Wine's Big Command Stream D3D Patch-Set Updated

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with the planned patch-set for Wine that provides significant Direct3D performance improvements via work on the D3D command stream. Fortunately, the patches have been updated and now offer better support as well.

We haven't seen any Wine D3D command stream news since last October when early changes for the D3D command stream started to land. Stefan Dösinger of CodeWeavers who was the original author of this patch-set has now provided an update.

As of this week there's the updated command stream patches in Stefan's Git repository. Among the changes in the latest patches are lots of bug fixes, dynamic surface maps support, improved stability for all drivers, it matches the code currently shipping in CrossOver 13, and other changes.

The dynamic surface maps support is to benefit World of Warcraft and many other Wine games. The improved driver stability is via avoiding the acquiring of an OpenGL ccontext in the main thread with few exceptions. The improved stability is to especially benefit the AMD Catalyst (fglrx) driver.

Stefan will continue maintaining his Wine Git repository with this code as it appears there's no immediate plans to mainline this patch-set that can dramatically improve the Direct3D Windows game performance on Wine, as noted in the earlier Phoronix articles. More details on the latest update can be found via this mailing list post.