Wine 3.0 brings Direct3D 11, Android support

The team behind Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for other operating systems, has announced the launch of Wine 3.0 - the first version to support both Direct3D versions 10 and 11 and with Android graphics driver compatibility.

Named for the recursive acronym 'Wine Is Not an Emulator', Wine is designed to allow software written and compiled for Microsoft's Windows platform to run on third-party operating systems by translating Windows application programming interface (API) calls into native calls. Compatible with a wide range of software, Wine is typically used to run productivity software and games for which no native version is supported.

Previous Wine releases, however, have been sorely limited in their support of the Direct3D API with full support stopping at the long-since deprecated Direct3D 9. Wine 3.0, by contrast, brings official support for both Direct 3D 10 and Direct3D 11 - the latter only one version short of Microsoft's Windows 10-exclusive Direct3D 12, the current release.

As well as support for the new Direct3D APIs, Wine 3.0 brings support for the Direct3D command stream, the Android graphics driver for running Wine on Google's mobile-centric Linux distribution, and enhanced DirectWrite and Direct2D support. Compatibility with Direct3D 12, meanwhile, is in the works, along with Vulkan low-level API and OpenGL ES support - the latter designed to allow Direct3D applications to be run on Android devices.

For those eager to try out the new changes, Wine's official download page includes binary builds for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Mageia Linux as well as macOS, with links to third-party packages for SUSE, Slackware, and FreeBSD.