Wine 1.7.14 Arrives With More Task Scheduler Support

The latest bi-weekly development release of Wine is now available, but sadly it doesn't yet mainline the major Direct3D command stream work for improved performance nor has it moved much along with its Direct3D 10/11 work.

We can't wait to see the Direct3D command stream work arrive for Wine due to the performance benefits. We're also waiting on actual working Direct3D 10/11 support for Wine, especially with Direct3D 12 set to be introduced later this month by Microsoft. Apparently Direct3D 10/11 support hasn't been too high of a priority since most Windows games using DirectX tend to ship a D3D9 renderer option. With Direct3D 12 it will be even more work for Wine developers to implement due to its reported lower-level Mantle-like API that will cause a big shape-up and will be interesting to see how it can be translated to OpenGL.

Anyhow, the changes that made it in Wine 1.7.14 include:

- Continued work on the Task Scheduler support, which has been ongoing for several release cycles now.

- Improved support for AVI encoding.

- More VisualBasic interfaces implemented for MSXML.

- Wine's Wininet implementation now supports deflate content encoding.

- Notable fixes for monochrome printers.

There's also the usual bug-fixing that took place over the past two weeks with a reported 56 bugs fixed. More details on Wine 1.7.14 can be found via the WineHQ.org release announcement.