A new version of Wine has been released

Aug 21, 2015 15:27 GMT  ·  By

Wine developers have just announced that a new version of the application has been released and is now available for download. This is the version that shows signs of DirectX 11 support, so it's going to be an interesting one.

It's been a while since anything truly exciting happened with Wine, but the current release does feature a few interesting entries that show how much progress has been made. Besides all the changes and improvements that have been made for various apps and games, the developers are now pushing for some fort of DirectX 11 emulation, which has been announced a week ago.

Developers from Codeweavers said just a week ago that these kinds of improvements were being made and it looks like it happened very quickly. We do have to keep in mind that this DirectX 11 implementation will take some time and that is why it's mentioned in the changelog as "First steps of the Direct3D 11." It's a complex piece of software and it can't be done overnight.

What's new in Wine 1.7.50

According to the changelog, a new version of the Gecko engine based on Firefox 40, better font matching has been added in DirectWrite, support has been added for OpenMP on ARM platforms, and various bug fixes have been added.

Wine 1.7.50 brings bug fixes for the following Windows games and tools: PowerPoint 2007, Winamp, Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, PhotoLine 32, Hearts of Iron III, Xfire 2.0, Visual Studio Code, Schein, Nvidia PhysX uninstaller, and Office 2013 installer

More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.50 source packages right now from Softpedia. It's possible to compile the package yourself, but there are quite a few dependencies, and it will take a while. Also, please keep in mind that if the applications you need already work with the stable version of Wine, then you should postpone upgrading to the new one.