I assume that mingw is only used to compile the Windows binaries like Gecko.

It definitely doesn't need mingw to build. My SlackBuild (I assume you don't need a link by now?) builds it just fine.

I'm not cross-compiling but I have been a Wine user for almost 2 decades, at first for a few "indispensable" apps I soon learned to replace and for the last 12 or so years, strictly for a few, and ever smaller list, for games. I've been using Dugan's slackbuild script for about 3 years mainly because of my perception that Alien Bob is not a gamer while Dugan apparently plays some.

One odd occurrence is that somewhere in the mid 2x's wine started to lose performance in a few games and particularly my long-standing favorite World of Warcraft and I tried so many versions back then I lost track of which version was the best and hoped whatever the hit was, it would get resolved. I got somewhat of a respite when Staging and PBA became possible, but PBA soon petered out for me but Staging was up then down with new versions... that is until v4.0 came out.

Wine-Staging 4.0 was a sweet release and gave me back some of the old performance. Specifically this was most noticeable during heavy ram usage like when 25 players and a big Boss all started massive (and very graphic) interaction during battle. Framerates would drop to almost comic strip quality even with my GTX-1070 Ti but it is my understanding that 10 year old WOW doesn't need much GPU, just a lot of free ram resources.

I again used Dugan's slackbuild for 4.6 but without Staging and while this is the first day I am cautiously impressed. It compiled without a hitch and I'm getting better, more consistent framerates than I did with 4.0 Staging. I'll soon add a note for how 25 man fares. FWIW I'm still launching WOW as OpenGL and not as Vulkan but I may see how that does, too.

Personally I'm a big fan of both Wine and MinGW. They allow me to develop and test cross-platform stuff without having to actually use Windows. I have no idea about the MinGW dependency question, though.

Are you sure about that?

I actually recently dropped support for non-staging builds.

Use DXVK. Really. Use WoW's DirectX 11 engine with DXVK.

WoW has long been CPU limited due to a lack of threading - running on one core in the dual core days, moving to one and a bit when quad cores landed, slowly moving more work to that second core. With a recent patch it took a big step forward and I'm now seeing it fully utilize three cores, and I don't get framerate drops when a lot of players are on screen any more.

Sure, this is with a Vega 64, but I'm playing at 4K and usually hitting 60 FPS. I even rolled my own Mesa to get Freesync support. It works great.

I can tell you that Diablo 3 works amazingly with wine-staging and DXVK. I have a weird issue where I don't have audio if I launch it from the battle.net client, but I do have audio if I launch it directly with "-launch". But that's tolerable.

Yeah, figured it out that the need for mingw is an optional dependency due to the libwine.dll change--it means that one can compile WINE dlls for windows. I'm not sure why one would want to, but whatever floats their boat. (Debugging?)

Heh. Sounds like we almost have enough Slackware people for a WoW dungeon group. ;^)

DXVK has been awesome for WINE. For instance, when I was playing WoW, I copied over the installation from my partner's much newer computer, rather than wait for the download. I was playing it as his settings (everything cranked), and didn't have a performance hit until I'd gotten into a raid. (Sadly, even dxvk can't help a lackluster expansion...) No problems with Diablo III, but--to be honest--I haven't played it in a few months. Grim Dawn and Path of Exile also run really well with dxvk.

I'm curious as to what d9vk will do with Guild Wars 2, once d9vk is a bit more mature.

I actually have two odd results. The first is that not only is it not named "wine-staging" as was common in the past, but there is no longer a tab present at all in "winecfg" for enabling/disabling the 4 or 5 options of "staging". The second is that it did not create a separate named multilib version as I'm used to, yet it works, and rather well as I've noted.

I think I likely have older slackbuild scripts of yours, that I have just edited for versions. The one I had renamed "Wine-Staging-4.Slackbuild that worked for 4.0 stopped very quickly saying "unexpected end of file" at line 115. I used a different one of yours labeled simply wine4.Slackbuild. It has 130 lines and built without hesitation with just the two odd results.

I may be playing an older version than you. I'm playing WOW WOTLK 3.3.5a. I suppose it is possible that I have some hangovers in wine regedit from using opengl but when I run the macro to determine what gxAPI is running as I get "DX9 is running" and find that config.wtf has been overwritten from
and it is not good. Framerates drop almost in half just running around Dalaran mounted. For now anyway I have set it back to "opengl" and use this to launch

I may just reboot to an old Win7 install to see what happens there, but unless I'm missing some important dll, or some config setting, DXVK is a bust for this game version, at least for me so far.

DXVK is DirectX 10 or 11. For DirectX 9 you need the new D9VK project, which is pretty new.

@ zuriel --- Thank you much, zuriel, I hadn't known about D9VK and you're right ... it is very new.. a bit too new for my tastes until it matures a bit. Also that explains why launching with Steam Proton 3.16.9 Beta makes no difference at this time compared to vulkanized wine.

@ dugan --- I downloaded the newest slackbuild of yours on github and rebuilt wine and now have the Staging tab but still only have just the one package with no "compat32" version. It runs so I'm not complaining but is this now normal for a multilib system?

Yes. There is one "wine" executable to run both 64-bit and 32-bit apps. The "wine64" executable is present, but you're not supposed to use it. It's just there for the "wine" executable to call.

Alien Bob's WINE and SBo's WINE are also built like this.

Here's the build-from-source howto:

https://wiki.winehq.org/Building_Wine#Shared_WoW64

Ah yeah. Dx9 and WoW was never great, and the rewrite of the OpenGL engine in the last expansion was even worse than the one previous. (It was never finished.) By the end of Legion, dx9 was so broken, projected textures weren't showing, which made raiding impossible. Back in WotLK, I was using OpenGL, I think. I'm not sure how it would work with a modern version of WINE, though. It might be worth trying a version of WINE from that time period, in case there are regressions. For older games, too, I find that disabling CSMT (which one can do in staging) helps performance. (Like with Baldur's Gate.)

Thanks garpu for the background since the only two expansions I've ever played are WOTLK and Cata. I started on Cata but once I discovered how much deeper WOTLK is, I knew I'd found my niche. I'm sure you know the version of OpenGL can be specified in Wine and experimentation has led me to use the latest for best performance. I agree with you on CSMT. While it seems there may have been some regressions that resulted in a decrease in overall performance for awhile, that seems to have evened out and in some ways, actually improved.

I use between 20 and 30 addons depending on the character and these days the only performance hit I experience is with LOTS of Mobs and say two Mages doing Blizzard and Flame Strike while a couple of Druids do Starfall AND Hurricane like when the multitude of Whelp adds join in on Onyxia in 25 man. It's still playable if a tad hobbled. Most of the time now all ICC fights are fine, since Wine 4.x. 4.0 was a decent improvement and 4.6 is great!

I played Quake 3 Arena for ~20 years and at one time used 2 Viewsonic 120Hz Cathode Ray displays so I could lock framerates at 120fps to enable the smoothest physics tricks. I have WoW locked at 60fps to match my Flat Screen and it takes some serious tweaking to keep that viable. Some various versions would start off dropping as low as 28fps in certain environments but lately 50fps is the rock bottom low (excepting situations like Ony above). I'd very much like to get it so potentially high that it never drops below 60 and stays rock solid but that may never be more than a desire, being more software limited than hardware.

PS - As always, thank you dugan for your excellent slackbuild script.