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Direct3D to Vulkan gets even better with DXVK 1.7

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Today the latest and greatest in Direct3D to Vulkan translation for the Wine (and Proton) compatibility layers has released with DXVK 1.7.

What's new? Well this release answers the age old question of "ah, but can it run Crysis?". Yes, it can, and they've improved it too. DXVK 1.7 now makes use of VK_EXT_custom_border_color a new Vulkan extension introduced with Vulkan 1.2.140, which fixed multiple Direct3D 9 issues with titles like Crysis and Halo 2 Vista. Additionally the VK_EXT_robustness2 extension is also now used, introduced in Vulkan 1.2.139 which they use to "handle out-of-bounds access to resources the same way as D3D11 does".

Since both of those are newer extensions, to take advantage of them you not only need a brand new version of Wine with the 5.8 release that went out last week, you also need development drivers for AMD / Intel with Mesa 20.2 and NVIDIA with 440.66.12. Note: neither of those drivers are recommended for daily use, may be best to wait for stable driver updates. It's not required to have new Wine / Drivers, DXVK 1.7 just skips the extensions if you don't.

Apart from that there's a few optimizations, some DXGI 1.6 is in for future versions of World of Warcraft, reduced memory use for D3D9 and game specific fixes for Cloudpunk, Fallout New Vegas, Freelancer, GTA IV and Halo Custom Edition.

See the full changelog for DXVK 1.7 on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Open Source, Update, Vulkan, Wine | Apps: DXVK
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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7 comments

mylka May 16, 2020
Quoting: PatolaIt is unfortunate that it requires wine 5.8. This wine release is not a good one, it is a release that has a number of regressions. .

this version needs drivers, which in development right now
mesa 20.1 isnt even released yet and this one needs 20.2, so i guess you are a BETA tester, if you want it anyways

if you dont have any problems with your games you playing right now, i wouldnt use it
Koopacabras May 16, 2020
Quoting: PatolaIt is unfortunate that it requires wine 5.8. This wine release is not a good one, it is a release that has a number of regressions. And it's started in some refactoring in wine 5.0, which might not even launch if there are oddities in the network configuration. It seems that wine is becoming less and less resilient.

I also noticed some games working better with Proton 4.2-9, Thief was one, another one is Baja Edge of Contol. Can't understand why, it's not the DXVK version, and it's not ESYNC.
YoRHa-2B May 16, 2020
To be clear, it does not require wine 5.8 and dev drivers to run, only for the two new extensions to be used and have any effect. On an older software stack it'll work just like previous versions (including broken rendering in Crysis' Dx9 mode and friends).

The winevulkan patches are likely going to be pulled into Proton 5.0 with the next update; at least I'm going to make Andrew aware that we want them. The driver situation is a bit unfortunate since Mesa 20.1 branched shortly before the border color extension came out, so that won't be supported in stable mesa any time soon.


Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 16 May 2020 at 4:59 pm UTC
Liam Dawe May 16, 2020
Quoting: YoRHa-2BTo be clear, it does not require wine 5.8 and dev drivers to run, only for the two new extensions to be used and have any effect. On an older software stack it'll work just like previous versions (including broken rendering in Crysis' Dx9 mode and friends).
Did a wee adjustment on my wording to hopefully make that clearer :)
mrdeathjr May 16, 2020
In my case works ok (d3d9):



^_^
tpau May 16, 2020
Weren't there attempts to create mesa front ends for dx as well for higher dx versions? It would be interesting to see if the vk layer has disadvantages due to more converting needed


Last edited by tpau on 16 May 2020 at 9:07 pm UTC
STiAT May 17, 2020
Gotta' say the DXVK and D9VK devs are doing a really great job there. Sponsored by Valve by now, true, but what they got rolling here ... it's the best linux gaming has experienced in a long time.

We all were on wine, dealing with particular issues. DXVK / D9VK just seem to work. And that with beautiful performance. We can't thank the two of them enough for starting it and staying committed. In the end, Valve as well for sponsoring that work.
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