14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine Staging team announced today, February 9, 2017, the availability of the Wine Staging 2.1, a development release that implements various improvements and addresses numerous issues.
Coming hot on the heels of Wine 2.1, on which it's based, the Wine Staging 2.1 release has revamped the CSMT (Command Stream Multithreading) patchset, which is the application's number one functionality for using the available GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) more efficiently by moving the execution of OpenGL commands to a separate thread, to support Direct3D 10 and 11.
"In the new version the existing code has been cleaned up and various hacks have been removed. The result of this work is that all D3D related tests pass again. We also tested some D3D11 games which were previously broken with CSMT enabled, and they started working. If you encountered bugs when using the CSMT, it might be a good time to retest them with the new release," reads today's announcement.
CSMT is what makes Wine Staging so special, and why users choose it instead of Wine 2.0. The development team worked very hard on some new technologies that would speed up the rendering, and they promise to add more performance improvements in the next versions. Other than that, Wine Staging 2.1 adds support for certain processor group functions and resolves many of the issues left out from the Wine Staging 2.0 release.
Wine Staging 2.1 also ships with all the goodies from Wine 2.1
As expected, the Wine Staging 2.1 development release also ships with all the goodies brought by Wine 2.1, which include the implementation of additional Shader Model 5 instructions, various improvements to the handling of MIME message, Direct2D rendering improvements, enablement of the HID bus service by default, line breaking improvements in DirectWrite, as well as numerous bug fixes for various app and games.
Wine Staging 2.1 is now available for download via our web portal, along with Wine 2.1, if you want to take them for a test drive on your Linux-based operating system. Binary packages for various supported distributions can be accessed on the official homepage of the project. Please try to keep in mind that Wine Staging 2.1 is a development version and you shouldn't use it as your daily driver.