Wine 5.0 Stable Released: Vulkan 1.1 and New XAudio2 Support Added

Wine 5.0 takes another huge step to run windows application in the Linux operating system and incorporates major changes like support for Vulkan 1.1. The release is the culmination of efforts by CodeWeavers and Valve who are pushing gaming on Linux through Proton. This comes right after major updates available to DXVK released in Dec 2019.

Major Changes include

• FAudio integration as a better XAudio2 implementation and done in part thanks to CodeWeavers / Valve as part of Proton efforts. 
• Vulkan 1.1 support. 
• Support for installing plug-and-play drivers. 
• Many DLLs now built as PE files by default. 
• DXTn compressed textures / S3 Texture Compression support by default now that patents around that compressed texture format have expired. 
• NT kernel spin-locks support. 
• Futex-based implementations of more synchronization primitives. 
• Various DirectWrite improvements. 
• Support for ECC cryptographic keys. 
• Greater support for the Windows Media Foundation APIs. 
• Support for a shared Wine-Mono to save space rather than needing this open-source .NET implementation per Wine prefix. 
• Unicode 12.0 and 12.1 support. 
• Better enumeration of display outputs, particularly for multi-monitor Linux setups around Xinerama. 
• Initial HTTP Service implementation (HTTP.sys) as the replacement to the Winsock API usage by IIS for better performance than the Windows Sockets API. 
• Better compatibility with Windows debuggers. 
• Better LLVM MinGW support and separately WineGCC cross-compilation improvements. 

What is Wine?

WINE (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is a compatibility layer that enables Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, and Solaris (Unix Based) users to run Windows applications without a copy of Microsoft Windows. This project is also used as base by commercial projects i.e. CodeWeavers and Valve to run Games and Commercial Apps on Unix like OS. This is an open source project.

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Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx

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