Wine 7.0 Released with Support for New GPUs, Multiple Displays, and WoW64

Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Wine 7.0

Wine 7.0 open-source and cross-platform compatibility layer for running Windows apps on POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, or macOS, has been released today as a major update.

After a year of development, Wine 7.0 is here to introduce lots of goodies to satisfy your Windows application and gaming needs. First of all, it brings support for the WoW64 (64-bit Windows-on-Windows) architecture to allow you to run 32-bit Windows programs inside a 64-bit Unix host process.

“WoW64 thunks are implemented for most Unix libraries, enabling a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries,” explain the developers.

On top of that, Wine 7.0 adds support for multiple displays (multi-head) to its Direct3D implementation to allow you to choose which monitor a Direct3D program will use for full-screen mode, along with display gamma adjustment using the DXGI API, and support for new GPUs, including AMD Radeon RX 5500M, AMD Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT, AMD Van Gogh, Intel UHD Graphics 630, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030.

Other major changes in this release include better theming support with a new default theme for a more modern look, improved HID (Human Interface Device) stack and joystick implementation with new WinMM joystick support, new DirectInput joystick backend, and a much-improved joystick control panel, as well as porting of all modules to the PE format.

There’s also a new Win32u library that implements the kernel side of graphics and window management support, an updated Vulkan driver and improvements to the Vulkan renderer for the Wine Direct3D implementation to be on-par with the older OpenGL renderer from Wine 6.0, initial support for Direct2D effects, support for decoding WMP (Windows Media Photo) images, major audio improvements, and new Direct3D 10 and 11 features.

Among other noteworthy changes, the built-in REG registry tool has been updated to support copying of registry keys and operating on either the 32-bit or 64-bit view of the registry, Apple Silicon Macs are now supported, the DTLS communication protocol is now supported, and Windows Sockets support has been re-implemented. Check out the full release notes for more details.

Wine 7.0 is available for download right now from the official website if you fancy compiling it yourself. If not, you should wait until it arrives in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution to update.

Developing story…

Last updated 2 years ago

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