Fedora 22 To Have Direct3D 9 Mesa State Tracker, Add Wine Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 14 January 2015 at 09:08 AM EST. 24 Comments
FEDORA
For those doing Windows gaming with Wine on Fedora Linux installations, the experience will potentially be better for Fedora 22 if using the open-source Gallium3D Radeon or Nouveau drivers.

One of the Fedora 22 changes being mentioned today is the Direct3D 9 state tracker "Gallium Nine" that landed in Mesa 10.4 that can interface with a patched version of Wine to offer better D3D9 performance on the open-source drivers. This state tracker is an alternative to using Wine's Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. Users relying upon this state tracker have generally reported very positive results.


Since last month when Fedora pulled in Mesa 10.4, they've enabled the D3D9 state tracker for being compiled for the Fedora packages. However, still to be done is patching Fedora's Wine build to make use of the Gallium Nine state tracker. The Fedora packagers could patch the Wine build themselves or wait for the support to land in the new Wine-Staging, for which the Fedora Wine packages have been based on and how they already gained the D3D CSMT support.

Full details on the implementation plans can be found via the Fedora Wiki. While this will improve the experience for Fedora Wine gamers, don't forget to install the Mesa S3TC support (libtxc_dxtn in RPM Fusion) when installing Fedora, as it can help the graphics performance and Fedora is one of the distributions still not shipping with S3 Texture Compression support for legal reasons...
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