Wine 11.16 Adds VA-API Hardware Video Decoding and Fixes a Steam Launch Regression

Wine 11.16 Adds VA-API Hardware Video Decoding and Fixes a Steam Launch Regression

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Wine 11.16 was released on August 21 with the first piece of hardware video decoding support the project has shipped.

VA-API decoding

Wine can now use GPU-accelerated video decoding through VA-API, implemented by Elizabeth Figura of CodeWeavers, covering H.264 decoding with WineD3D.

The scope is currently limited: H.264 only, with no H.265 or other codecs. That is still the format most Windows applications reach for, so the practical coverage is better than the list of one suggests.

The benefit is reduced CPU usage and better playback efficiency. Applications that play video, which includes a lot of games with cutscenes as well as actual media software, have been decoding on the CPU under Wine while the GPU sat idle. On a handheld or a laptop this is directly a battery and thermal issue, not just a benchmark number.

Mono 11.3 with ARM64

The bundled Mono engine moves to 11.3.0, adding ARM64 device support and improving .NET compatibility.

ARM64 is a recurring theme in this release. Wine also improves exception handling for ARM64EC, which matters for anyone running Windows applications on ARM Linux hardware, a category that has gone from theoretical to plausible over the past two years.

35 bug fixes

The release includes 35 fixes across a broad range of Windows software and games. Two are worth calling out:

  • A fix for an issue preventing Steam from launching
  • A regression that stopped the WineWayland driver working in Wine 11.15

The WineWayland regression is the one to note if you skipped 11.15. As desktops complete the move off X11, WineWayland stops being an experimental path and becomes how Wine runs, so regressions in it have a wider blast radius than they used to.

Valve shipped Proton 11.0-2 the same week, addressing compatibility regressions from its own Wine 11.0 migration, and Vkd3d 2.1 landed with expanded HLSL support.

# Arch
sudo pacman -Syu wine

# Fedora
sudo dnf upgrade wine

# Or use a manager like Bottles or Lutris to pin runners per prefix

Wine’s development releases ship weekly and are not the same thing as the stable branch. If you want the VA-API work now, you want a development build.

More news

Wine 11.18 Expands NTOSKRNL Support for Windows Kernel DriversWine 11.18 improves its emulation of the Windows kernel interface, which is the layer that decides whether software depending on a kernel driver can run at all.Wine 11.17 Adds Initial Display Mode Emulation and Fixes 44 BugsWine 11.17 begins emulating display mode changes rather than applying them to the real display, which addresses one of the more disruptive behaviours of running Windows games on Linux.Vkd3d 2.1 Expands HLSL Support and Adds Reflection for Direct3D 10 and 11Wine's Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation library picks up previously missing shader reflection capabilities, extends beyond D3D12 to D3D10 and D3D11 interfaces, and improves SPIR-V generation.

Background reading

Explainers for the concepts behind this story.

D-Bus Explained, and Why Distributions Are Switching to dbus-brokerD-Bus is the message bus Linux desktops and system services use to talk to each other. What it does, the system and session buses, how to inspect it with busctl, and why Fedora, Arch, and now Ubuntu replaced dbus-daemon with dbus-broker.Moving to Wayland on KDE Plasma: What Breaks and How to Fix ItPlasma 6.8 removed the X11 session, so every Plasma user is moving to Wayland. The common problems, from screen sharing and xdotool to global shortcuts, blurry apps, NVIDIA, and remote desktop, and how to solve each one.AMD GPUs on Linux: amdgpu, Mesa, Vulkan, and ROCm ExplainedAMD graphics work out of the box on Linux with fully open source drivers. How the amdgpu kernel driver and Mesa fit together, getting the newest Mesa, Vulkan with RADV, video acceleration, monitoring and fan control, and ROCm for compute and AI.