Direct3D 10 and 11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel

Its a pity Luca Barbieri or any Mesa / Gallium3D developers are not at Oktoberfest as they are deserving of more than a few Maß of Augustiner. In fact, today a new Gallium3D state tracker was pushed into Mesa and it's perhaps the most interesting state tracker for this open-source graphics driver architecture yet. Its a state tracker that exposes Microsoft's DirectX 10/11 API on Linux! And it's already working and can be hooked into Wine!

Luca Barbieri made a rather significant commit today that adds a state tracker dubbed "d3d1x", which implements the Direct3D 10/11 COM API in Gallium3D. Luca says this is just the initial version, but its already working and can run a few DirectX 10/11 texturing demos on Linux at the moment. This is not a matter of simply translating the Direct3D calls and converting them to OpenGL like how Wine currently handles it, but is natively implemented within Gallium3D and TGSI to speak directly to the underlying graphics driver and hardware. Thanks to Gallium3Ds architecture, this Direct3D support essentially becomes "free" to all Linux drivers with little to no work required.

As said in the commit, "The primary goal is to realize Galliums promise of multiple API support, and provide an API that can be easily implemented with just a very thin wrapper over Gallium, instead of the enormous amount of complex code needed for OpenGL. The secondary goal is to run Windows Direct3D 10/11 games on Linux using Wine."

In regards to Wine taking advantage of this state tracker, no DLLs have been published yet for Wine to hook into this state tracker, but Luca says that should be quite easy to accomplish.

If things could not get any better, "Fglrx and nvidia drivers can also be supported by writing a Gallium driver that talks to them using OpenGL, which is a relatively easy task. Thanks to the great design of Direct3D 10/11 and closeness to Gallium, this approach should not result in detectable overhead, and is the most maintainable way to do it, providing a path to switch to the open Gallium drivers once they are on par with the proprietary ones."

This is incredible news especially as Wine only has limited DirectX 10.0 support and lacks no form of DirectX 11.0 at the moment.

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Bordeaux 2010 year end roadmap

I thought this would once again be a good time for us to share our next six months outlook for Bordeaux. Maybe I should start with whats taken place over the past few months then go over our future goals.

Over the past six months it has been extremely exciting times around here once again, we shipped Bordeaux for MAC users and now MAC users can run Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer 7 and many other Windows applications on their beloved MAC Computers. So, now its easy and inexpensive for MAC users to run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games without having to run bootcamp and a full version of Windows.

We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux five times this year, and added support for Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google SketchUp, VLC Multimedia player and updated to the latest IrfanView release. Bundled Wine 1.2.0, added support for Pulse Audio, updated and cleaned up our custom winetricks script and we also fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

We are currently running a donations promotion, where we will give fifty percent of all sales back to the Wine and FreeBSD community's. For more information of the fifty perfect give back promotion please take a look here.

In the next few months, we plan to ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 and this is where 99% of our work will be focused. In the past Bordeaux was a run of the mill "Wine front end" and while their is nothing wrong with being just a front end to Wine this approach causes massive head aches. Wine is released every two weeks and over just a couple months their are numerous versions that need to be supported. Some people stick with the old stable Wine 1.0.1 version that came with their distribution while others install the latest version just after each release. And if you have used Wine for more then a month you know that what worked in one release isnt guaranteed to work in the next release.

So it came to the point to where we needed to also Bundle Wine with Bordeaux. And as of our 2.0.0 release we now bundle our own Wine build with each release. This allows us to focus on one version and test all of our supported applications against it. And now we don't have to worry about the next Wine release breaking a application or feature. This move has also opened up the availability for us to add in hacks and tweaks so certain applications and games run, or in some circumstances run allot better then with just plain stock Wine.

We have also included a number of hacks and fixes in our Wine build, some of the hacks include the unsupported DIB Engine. We know its not perfect but it allows our customers to use it if needed. We have also built in Pulse Audio support for the Linux release, added a memory hack to the BSD build and many other small hacks that were not possible before. In the near future we will be able to support IE 8, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office 2010, and much much more.

Now that the Wine bundle is complete and all of our current supported applications run we plan to re-write the front end and make it extremely simple to install any application or game through the new UI. The new Bordeaux User Interface is next on our todo list and our plans are to ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 by early 2011. We will also be adding some new features to our Cellar manager, these changes will make it possible to add a new cellar and configure a cellar more easily, the new Cellar manager changes will be released in a upcoming 2.2.0 release. As soon as the main UI is complete we will ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 for Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD and MAC.

