14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers have just announced today, April 15, 2016, the release of the eighth milestone towards the 2.0 stable branch of the free implementation of Windows on Unix software.
Wine 1.9.8 comes hot on the heels of the second stable maintenance build of Wine 1.8, which brought in only minor bug fixes, and adds even more improvements to the upcoming WineD3D command stream, as well as to the built-in Shader Model 5 support and the WebServices reader support.
Other noteworthy changes are further improvements to WinHelp's table formatting, support for gradients in metafiles, major bug fixes to the Mono engine, as well as various other small, under-the-hood enhancements to several Windows applications and games (see below for details).
More DirectX10 games now work better in Wine
As you may very well be aware, Wine lets you run certain applications and games designed only for Microsoft Windows operating systems on your GNU/Linux box, so with every new release of Wine, we get better support for more software projects. And Wine 1.9.8 fixes some issues with multiple DirectX10 games.
Among these, we can mention Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. Additionally, games like Dragon Age 2, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, Fifa 2005 Demo, Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, and Doom 4 have also received improvements and should work a lot better now.
Furthermore, Wine 1.9.8 fixes many issues reported by users with various Windows applications, such as AvsP, MJ's Diagnostics, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft OneDrive, 64-bit Autodesk Fusion 360, GImageX 2.1.1, Tencent QQ 7.6, Microsoft .NET Runtime Optimization Service 2.x, mIRC 7.43, and Virtualdub 1.10.4.
Lastly, the Nvidia Geforce 980 Maxwell graphics card is now properly detected by Wine. You can download Wine 1.9.8 right now via our website or install it from the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system and take it for a test drive. Please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.