I noticed in the PlayOnLinux Wine Manager there are Wine Staging version along with the Wine versions. Wine Staging This sounds like an interesting list of features not found in Wine versions: CSMT (Commandstream multithreading) for better graphic performance CUDA / PhysX / NVENC Support for NVIDIA graphic cards DXVA2 GPU video decoding (experimental) Fixes for various upstream regressions Job Object support Named Pipe message mode support (Linux kernel >= 3.4 only) Performance improvements for IO-heavy programs and memory allocation functions S3 texture compression (DXTn) support Threadpool API support Various improvements to d3dx9 Windows ACL support Wine PulseAudio driver Is anyone else testing these Wine Staging versions on your games?
This version have some improvements various of this have uploaded to wine git, however dont all can be approved for wine devs However them have sebastian lackner (this guy upload many interesting things in wine git) and mark harmstone who upload some things referent sound (sound entry selection in winecfg is part of mark harstone work approved in wine vanilla)
No really because sebastian lackner and mark harmstone send patches to wine.git (regular wine) and some of them (patch sended) has aproved other not but in middle of this, situation can better
I am a little late joining this thread but in my previous tests I didn't find any difference between vanilla Wine and Wine-Staging in Playonlinux: the situation has changed now because, after stumbling upon this video, I tested Crysis, which I had previously installed following Booman's excellent guide. Well, I switched the Wine version from the suggested (in the guide) 1.6-rc4-d3d_doublebuffer to Wine-Staging 1.39 with CSMT enabled and the improvement was unbelievable. The game, which was barely playable on my system, works now perfectly well: I was seriously surprised. Having said that, I think this Wine branch has to be evaluated on a case by case basis; for instance, I tested the same version on UT3 and performance was a little worse than the old trusted wine 1.5.25.
This is good news! I had to play Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2 with shadows off because of performance problems. Now I want to test them again with Wine 1.7.39 staging to see if I can finally get full performance.