It's 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.

Recent Wine releases in particular have brought better Direct3D 10.x coverage and this work has continued with the just-released Wine 1.1.33. Of the about 600 changes that were committed between Wine 1.1.32 and 1.1.33, about 80 of them pertain to Direct3D 10 support.

The new development release of the Wine Windows API implementation features new icons, Direct3D optimisations and several improvements for 64-bit systems

Wine 1.1.43 features a number of new icons, Direct3D optimisations and several improvements for 64-bit systems. Other changes include improved support for the alpha channel in bitmaps and more complete msvcr80/90 DLL implementations. A number of bugs related to applications like CDBurnerXP and games, such as Warcraft III, Diablo 2, and Battlefield 2, have also been addressed.

For the past few months there has been a developer, Chia-I Wu, working to bring the Mesa 3D stack to Android netbooks.

Unigine offers two free benchmarks - Tropics and Sanctuary. I ran both demos using OpenGL (because OpenGL runs on both platforms natively and DirectX does not).

Everyone in the Wine community is driving to release Wine 1.2 the newest and best version of Wine.

Its been two years since Wine 1.0, and weve really made huge strides. This version will include the beginnings of genuine 64-bit support, along with major Direct3D improvements, and improvements in a huge number of other areas.

It's common geek wisdom that standards-based websites, for instance, trounce Silverlight, Flash, or ActiveX. Cross-platform development is laudable and smart. No self-respecting geek enjoys dealing with closed-standard Word documents or Exchange servers. What kind of bizarro world is this where engineers are not only going crazy over Microsoft's latest proprietary API, but actively denouncing its open-standard competitor?

What's new in this release:
- Direct3D improvements, including driver version emulation.
- Beginnings of support for OLE objects in Richedit.
- Several fixes to the animation control.
- A bunch of fixes for regression test failures.
- Lots of bug fixes.