Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

Wine is a project that I've grown a near-infinite level of respect for.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of the work for Wine is boring and thankless. Digging through and trying to get exact parity with both the documented and undocumented behavior of Windows for the past 30 years doesn't sound fun, but it's finding every little weird edge case that makes Wine a viable product.

The fact that Wine runs a lot of games better than Windows now (especially older games) shows a very strong attention to detail and a high tolerance for pain. I commend them for it.

> Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS

> Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS

> Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS

> Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS

Amazing. I don't understand the low level details on how such a massive speed gain was ripe for the picking but I welcome!

I guess thanks Valve for pouring money into Proton.

Before anyone gets too excited about ntsync, the performance gains are (with few exceptions) mild, usually in the lower single percentage range. These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla wine without fsync, anyone playing demanding games on linux would have been doing so using fsync. This is mentioned in the article but treated like a side note. I've been running benchmarks between both and while the performance increase is real, please temper your expectations. A few titles might also run slightly worse.

Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.

I am glad that a portion of the thousands of dollars I've given to Valve Corporation over the years has been gone to improve Wine for everybody. I wonder how many developers and contractors on the project are paid by Valve.

Wine might be oddly self-defeating. Broad game support on Linux increases the viability of Linux as a desktop, which increases market share, which may result in developers creating Linux ports as a 1st class concern, which don't need Wine to run.

This is such an amazing accomplishment! Absolutely wild to see Linux basically re-implement Windows and doing it better, while MS is dead set on making everything about their software worse.

If any Wine devs are reading this, I'd love to see a talk on this topic at the 2026 Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open until March 31st.

It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory to store the data structures and using just one eventfd per thread to park/unpark (or a futex if not waiting for anything else), which should be fully correct and have similar or faster performance, at the cost of not being secure or robust against process crashes (which isn't a big problem for more Wine usage).

It seems that neither esync or fsync do this though - why?

Claude thinks that "nobody was motivated enough to write and debug the complex shared-memory waiter-list logic when simpler (if less correct) approaches worked for 95% of games, and when correctness finally mattered enough, the kernel was the more natural place to put it". Is that true?

it seems if you want the same on macOS, this is the place to contribute:

https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...

If you're interested in technical notes on how the WoW64 thing works, I dug into Wine and implemented a similar thing in my (far inferior) emulator and wrote about it here, including some links to some Wine resources: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64....

I've heard in the past that ntsync is a big deal for audio plugins via yabridge as well. Not sure how much that's going to reduce the existing CPU penalty there.

Is the difference between the NT-style and POSIX-style semaphores essentially just that NT (and now this new API in Linux) supports setting a max value? Why don't POSIX semaphores support this?

awesome, finally wine is getting proper ntsync support... and i reckon wow64 will let me run so many old games...

Anybody know if NTSYNC support is why the Chrome OS team moved away from native Steam support?

Not that it really matters, but does this article read as LLM authored to anyone else?

I had to close 3 ads before even half my screen was the article

And then it never was more than half…

I'll be very interested to see how this plays out with final 3rd-party benchmarks.

Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......

Does it finally support visual studio?

> 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.

Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.

While I am not a big gamer anymore, I am curious whether this new Wine release make it possible to run Windows software such as Photoshop or Visual Studio on Linux with decent speed and decent resource usage.

Yuck.

i would love to know how much of these gains are due to help from AI. i have no problem with AI usage at all in coding but i would love to know if the dramatic gains are because of insights from ai usage.