SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support

Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications.

SDL 3.4 brings a number of new APIs, including work on better interoperability between SDL's 3D GPU API and its 2D rendering API.

SDL 3.4 also enjoys better Emscripten support if wanting to compile it down for use within web browsers.

Some other highlights of SDL 3.4 include better pen handling, native support for PNG images, atomic support for Linux's KMS/DRM path and an associated hint for controlling atomic functionality use, and various other platform-specific improvements. SDL 3.4 also contains support for the new Steam Controller, fixes for more than five mouse buttons on Wayland, render batching for Vulkan and other APIs, introducing X11TK as the X11 Toolkit for SDL, improved logic for detecting the most performant Vulkan GPU in multi-GPU systems, precision scrolling for X11, and other improvements.

Downloads and more details on today's SDL 3.4.0 release via GitHub.