For those keen to keep up with the exciting progress of the Vulkan-based compatibility layer for D3D 11 and Wine 'DXVK' [GitHub], you will be pleased to know a fresh release is now out.
Version 0.42 adds in:
- Added support for DXGI Gamma Control functions, which should fix the Gamma slider in The Witcher 3 (and likely other games too)
- Avoid compiling the same DXBC shader multiple times
- Implemented missing HLSL semantics for tessellation and geometry shaders
There's also five bugs that were reported as fixed which affected: World of Warships to fix a crash where MSAA was enabled, Ni No Kuni II had a fix for a bunch of missing textures and Overwatch should now show enemy outlines.
The progress here has been absolutely amazing, here's another video produced by GOL supporter and YouTuber Xpander showing off F.E.A.R. 3 using Wine Staging and DXVK:
Direct Link
Very impressive stuff. Obviously we would all prefer to get native and supported games, but for the times where clearly a Linux port isn't going to be made or for a new Linux user not wanting to lose access to their favourite Windows games, Wine is a great tool.
Quoting: Code ArtisanHow fast this project is advancing is truly impressive. Hope the guy behind it, doitsujin (German in japanese), stays motivated.Thankfully all the code is there, so anyone can come along and pick it up if they ever stop. However, it's so far along I don't see why they would. I doubt it's that far off being included directly in Wine.
Honestly most of the game not only work fine, but as a recent exemple: I wanted to replay the Prince of Persia Trilogy. I thought the second episode was not working, but it was due to the way I mounted my ISO. So I played it on windows 7 64bit, and the game kept of crashing all the time on the beginning of the game. I found a way around but the cinematics were buggy, and the was crashing every two loading. At one point my character suddenly had the skin of my double shadow which it's not meant to happen in the game.
I retried and install the game on wine with correct mounting of ISO, and then I realised some parts of the game and quest were not present when I was playing on windows. Like some action, movies, enigmas and chase part of the game had completly disappeared, but on linux with wine, everything was working normally without crash bug/glitch...
Really crazy stuff!
I also saw the movie from GTA V played on linux through DXVK from Xpander and it's Wow!!! Once again it's pretty stunning, it also seems to perform very well! Time to entirely ditch windows is coming way closer than I expected. Really wine team does some computing magic for all those lost treasure with no ports.
Last edited by Jahimself on 14 April 2018 at 11:35 pm UTC
I just tested it with The Witcher 3, and it brings the game from barely playable to totally enjoyable.
There are probably still some optimisations to do, but it's definitely a huge improvement. I don't know if it will be included in the Wine main branch any time soon so, because they need to support older DX versions as well (like DX9 and DX10), while they actually only support DX11.
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