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

https://www.xda-developers.com/wine-11-rewrites-linux-runs-windows-games-speed-gains/

Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive

Wine 11 is the biggest jump for Linux gaming in years.

XDA

> 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.

Those benchmark numbers are slightly misleading, as they are a comparison of Wine+ntsync against Wine+nothing. There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex and the gains over Wine+fsync are modest (just a few % in most cases).

That said, Wine+ntsync is still a win, just not a 8x improvement like the Dirt 3 benchmark suggests.

(And it case it's not clear, ntsync is https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html, which is a driver for Linux that offers syncronization primitives (mutex, semaphore, events) that more closely match the semantics of the Windows primitives. It's easier to do a direct implementation in Wine to support code compiled for Windows that expects to be talking to an NT kernel.)

NT synchronization primitive driver — The Linux Kernel documentation

Do they have any other usecase behind Wine? My guess would be MS SQL server, but is that correct?