Wine 8.0-rc1 Released With VKD3D 1.6, Vulkan/OpenGL Thunking Optimizations

As planned the first release candidate of Wine 8.0 is now available that marks the culmination of the Wine 7.xx bi-weekly development releases and now onto the strictly bug-fixing phase before introducing Wine 8.0 as stable in early 2023.

Squeezing into Wine 8.0-rc1 prior to today's feature freeze is upgrading of the bundled VKD3D library against v1.6 for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan, thunking optimizations for OpenGL and Vulkan have been merged, support for more print processors, improved joystick control panel, long types printf format conversion has finished, and various bug fixes over the past two weeks.

Wine 8.0-rc1 has 52 known bug fixes which is rather a lot for a bi-weekly release. Among the fixes in Wine 8.0-rc1 range from crypto fixes to various game fixes, crash fixes, and some software that was experiencing bad performance previously.

Downloads and more details on the Wine 8.0-rc1 changes via WineHQ.org. Wine 8.0.0 stable should be out in January~February if the release timing traditions hold true.