ReactOS Lands Significant DirectX Stack Update From Wine For Enabling More Games

The open-source ReactOS project striving to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows applications/games as well as drivers took a huge step forward today with landing a significant update to its DirectX stack from code leveraged from the Wine project.

A big undertaking has panned out with improving the Wine 10.0 state of its DirectX stack into ReactOS. It's taken hundreds of hours of work by ReactOS developer Justin Miller. It also removes a lot of the prior DirectX hacks within ReactOS.

The now merged code code is 498k lines of new code and removes 119k lines of old code. This new code allows ReactOS to use OpenGL and Vulkan for translating DirectX and also improves the ReactOS ability for its DirectX stack to work on Windows itself.

This update is said to help hundreds of games. Miller commented in the pull request:

"This is an incredibly long time coming, that's taken at least 230+ hours of my life so far. (And still not done woohoo!)
The goal of this PR is to update our DirectX stack to WINE-10.0, while removing a lot of our hacks.

This allows ReactOS to use Vulkan and OpenGL to translate to DirectX (Despite Vulkan being only possible with a custom branch or the mesa software renderer, It also improves the ability of our DirectX stack to work on Windows itself.
Fixes some tests. and so much more.

The amount of games this PR unlocks in combination with other PRs that are open are in the 100s.
But even just for NT5.x This allows games such as Dragon Age: Origins to finally launch."

ReactOS developers remarked on X that soon DirectX 10 / 11 / 12 game compatibility will be possible on ReactOS.

Exciting times continue in the ReactOS space.