What is often overlooked

Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.

Ntsync is great and there will be performance improvement. But not exactly massive

If NTSYNC is the headline feature, the completion of Wine's WoW64 architecture is the change that will quietly improve everyone's life going forward. On Windows, WoW64 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit) is the subsystem that lets 32-bit applications run on 64-bit systems. Wine has been working toward its own implementation of this for years, and Wine 11 marks the point where it's officially done.

What this means in practice is that you no longer need 32-bit system libraries installed on your 64-bit Linux system to run 32-bit Windows applications. Wine handles the translation internally, using a single unified binary that automatically detects whether it's dealing with a 32-bit or 64-bit executable. The old days of installing multilib packages, configuring ia32-libs, or fighting with 32-bit dependencies on your 64-bit distro thankfully over.

This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it's a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you've got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered.

For gaming specifically, this matters because a surprising number of games, especially older ones, are 32-bit executables. Previously, getting these to work often meant wrestling with your distro's multilib setup, which varied in quality and ease depending on whether you were on Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, or something else entirely. Now, Wine just handles it for you.

Oh, thank heavens. I remember advising some users here to look for specifically missing 32-bit host Linux library support; I'd run into that problem before.

I just installed wine and launched Noita (a very cpu intensive game) with it, and the stuttering I've been experiencing since switching to linux has vanished. The game has never run smoother. Cant wait for proton to get up to date.

Every time I see something that points at Microsoft losing market share, I get really excited. This is great.

Wine 11 >> Win 11

Completely missing from the article is the syscall user dispatch being utilized finally: hardcoded NT syscalls can be handled instead of crashing. So, a program which didn't work previously or crashed often may very well now work with Wine 11.5

windows games probably run better on linux than windows at this point

Elizabeth Figura is my new hero

I'm less interested in games and more interested in creative apps. If Affinity on Linux is actually useful now, I'd make the transition. Gimp still lacks layer masks for adjustments. I want better tools.

Thank you for this post! I got curious as to what I have, so I ran zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -iE 'ntsync|esync|fsync' and saw that I only have ntsync which is a module and is unloaded! Now I have it loaded and set to autoload on boot so I'm ready for better performance. This is with the Arch Zen kernel. Thanks!

man things run pretty good now. this is gonna be interesting.

year of the linux gaming pc

ohhh shit, stop, I can only get so hard......

How awesome would it be for wine to outperform windows :)

I've been using it starting from today and while there doesn't seem to be much difference in the average FPS, the frame pacing seems way better. Less stuttering overall, but I wouldn't say massive speed gains.