Gallium Direct3D 9 Improvements Land For Mesa 11.0

Ahead of the expected Mesa 11.0 code branching this weekend are some improvements that landed for the Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker.

While other Mesa developers have been quickly finishing up more OpenGL extensions and features like NIR for Intel vertex shaders, Axel Davy has remained active working on this Direct3D 9 state tracker.

For those that haven't paid attention to previous articles about it in the past, the D3D9 support is mainly for usage with (patched) Wine. This method of acceleration for the Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers can offer faster Windows gaming performance on Linux than using Wine's Direct3D 9 to OpenGL layer. However, Wine developers don't support this state tracker upstream which means that the gamer's copy of Wine must be patched to use this state tracker.

This afternoon Axel pushed over sixty "Nine" ST changes. There's a lot of code changed-up for this state tracker. The patches vary in terms of their changes but appear to be a lot of code refactoring and fixes. If you're a Linux gamer using the Gallium3D Nine support with your Windows games, be sure to try out this latest Mesa Git code and let us know in the forums how it's working out.

Mesa 11.0 is expected to be officially released in September.