As you know Codeweavers (and other WINE contributors) have been working on DX11 support for a while – they were supposed to have DX11 support by the end of 2016, but as with all complex projects, timelines tend to slip and only very DX11 titles could run a few months ago. Since then, there was no major announcement, but it seems that the progress has been very significant in the recent WINE versions (2.3 is already out). And to prove this, we can see that the following is now running (albeit with remaining glitches):

Witcher 3



On Wine forums, users have been reporting getting the following performance (on such hardware CPU: Intel Core i7 4770, RAM: 16GB, GPU: AMD RX480 (4GB VRAM), Mesa 17.1.0-devel (git-4dc42ae792), Resolution: 1920×1200):

Buffer pool patch applied. Low graphics settings, same hardware as above. Framerate: 60fps. CPU usage is also higher than without the buffer pool patch.

Buffer pool patch applied. High/ultra graphics settings, hairworks off. Same hardware as above. Framerate: ~45fps.

This is honestly pretty good performance for a first start, and while it’s probably going to take a little white to get all glitches sorted out, I am extremely excited by the opportunity to run Witcher 3 in WINE in the future (since no port was actually confirmed, sadly).

GTA V

GTA V is a big one. It’s currently unplayable, but stuff is rendered on screen. At this point in time, controls are messed up, so it’s definitely not at the level of Witcher 3 for now, but progress is progress!

Although everything is rendered quite ok, the game is still unplayable, eg. moving is impossible. Pressing any key like ‘w’ freezes the game completely for 2 seconds, nothing else happens. You can only look around with mouse and shoot. I’ll open a separate bug for that later, if needed.

Overwatch

As mentioned a few weeks earlier, Overwatch can run in WINE nowadays with special patches applied, and the latest efforts have brought significant improvements as you can see from the below video (captured on CPU: Intel 6700k, GPU: Nvidia/Asus Strix 980 TI, Nvidia driver: 378.13-2,Distro: Arch Linux).

In parallel of the Graphics API support, let’s not forget that proper Xinput support with HID is being worked on, and will hopefully be fully integrated within this year.

So what’s next ? Well in the hope that Vulkan will help getting more us more ports in the future, there is still a growing library of DX11 titles that are not getting any port any time soon – some publishers have been very vocal about not considering Linux support, others completely silent or oblivious about it, so unless they can be convinced anytime soon, WINE is going to be our best shot to play such games inside our current OS environment.

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