The Big Highlights Of Wine 5.0 From FAudio Integration To Vulkan 1.1 + A Ton Of Bug Fixes

Wine 5.0 is still going through weekly release candidates but the stable release of Wine 5 is expected to land in the back-half of January. With that imminent release, here is a look at the big changes to find with this annual Wine update.

Wine 5.0 represents the latest annual stable update to the Wine code-base and the culmination of the bi-weekly Wine 4.x development snapshots over the past eleven months. Some of the highlights for Wine 5.0 include:

- FAudio integration as a better XAudio2 implementation and done in part thanks to CodeWeavers / Valve as part of Proton efforts.

- Vulkan 1.1 support.

- Support for installing plug-and-play drivers.

- Many DLLs now built as PE files by default.

- DXTn compressed textures / S3 Texture Compression support by default now that patents around that compressed texture format have expired.

- NT kernel spin-locks support.

- Futex-based implementations of more synchronization primitives.

- Various DirectWrite improvements.

- Support for ECC cryptographic keys.

- Greater support for the Windows Media Foundation APIs.

- Support for a shared Wine-Mono to save space rather than needing this open-source .NET implementation per Wine prefix.

- Unicode 12.0 and 12.1 support.

- Better enumeration of display outputs, particularly for multi-monitor Linux setups around Xinerama.

- Initial HTTP Service implementation (HTTP.sys) as the replacement to the Winsock API usage by IIS for better performance than the Windows Sockets API.

- Better compatibility with Windows debuggers.

- Better LLVM MinGW support and separately WineGCC cross-compilation improvements.

More details on Wine 5.0 with its release coming up shortly!