Wine 4.6 Released With Initial Bits Towards Vulkan WineD3D Backend

Wine 4.6 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release and is actually quite exciting on the feature front with the developers -- especially those at CodeWeavers -- being quite active this spring.

While not yet useful to end-users/gamers but as the first step in the right direction, there is the initial bits towards developing a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D. This will ultimately allow Direct3D 11 and earlier to be accelerated via Vulkan rather than WineD3D's current Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation layer. Wine already is working on VKD3D for Direct3D 12 to Vulkan while this Vulkan back-end to WineD3D is for D3D11 and earlier. Yes, there is already DXVK filling a similar void but this new CodeWeavers effort fits better into the Wine design, among other reasons for not re-using DXVK/D9VK but with some possible collaboration perhaps moving forward.

So while this is just the preliminary bits for working towards this D3D-to-Vulkan support, it's an important first step and we look forward to seeing it evolve and perhaps be useful for next year's Wine 5.0 release given how quickly many other D3D-on-Vulkan projects have matured.

Also significant to Wine 4.6 is now supporting a shared Wine-Mono for helping to save disk space and more.

Wine 4.6 additionally has support for the split button common control, video capture code was ported to V4L2, an initial version of the Debug Engine DLL, and around 50 bug fixes. The bug fixes address the usual assortment of problems from different PC games to applications.

More details on Wine 4.6 via WineHQ.org.