The Many Features Coming To The Wine 4.0 Stable Release From Vulkan To New Input Devices

January should bring the release of Wine 4.0 as the annual stable release of this software for running Windows applications/games on Linux. As Wine 4.0 continued to be developed over the course of bi-weekly development releases all year, here's a look back at the notable features to find with this upcoming Wine 4.0.0 release.

New features/changes with Wine 4.0 include:

- Initial Vulkan support, which is important in its own right but also for DXVK and friends that really splashed on the scene heavily this year for improving the Wine-based gaming experience and all that changes that happened on that front.

- The Direct3D Multi-Threaded Command-Stream (CSMT) is enabled by default for better performance.

- Initial bits of Direct3D 12 support using the VKD3D project to map D3D12 on top of Vulkan.

- OpenGL core contexts are now enabled by default in Direct3D.

- Continued work on HiDPI (High DPI) display support and other DPI scaling improvements.

- Support for HID gamepads as well as game controllers through SDL. Separately there is also work on improving Wine's joystick support.

- Multi-sample texture support for Direct3D.

- Support for querying BIOS data on Linux.

- Kerberos authentication support.

- Continued work on Wine for Android.

- Better handling of privileged CPU x86_64 instructions.

- Debugging support for WoW64 processes.

- Better handling of 32-bit .NET code on 64-bit.

- Support for DXTn texture compression.

- Shell auto-completion work.

- Task scheduler improvements.

- Lots and lots of bug fixing.

Wine 4.0 in particular should be a huge improvement over Wine 3.0 for Windows games on Linux. Wine 4.0.0 should officially debut within the next few weeks; weekly release candidates are continuing until the developers decide it's ready to be popped.