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Wine Staging 2.0 available, also new on the state of Vulkan, DX11 and more

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The Wine Staging team has release their 2.0 release and they have also written up a blog post detailing work on Vulkan, DX11 and more. Seems a number of DX11 games now work!

For those that don't know, Wine Staging is the test-bed for future features that will go directly into normal Wine releases.

First up, here's whats in Wine Staging 2.0:
- Support for various new windowscodecs image formats.
- Improved emulation of deferred rendering contexts.
- Fixes for semi-transparent layered windows.
- Various smaller bug fixes.

In their blog post about Vulkan, DX11 and other stuff, the Wine Staging team noted that the Wine Staging project is not affected by feature freezes when new stable Wine releases are being done, but they did put in some extra effort into their own release candidates this time around.

They also mention that CSMT was not designed for DX11 and it's not a good idea to enable it for games using it.

They list a few games on the newer APIs which should work in Wine Staging:
- DOOM (2016) (Vulkan), should work fine
- Hitman: Absolution (DX11), needed a small patch which is now in Wine Staging 2.0, but it works (some graphical options don't work)
- UNIGINE: Heaven (DX11), also needed some small fixes to work that is in the Wine Staging 2.0 release
- Tomb Raider (2013) (DX11 mode), works like Hitman: Absolution
- Shantae and the Pirate's Curse (DX11), needed deferred contexts which was added during release candidate testing
- Need For Speed Most Wanted (2012), works but has performance problems
- Steam, Uplay, Origin and GOG Galaxy should all now work

That's an impressive list of things that now work or work with some issues. Hopefully it won't take too long for the patches in Wine Staging to get cleaned up, reviewed and entered into Wine itself.

See their news here for the rest. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Wine
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Shmerl Jan 26, 2017
Quoting: oldrocker99+ for The Witcher 3. No other game would mean more to me to be able to play; I've been reading the novels (HIGHLY recommended, and you can find fan translations online) and ache to play Geralt (and Siri) in an open world...

Feel free to pop in to Witcher community forum. It can benefit from more Linux users :)

* http://forums.cdprojektred.com/forum/en/community
* http://forums.cdprojektred.com/forum/en/the-witcher-series
sr_ls_boy Jan 27, 2017
Quoting: PlutonMasterSniper Elite v2 works but in the menu it is messed up.

I tried it but a get a message that reads: "Sniper Elite V2 requires "Platform update for Windows Vista" (KB971512) to be installed..."

My prefix is Win7. How did you get past this?
soulsource Jan 27, 2017
Quoting: STiAT
Quoting: soulsourcewine-gaming-nine should work with all graphics drivers, but in order to enable the Gallium Nine feature, you'll need to run a Gallium3D driver (AMD or nVidia open source drivers).
Also, I'd suggest not to waste time with AMD GPU-Pro drivers, as they in general don't have better performance than the open source drivers (except for a few games, Deus Ex: MD being the only one that comes to my mind) and are (except for *buntu) a pain to install.

So you'd recommend me to go with the radeonsi driver when testing with the RX460? That should be pretty straight forward then ...

Yup. The numbers are slightly outdated, but Phoronix has some comparisons between AMD GPU-Pro and Mesa, showing that for some games the one is faster, for other games the other: AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. Mesa 13.1-dev
The main issue I have with AMD GPU-Pro is that it currently brings along a patched kernel, making installation less easy than it should be. If there is a well packaged version of it available for your distribution of choice, you can definitely try it, but if not, it depends on how much time you want to invest.
If you use OpenCL, installing AMD GPU-Pro is still the best choice, as the open source OpenCL support is in a rather bad shape, and getting the proprietary OpenCL libs of AMD working on the open source graphics drivers is, while possible, also quite a bit of work.
STiAT Jan 27, 2017
Thanks for the insight. I installed my RX460 with the open source drivers because it seemed just the easiest and dabbled a bit with it (just a few games). Actually, I have very interesting performance results (latest Mesa).

First of all, in Linux I was surprised that actually a lot of the games did run with the open source driver - and not as bad as I expected.

I ran the gallium patched testing it with WoW (dx9 engine version), and it more than doubled my FPS compared to a GTX1050Ti with normal wine. I even had more FPS than I reached with my GTX1050Ti in Windows ... and more than I had with the RX460 in Windows (did the cross test. Yes, I still maintain a Win7 install for software porting purposes).

Still have to test more with the gallium patched version, but to be true - I don't own too many windows games I'd like to play, but I certainly will try it with DragonAge: Origins and Skyrim.
TheRiddick Jan 27, 2017
I suspect once the AMD and NVIDIA (Mostly AMD) driver situation settles and they get to a point where hardware performs nicely and also works with anything you toss it, THEN we might see some AAA titles get more attention like Witcher3.

And don't try to tell me AMD's confusing quad-ripple driver option (choice has its downside) is rock solid now, its not for allot of hardware as reported not long ago. The NVIDIA drivers could be made to install ALLOT easier also, to eliminate the dreaded black-screen issues (and need for X.org to be disabled) that can still occur when installing them manually (installing via distro driver selection is generally safer!).

AND THEN we need to wait until VEGA comes out so AMD users can actually have hardware to play these new games at 4k@60fps :p

I would like to see the below games ported over:
Hello Feral? you there? you want loads of money for a port >>> (from sales)

The Witcher 3
Skyrim SE
Fallout 4
GTA 5

If these games got ported over to work well (wrapping DX11 into Vulkan API would yield best results!), it would change Linux gaming landscape forever! But I suspect it will never happen as the developers of these games have no heart for Linux in general :(


Last edited by TheRiddick on 27 January 2017 at 11:57 am UTC
oldrocker99 Jan 27, 2017
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Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: oldrocker99+ for The Witcher 3. No other game would mean more to me to be able to play; I've been reading the novels (HIGHLY recommended, and you can find fan translations online) and ache to play Geralt (and Siri) in an open world...

Feel free to pop in to Witcher community forum. It can benefit from more Linux users :)

* http://forums.cdprojektred.com/forum/en/community
* http://forums.cdprojektred.com/forum/en/the-witcher-series

It had never occurred to me; I posted a whining request!
Shmerl Jan 27, 2017
Quoting: oldrocker99It had never occurred to me; I posted a whining request!

I answered you there :)
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