The new release contains a couple of major new features and number of key changes. The list of major changes and improvements to Wine 5.0 includes built-in modules in PE format, multi-monitor support, XAudio2 reimplementation, and Vulkan 1.1 support.

The PE format modules are of significant importance, as these are modules built in the Portable Executable format (aka the Windows binary format). This change (from the ELF format) will help with copy protection schemes, which check that the on-disk and in-memory contents of system modules are identical. With the previous method, fake DLL files were copied into the Wine prefix. With the PE format added, actual PE binaries are copied into Wine prefix, which has the effect of making the prefix look more like an actual Windows installation.

Other fixes/features include:

• Direct 3D 12 applications can switch between fullscreen or windowed and change display modes.
• Dirty texture regions are tracked more accurately for Direct3D 8 and 9 texture uploads.
• The ID3D11Multithread interface support.
• More shader reflection APIs.
• The kernel-level synchronization objects like spin locks, fast mutexes, remove locks, and resource variables has been implemented.
• The system battery state now properly reports to applications.

For more details, check out the official Wine 5.0 changelog.