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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Wine 11 brings near-native performance to Windows games on Linux.
- Thanks to NTSYNC, performance bottlenecks are a thing of the past.
- Wine 11 is now available in most distro default repositories.
I remember, in 1999, when I used Wine for the first time to run the original Diablo game. I thought I’d done something very special (as did all of my Linux-curious friends). Back then, running games with Wine was no easy feat.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and Wine has made massive strides forward. It seemed Linux was on the precipice of something great. Then Valve stepped into the picture and ramped up support on Linux for Windows games, and things moved from the possible to the probable.
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And now, the developers of Wine have announced a change that will likely be the final push gamers need to migrate from Windows to Linux. That change comes in the form of NTSYNC support. This new feature was introduced as a kernel driver in January 2026 and retools how Windows games synchronize threads on Linux.
Let me rephrase that in a way that everyone will understand:
Wine NTSYNC support brings performance gains of up to 678% for games on Linux.
The Wine developers shifted how thread synchronization works by way of a new /dev/ntsync device to solve an issue that has plagued gaming on Linux for over a decade. Now, Windows games will run at native or near-native performance without rewriting a single line of code.
Previously, Wine handled Windows NT synchronization via RPC (Remote Procedure Call) through a process called wineserver. That workaround required data to be sent over a socket to wineserver, which would then perform the operation on the data, and send the reply back. Given how many of these calls modern games make per second, it could lead to a serious bottleneck.
In other words, wineserver was a big problem.
With NTSYNC, the /dev/ntsync device is exposed, so the Linux kernel now handles the sync natively. Wine now automatically detects a supported kernel (version 6.14 or newer) and uses NTSYNC when available.
This is massive.
According to XDA, documentation for the patch claims a “50-100%” improvement for most games.
For NTSYNC to work, you must have at least Linux kernel 6.14 (you can check with the command uname -r), and the ntsync module must be loaded at boot (which can be checked with sudo modprobe ntsync). Here’s what you can do (if the module isn’t loaded).
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Check to see if /dev/ntsync exists with:
ls -l /dev/ntsync
If you get the error “cannot access ‘/dev/ntsync’: No such file or directory,” you must load the module with:
sudo modprobe ntsync
Once the module is loaded, run a Wine game and enjoy the increase in performance.
Even more additions to Wine
Wine 11 isn’t just about NTSYNC. You’ll also find that the WoW64 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit) implementation is now complete. WoW64 allows the Wine binary to run both 32- and 64-bit games, without having to employ multilib libraries. WoW64 is also now capable of handling OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and 16-bit app support.
The above is important because most Linux distributions have already (or have begun) the process of phasing out 32-bit support. Without WoW64, 32-bit games wouldn’t run on Linux.
Other changes and improvements include:
- Improvements to the Wayland driver.
- EGL is now the default backend for OpenGL rendering (on X11).
- Initial support for hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding.
- Improvements to force feedback support.
- A new driver for Bluetooth that includes BLE and proper pairing support.
- Zip64 compression support.
- Unicode 17.0.0 support.
- TWAIN 2.0 scanning (64-bit apps only).
- IPv6 ping functionality.
Of course, there’s also the usual host of bug fixes.
All this comes together to make Wine 11 the most consequential release to date, and promises to profoundly level up Linux gaming.
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Wine 11 should already be in your distribution’s default repositories. One of the major exceptions to this is Ubuntu 24.04, which does not include a kernel new enough to support the latest release.
