Wine 1.7.3 Readies D3D Command Stream Improvements

Wine 1.7.3 is now out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine. This time around it does some preparation work on the Direct3D command stream support.

Aside from preparation work on Wine's Direct3D command stream support, there's also an updated Mozilla Gecko web rendering engine back-end, and other changes:

- New version of the Gecko engine based on Firefox 24.
- Preparation work for the Direct3D command stream.
- Window management fixes in the Mac driver.
- Support for IPHLPAPI functions on Android.
- Various bug fixes.

These are details from the official announcement at WineHQ.org. In all there's 48 known bug-fixes for Wine 1.7.3, including many Direct3D-related changes in the past two weeks.

The Direct3D command stream work -- which is still to-be-merged and only some prep work made it into v1.7.3 -- allows for very noticeable Wine Direct3D performance improvements. The WineD3D changes move OpenGL calls into a separate thread and can yield 50~100% performance improvements while also clearing some outstanding bugs.