Wine 11.17 brings display mode emulation and VKD3D 2.1
Bi-weekly dev release adds OpenGL virtualization, shader updates, and 44 bug fixes for games and enterprise apps.
Wine 11.17 is out. This bi-weekly development release lands today with three headline features: initial display mode emulation, a VKD3D upgrade to 2.1, and full support for preferred UI language APIs. The release also packs 44 bug fixes targeting everything from GTA: Vice City to KOBIL e-banking.
Keep in mind that this is an odd-numbered development release. It's meant for testing, not production. The stable branch is still back in the 10.x series. Wine 11.17 represents two weeks of commits from roughly 25 contributors. If you're running this on a daily driver, back up your prefix first.
Display mode emulation hits Wine
The headline feature is display mode emulation, led by developer Rémi Bernon. It enables OpenGL rendering virtualization. Games can now render at a virtual resolution that differs from your host window. Wine handles the scaling transparently.
This solves the tiny window problem on high-DPI monitors for older titles. Apps that render at 800×600 can do so internally and scale up cleanly. The host window receives properly scaled output with correct aspect ratio preservation. Applications querying GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN) get back the emulated values they expect.
It addresses a long-standing pain point for Linux gamers. Games that query internal display metrics will behave correctly now. However, this is initial support. You might run into edge cases with gamma ramp emulation or multisample resolve in certain contexts.
FAudio also got bumped to version 26.09 for audio compatibility.
VKD3D 2.1 and UI language updates
VKD3D moved up to version 2.1. This improves Direct3D 12 compatibility over Vulkan. The shader compiler now includes dead-store elimination, which fixes constant table layout in some DX12 titles. There's updated DXIL floating-point-to-integer conversion and stricter validation for malformed shaders.
Wine finally implements the preferred UI language APIs. New functions include RtlGet/SetProcessPreferredUILanguages and RtlpQueryDefaultUILanguage. Applications can now get and set per-process language lists correctly.
Wine loads locale settings from the registry and uses them to select resources. This fixes localization issues in apps that were previously ignoring Wine's locale settings. If you've ever seen garbled text in a localized Windows app running under Wine, this release might help.
Bug fixes cover games, enterprise, and security
The 44 bug fixes span a wide range of subsystems. Gaming improvements include Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, where SafeDisc v2 driver dispatch failures are resolved. Horizon Chase Turbo now handles gamepad hotplugging. PS4 Remote Play 2.x starts up without failing on the Local AppData temp directory. Xbox One Bluetooth controllers should respond to XInputGetState correctly.
GTA: Vice City gets fixed intro videos. GTA: San Andreas handles exclusive fullscreen video playback. Marathon launches without crashing.
Enterprise and security apps also see improvements. KOBIL e-banking applications can start now. Fixes resolve NtQueryDirectoryObject failures and add the missing ROOT\SecurityCenter2 WBEM namespace. PDFCreator gets better Chinese character rendering. SketchUp 2021 installer issues are patched via a native xmllite workaround.
Hans Leidekker contributed 81 commits, focusing on MSIs, WinHTTP, and bcrypt. Nikolay Sivov followed with 77 commits on MSXML3 and DirectWrite. Rémi Bernon added 40 commits, with display mode emulation doing the heavy lifting. Alexandre Julliard rounded out the top four with 33 commits.
Wine 11.17 is a development release. It's not for everyone, but the display mode emulation work is a meaningful step forward for retro titles on modern displays.
You can pull the source tarball from dl.winehq.org.
