Just five years ago, if you used a Linux distro and wanted to play Windows video games, you would surely encounter incompatibilities, jerks, or it was simply impossible to play.
With the release of Wine 11, Linux has gone from introducing slight compatibility improvements so that Windows games work well to completely redesigning the way you play on this operating system.
One of the great novelties is NTSYNCa technology that allows both systems to understand each other through a kind of translator, directly in the Linux kernel, its core.
When trying to run a Windows game on Linux, both systems begin to receive constant signals, but which they do not understand, so Wine was in charge of being the translator during the video game sessions.
With NTSYNC this changes completely and stuttering is eliminated by introducing this type of native translator, which means that the processor does not have to waste time with each instruction.
According to internal testing, this means that titles like dirt 3 have gone from 110 fps to more than 860 fps; in the case of Resident Evil 2reaching triple the performance seen previously.
Another of the great news is that The WoW64 architecture has finally reached its end.
So that old 32-bit programs can continue to work alongside modern 64-bit ones, WoW64 is vital, although until now in Linux numerous 32-bit libraries had to be installed, causing errors in the system.
Wine 11 is now capable of taking care of everything without having to install extra packages or repositories on any Linux distribution, even 16-bit retro gaming applications without system crashing.
Beyond these big changes, which make Linux an even more comfortable system to play, other improvements also appear for those who use Wayland, with a clipboard suitable for copying and pasting between Windows and Linux without errors.
As well as a change in resolution in older games that have lower resolutions, such as 640 x 480 pixels, which previously did not scale correctly.
Finally, support is also added for the latest graphics technologies and faster hardware video decoding, also vital for smoother gameplay.
In short, Wine 11 has made Linux become a system more similar to Windowsperhaps in its most important update since Valver launched Proton in 2018.
At the moment, the Steam company is already testing it in beta versions of SteamOS, although it is expected to reach stable versions based on the Linux 6.14 kernel, which allows NTSYNC to work.
