Wine-Staging 4.6 Brings Big Performance Improvement For Multi-Threaded Games / Apps

Friday's release of Wine 4.6 was exciting in that it started merging the code for WineD3D Vulkan support, now supports a shared Wine-Mono, and other big ticket work. Wine-Staging 4.6 is now available as the latest experimental patches re-based atop the latest upstream Wine. This Wine-Staging update is quite exciting in its own right.

Getting us excited about this Wine-Staging update is better performance out of multi-threaded games and applications due to a reworked implementation in Wine of the Windows synchronization primitives. We hope the testing pans out well and that optimized implementation will make it into upstream Wine soon. Highlights of Wine-Staging 4.6 include:

- Better performance out of multi-threaded applications, stemming from a five year old bug report around the synchronization primitives implemented by Wine. Now though these synchronization primitives have been optimized by re-implementing them atop the Linux Eventfd primitives. This should be a huge win for multi-threaded Windows programs, including games. It's not enabled by default right now with Wine-Staging but requires setting the WINEESYNC=1 environment variable.

- A fix for a six-year-old bug affecting the Steam version of Warframe.

- Fixes for the League of Legends game.

- Wine joystick fixes around recognizing wheel / gas / brake axes inputs for Windows games.

Wine-Staging 4.6 still is reverting the FAudio implementation until it's been packaged by the key Linux distributions. Those wanting to try out Wine-Staging this weekend especially for performance testing can find the usual binary package offerings at WineHQ.org.