The Features To Look Forward To With Wine 3.0

Yesterday it was confirmed that Wine 3.0 will enter its code freeze next week and begin with the release candidates until the official v3.0.0 milestone is ready sometime around mid-January. Here's a recap of all the Wine developments for 2017 if you are curious about all the features and improvements to be found in this big update.

Among the changes that built up in the Wine 2.x unstable bi-weekly snapshots ahead of the official Wine 3.0 stable debut include:

- Better/working Direct3D 11 support. D3D11 is one of the big ticket items for Wine 3.0, but it's still not perfect. Some DX11/D3D11 titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Prey 2017, Crysis 2 and Witcher 3 are at least partially working while newer DirectX 11 titles like Far Cry Primal are having more problems. So with Wine 3.0 the Direct3D 11 support is at least a partial success for supporting this eight year old Microsoft graphics API, but needless to say, Direct3D 12 isn't yet supported by Wine. Post-3.0, they are working on Direct3D 12 support via VKD3D as a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan layer.

- Lots of prep work on the Direct3D Command Stream for offering better performance with this long-standing D3D CSMT functionality. This functionality was then enabled in Wine 2.6 back in April and has received albeit some further improvements since.

- A lot of Android code has landed this year to get the basics in place, including the initial Android graphics driver and OpenGL support, audio, etc.

- Direct2D rendering improvements as well as DirectWrite rendering improvements.

- HiDPI improvements.

- Performance improvements for asynchronous I/O.

- Preloader support for ARM64 and other ARM work.

- Updated Unicode support.

Overall there are a fair amount of improvements at play along with literally hundreds of bug fixes over the past year, if you haven't been riding the bi-weekly development snapshots. Wine 3.0 is the second release now where they have been pursuing an annual, time-based release approach. Stay tuned for more Wine 3.0 details as the release gets prepared over the next one to two months. If I missed covering any other interesting changes for Wine 3.0, feel free to point them out in the forums.