The New Feature Highlights For The Upcoming Wine 2.0

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 11 December 2016 at 09:25 AM EST. 11 Comments
WINE
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.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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