14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine Staging development team announced the availability of a new version of their optimized Wine builds, based, of course, on the latest Wine development release.
Coming a week after the release of Wine 2.11, Wine Staging 2.11 is here to inherit all of its improvements and new features, including OpenGL support for the Android driver, support for security labels, better dictionary support in WebServices, relay debugging support on ARM64 (AArch64), and a new registry file parser for RegEdit.
On top of that, the Wine Staging 2.11 release adds a bunch of improvements of its own, such as optimizations to keyboard and mouse handling, the ability to run PIE (Position-Independent Executable) binaries, better compatibility with older macOS versions for the preloader, as well as some NVAPI enhancements.
The Witcher 3 and GTA 5 should perform better
Apart from those internal improvements, the Wine Staging 2.11 release adds various other performance optimizations to some games, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Grand Theft Auto V, both of which seem to perform a lot better now on your GNU/Linux distribution if you use Nvidia GPUs or when using a previous version of Wine Staging.
"The Witcher 3 should now display the intro videos and contain less graphical glitches compared to Wine Staging 2.10," reads the announcement. "For GTA 5 it is no longer necessary to pass -GPUCount 1 as parameter or to change the PCI IDs to run the game on a NVIDIA graphic card (-DX10 is still required though)."
Last but not least, Wine Staging 2.11 improves support for some Unity-based games by changing the way clipping regions are handled to fix some remaining mouse issues that were reported from previous releases of the application. You can download the Wine Staging 2.11 source tarball right now from our website or update from the stable repositories of your favorite OS.