Here is a screen shot of a mockup Bordeaux 3.0.0 UI



After the new front end is complete we also plan to have our own application and game database and then tie it into the UI so you can instantly see what other peoples success are with any given application.

Here is a recent screen shot of Pulse Audio working in Bordeaux on Linux.



Bordeaux 2.0.8 on Mac OSX 10.6



Bordeaux 2.0.8 on Free and PC-BSD


If Bordeaux is something your interested in we would ask that you purchase the current 2.0.8 release to help fund future releases. All of the above changes take one of two things time or money. And with your support we can invest in more hacking hours and have Bordeaux 3.0.0 ready for release in just a couple short months.

Keep in mind if you make the purchase now you get six months of upgrades, so you will also get version 3.0.0 and any service releases.

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Crossover Bordeaux Cedega VS Vanilla Wine

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is

What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

There are three main commercial Wine products: Bordeaux, Cedega, and Crossover. There are a few distinct differences between the commercial Wine products and the FOSS Wine.

Support:
One of the largest benefits to using a paid for Wine product is that not only are you paying for software, you are also paying for support of said software. What this means is that if an application that is suppose to function, doesn't work properly - You will have a real live person to help you debug the issue. While support for Cedega is somewhat lacking, Bordeaux and Crossover have fantastic support staff.

GUI/Automated Installer:
All three of the commercial Wine applications provide a GUI/automated installer for installing applications. This makes it much easier for new users (and faster for experienced users) to configure applications properly under Wine. Time is money as they say.

Read the Full Article Here.

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Bordeaux 2.0.8 for Mac Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.8 for Mac today. Bordeaux 2.0.8 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated firefox to 3.6.8, added support for Google SketchUp 7.1, added support for VLC media player, bundle Wine 1.2, Support for Irfanview 4.27 and plugins, updated to the most current winetricks release, More fixes to the Bordeaux UI, there has also been many small bug fixes in this release.
With version 2.0.8 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.41, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools.

The cost of Bordeaux 2.0.8 for Mac is $25.00. Anyone who has purchased Bordeaux in the past six months is entitled to a free upgrade. Bordeaux comes with six months of upgrades and support and of course a 30-day money back guarantee.
Please read our Mac readme file before you use Bordeaux.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Intel Apple Mac (Mac Pro, Mac Mini, iMac, Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air)
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard OS-X 10.6 or later is required to install this package.
• Gtk-Framework-2.14 2.14 Download

2.0.8 application support :

• Microsoft Office 2007 Applications (Word, Excel, Powerpnt)
• Microsoft Office 2003 Applications (Word, Excel, Powerpnt)
• Microsoft Office 2000 Applications (Word, Excel, Powerpnt)
• Microsoft Visio 2003
• Microsoft Project 2003
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
• Mozilla FireFox 3.6.8
• VLC 1.1.0
• Google SketchUp 7.1
• IrfanView 4.27 and plugins

2.0.8 New Features :

• Updated to Wine version 1.2
• Better support for IE 7
• Even more fixes to .app Bundle support
• Firefox 3.6.8 support
• Added Google SketchUp 7.1 Support
• Added VLC Multimedia Player Support
• Fixed allot of bugs in the Bordeaux UI
• Synced to newest winetricks release
• Many other small bug fixes

Some recent Screenshots :

Bordeaux User Interface on OS-X Snow Leopard.

Bordeax Starting the Internet Explorer 7 Install.

Internet Explorer 7 running on OS-X Snow Leopard.

Microsoft Office 2003 Install.

Microsoft Office 2003 Install has Completed.

Microsoft Word 2003 on OS-X Snow Leopard.

Microsoft Excel 2003 on OS-X Snow Leopard.

About Bordeaux:

The Bordeaux Technology Group is a software services and development company specializing in Windows compatibility software. Users of Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris and Mac systems from time to time find themselves in the need to run specialized Windows software. The Bordeaux suite enables access to these programs and data in a seamless and low cost manner without requiring licensing of Microsoft Technology. The Bordeaux Group also provides migration services and support for alternative operating systems specializing in Windows compatibility.
There is a multitude of software developed only for the Windows operating system and even when software vendors port their applications to another platform, generally it lacks features that the Windows version contains. The only solution these developers face is to have access to both systems for testing which leads to increased infrastructure demands, and wasted project resources. If you are vendor interested in supporting your application on Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris or Mac OS X or a software user that needs to run a Windows application on Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris or Mac OS X we can help.

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