The New Feature Highlights For The Upcoming Wine 2.0

Now that Wine 2.0 is under a feature freeze with Wine 2.0-rc1 having been released, I spent some time this Sunday looking back at the new features added during the Wine 1.9 development series.

Among the changes to find with the upcoming Wine 2.0 release include:

- GStreamer 1.0 is finally supported.

- More work towards Direct3D 11 support but D3D11 isn't exactly usable for Wine 2.0. There is also still improvements happening for Direct3D 9.

- Some prep work for the Direct3D Command Stream Multi-Threading (D3D CSMT) initiative, but it didn't land in time for Wine 2.0.

- More Shader Model 4 and Shader Model 5 work.

- X11 drag and drop fixes, among other X.Org/X11 improvements. Somewhat related are Mesa GPU detection improvements.

- GDI performance improvements.

- Initial support for DC rendering in Direct 2D and Bitmap rendering in Direct2D.

- Better support for some older Windows games.

- A new Clipboard API re-implementation.

- Initial version of the HID mini driver.

- Many bug fixes, which amount to hundreds of fixes since Wine 1.8.

While it's sad that there isn't full D3D11 and D3D CSMT support to make Wine 2.0 a magical release, this is shaping up to be a big release, especially if you are still on Wine 1.8 from 2015 rather than all the Wine 1.9 bi-weekly releases from this year. Wine 2.0 is to be the first release off the project's new annual, time-based release strategy. More release candidates are coming while Wine 2.0.0 should be officially released later in December or in January.