3d: Collapse together NPOT d3d_info flags.
wined3d: Remove the redundant "pow2_width" and "pow2_height" fields.
wined3d: Fix inversion in shader_get_position_fixup().

As the others have said, they're obsolete because they're support for emulating Direct3D on top of ancient fixed-function pipeline video cards. It should have no effect on compatibility with Windows programs.

I believe they're basically dropping support for video cards too old to support the conception of shaders present in OpenGL 3.0... which is the oldest version on mesamatrix.net.

[pinguinpc]

with this wine version appear new build dependency, libodbc



however in my case with xubuntu 24.04 dont show installed (libodbc and libodbc dev files stay installed)

[DMJC]

As long as this isn't reducing game compatibility it should be fine. There's also QEMU-3DFX for people who want to run retro games on Linux. The compatibility with games is astounding. Stuff I've always wanted to run just works.

[muncrief]

I'm not much of a gamer, but some of the old games I used to enjoy most, like the original Call of Duty, Crysis, etc. no longer work with Wine or Steam on Linux. I wish the devs would realize there are still old people like me who enjoy these games and would continue to support them. There actually used to be fixes and tricks to make them run, but now even those don't work.

So the only way I can play many of my games is to run them under Windows. Thankfully I have a passthrough Windows 10 VM so I don't have to dual boot, but still, it would be nice if I could play these old gems under Linux.

[QwertyChouskie]

I'm not much of a gamer, but some of the old games I used to enjoy most, like the original Call of Duty, Crysis, etc. no longer work with Wine or Steam on Linux. I wish the devs would realize there are still old people like me who enjoy these games and would continue to support them. There actually used to be fixes and tricks to make them run, but now even those don't work.

So the only way I can play many of my games is to run them under Windows. Thankfully I have a passthrough Windows 10 VM so I don't have to dual boot, but still, it would be nice if I could play these old gems under Linux.

You should probably open a bug report with Wine, and Proton if the game is on Steam. The Wine/Proton devs are usually pretty good about finding and fixing regressions as long as they know about them. Also, remember that you can always run older Wine/Proton builds for specific games; Steam, Lutris, and Bottles all support manually selecting Wine/Proton versions AFAIK.

[muncrief]

You should probably open a bug report with Wine, and Proton if the game is on Steam. The Wine/Proton devs are usually pretty good about finding and fixing regressions as long as they know about them. Also, remember that you can always run older Wine/Proton builds for specific games; Steam, Lutris, and Bottles all support manually selecting Wine/Proton versions AFAIK.

Unfortunately bug reports have been filed on the games I can't play for years. And as I said once there were workarounds that enabled them to work. For example, the original Crysis could only be played by downloading a completely different 64 bit version from questionable sources, however even that doesn't work anymore.

But the devs have never attempted any real, permanent, remedies. It just appears the games are too old to bother with, as most people play much newer games. On one hand I understand that limited resources must be assigned to the problems that effect the most people, but on the other hand, as I said, I consider many older games gems and mementos of times long past, and regret their passing on Linux.