14 DAY TRIAL // Today, March 21, 2016, the Wine Staging team has announced the release and immediate availability for download of Wine Staging 1.9.6, based on the recently released Wine 1.9.6 development snapshot.
Looking at the changelog, we can see that numerous under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes have landed in Wine Staging 1.9.6, but among the new features, we can't help but notice the addition of a Vulkan wrapper.
Wine Staging 1.9.6 is the first build to add support for the Vulkan API (Application Programming Interface), and this means only one thing, that we will be able to run Windows games and apps that require the Vulkan API through Wine.
"The work was started by Erich E. Hoover and later finished by other Wine Staging maintainers," the Wine Staging devs have explained. "The code translates the Windows specific surface extensions to the corresponding X11 / XCB extensions and passes the remaining functions on the host Vulkan library."
Again, we remind you that the Vulkan wrapper thingy is currently in development, but so is the Wine Staging 1.9.x branch, so expect to encounter some issues here and there. If you're interested in learning everything there is to know about Vulkan support in Wine Staging, don't hesitate to read the official announcement.
The Python 3.5 compatibility has been improved
Among other interesting things that have landed in today's Wine Staging 1.9.6 release, we can mention better compatibility with the Python 3.5 programming language, the addition of multiple improvements to the Wines gdiplus.dll implementation, and fixes a bunch of issues that have been reported by users since Wine Staging 1.9.5.
Lastly, the Wine Staging team brags with the fact that the CSMT (commandstream multithreading) patchset, which makes the Wine Staging project so famous, might land soon upstream, in the development branch of Wine. You can download Wine Staging 1.9.6 right now via our website for your GNU/Linux operating system.