Wine Developers Are Still Working On Direct3D 10/11 Support

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 5 February 2015 at 09:45 AM EST. 54 Comments
WINE
Besides covering the shortcomings of Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 implementation for Wine, Stefan Dösinger of CodeWeavers also provided a look at the overall state of Wine's Direct3D/graphics support while he was in Brussels at FOSDEM.

The Vienna-based CodeWeavers developer talked at FOSDEM 2015 last weekend in the graphics development room about the problems with the D3D9 state tracker and about Wine's overall D3D/graphics capabilities and what's on the horizon for this program to run Windows games and applications on Linux.

Among recent progress made is fullscreen focus loss handling, continued work on Direct3D 10, multi-threaded D3D command stream (CSMT) work has stalled, and an update on performance monitoring. The focus handling is for switching out of a fullscreen Direct3D window and then being able to restore focus back on that Wine window. The new focus handling code in Wine is working on OS X and on Linux with KDE or FVWM. This handling doesn't yet work for Metacity forks and Compiz.

When it comes to Wine's Direct3D 10/11 support, there's been incremental progress and texture sampling was recently implemented, but one of the big items still missing is D3D10-style resource handling. Direct2D and DirectWrite also need to be implemented on top of Direct3D 10 for supporting applications like Microsoft Office 2013. Core context support is a work-in-progress and is needed for D3D10 suopport on some hardware. OpenGL core context support in Wine is expected hopefully in one or two months.

The multi-threaded D3D CSMT work is currently being blocked by first waiting on the D3D10 resource changes before restoring work on these patches and getting them merged into Wine. The D3D10/11 support by Wine hasn't been an extreme priority given most current Windows games still ship with D3D9 renderer options.

Stefan's presentation also shared some fresh Wine performance benchmarks, as usual with the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Stefan expressed that the open-source drivers work fine for casual gamers / users of Wine but "hardcore gamers" will want to use the NVIDIA Linux driver for now or just game on Windows.

As with most open-source projects, Wine and Mesa lack manpower and so Stefan encourages as many people as possible to be testing Wine+Mesa Git, help bisect performance regressions, and try to catch problems. Learn more via the PDF slides to the Wine FOSDEM presentation.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

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.

Popular News This Week