Wine 4.0 Released With Vulkan Support, Initial Direct3D 12 Support, CSMT Enabled By Default
After being in development for a year, Wine 4.0 is now available for download. The new stable Wine release includes important changes like support for Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and game controllers.
For those that might not be familiar with it, Wine is a Windows compatibility layer for Linux that lets you run Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and Android (experimental). Wine is used by Proton, Valve's Steam Play compatibility layer that allows playing Windows games on Linux, and by CrossOver, a commercial Microsoft Windows compatibility layer for macOS and Linux, among others.
Wine 4.0 changes include:
- Initial support for Direct3D 12
- A complete Vulkan driver is implemented, using the host Vulkan libraries under X11, or MoltenVK on macOS
- The Multi-Threaded Command Stream (CSMT) feature is enabled by default, which should provide better graphic performance
- OpenGL core contexts are now enabled by default for all graphics cards, and for all versions of Direct3D before 12
- New Direct3D 10 and 11 features were implemented
- Several Direct3D 11 interfaces have been updated to version 11.2, and several DXGI interfaces have been update to version 1.6. This allows applications requiring those newer interfaces to start working
- S3TC-compressed 3D textures are now supported. S3TC-compressed 2D textures were already supported, provided the OpenGL drivers supported them
- HID game controllers are supported in the XInput and Raw Input APIs
- An SDL driver is implemented to make SDL game controllers available through the HID interface
- HiDPI support for Android. The infrastructure for setting DPI awareness and scaling of non DPI-aware applications is implemented but it doesn't work outside Android for now
There is a more in-depth release notes page available on WineHQ if you need more information on the Wine 4.0 stable version.
For Direct3D 12, the vkd3d library and a Vulkan-capable graphics card are required.
It should be noted that some of these features were already available in the Wine development and staging builds (depending on the version/build of course), which are used by software like Lutris, PlayOnLinux, or Valve's Proton for example.
Related: How To Use Lutris To Play Windows Games On Linux (Quick Start Guide)
Download Wine 4.0
The Wine 4.0 binaries for macOS, Android, and for Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, are in the process of being built. The source is already available for download.
