Wine 8.17 Released With VKD3D 1.9 Upgrade, Initial Window Management For Wayland Driver

Wine 8.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux as well as serving as the basis for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play.

Wine 8.17 is exciting in that it landed VKD3D 1.9 for its Direct3D 12 implementation over Vulkan. VKD3D 1.9 brings HLSL shading language support improvements, a new utility to inspect DXBC blobs, and other improvements. VKD3D still typically trails that of Valve's downstream VKD3D-Proton that is shipped by Steam Play / Proton.

Also making Wine 8.17 exciting is that it has initial window management support within its native Wayland driver. The merge request opened up earlier this month for basic window management in the Wayland driver code and another step toward ultimately having a nice native Wayland experience for Wine apps.

Wine 8.17 also adds SoundFont support to its DirectMusic implementation. There are 19 known bug fixes in Wine 8.17 that help games from The Elder Scrolls to Dwarf Fortress. Downloads and more details on the Wine 8.17 changes via WineHQ.org.