SDL 3 Officially Released With New APIs, Better HiDPI & Improved Audio Handling

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 21 January 2025 at 05:05 PM EST. 19 Comments
LINUX GAMING
In addition to the Wine 10.0 stable release today, making the day very exciting as well for Linux gamers is the first official SDL 3.0 release!

The big SDL3 release for this Simple DirectMedia Layer is a nice step forward for this software that is commonly used by cross-platform games and other software for abstracting out software/hardware platform differences. SDL 3.2.0 was tagged a short time ago as the first SDL 3 official release. Yes, the version number is SDL 3.2.0 for this first official SDL 3 release.

SDL3 brings PipeWire camera support, prefers PipeWire over PulseAudio on the modern Linux desktop, improved Wayland support, a Vulkan renderer, initial colorspace support as preparations for HDR, dropping a lot of old code, and introducing many new APIs.

SDL3 Git tag


SDL3 brings new GPU, Dialog, Filesystem, Storage, Camera, Pen, Process, App MetaData, and Properties APIs. The new GPU API provides access to modern 3D rendering and GPU compute in a cross-platform manner.

SDL3 also adds support for main callbacks instead of main(), logical audio devices, audio streams, better keyboard input support, customizable virtual keyboards on Android/IOS, and much better HiDPI support.

Simply put, SDL3 is a hell of a big release and step forward for this widely-used library by games on Steam as well as countless other software projects. The SDL3 release also comes with a lot of additions and improvements to the programming documentation as well as many new example programs for demonstrating the SDL3 APIs and other new features.

Downloads and more details on this official SDL 3.0 (3.2) release via GitHub.
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