Changes To Find With The Upcoming Wine 1.8 Release

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 19 November 2015 at 10:30 AM EST. 19 Comments
WINE
With Wine now under a code freeze for v1.8, here's a look at the new features coming to this next stable version of the Wine software.

With it having been more than two years since the Wine 1.6 release, there's been a lot of changes piling up in the Wine 1.7 development series for Wine 1.8. Some highlights include:

- The PulseAudio driver was finally added!

- An optional start menu in desktop mode.

- Some Direct3D command stream improvements, but not the big D3D CSMT (Command Stream Multi-Thread) rework that many have been desiring for greater Wine gaming performance.

- Initial task scheduler support.

- Unicode and font improvements, including Unicode 7.0 and Unicode 8.0 support.

- DirectX Video Acceleration support for working on GPU video decoding and other video decoding improvements.

- Some Direct2D support.

- Initial support for 64-bit Android builds and other 64-bit ARM changes.

- Initial DirectWrite support.

- DirectSound surround sound support.

- OpenGL core context support.

- Handling for themed scrollbars.

- Support for kernel job objects.

- More OpenMP support.

- XAudio2 support.

- The start of Direct3D 11 support, however, it isn't yet finished for Wine 1.8.0.

Direct3D 11 and D3D CSMT support wasn't finished in time as developers decided to switch to annual, time-based releases. Nevertheless, there are a ton of exciting Wine changes that built up over the past two years. There's many changes besides all the ones that could be listed; share with us your Wine stores and changes you're looking forward to most if you still have to rely upon running Windows games/software on Linux.
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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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