The day has finally arrived for the DXVK project to put on its big boy pants, as it has hit the 1.0 release and it's full of interesting changes.
In terms of what's new there's a "DXVK_HUD=api" option which will show off the D3D feature level the current application is using, a minor performance improvement on RADV, minor improvements to CPU overhead in some situations, for NVIDIA users you might see improved frame time consistency in some games, the state cache directory will be created if it doesn't exist, Resident Evil 2 got an option to improve performance up to around 10% and an improvement to help with driver updates on RADV.
Also the "VK_EXT_memory_priority" and "VK_EXT_memory_budget" extensions are now used if available, to "improve behaviour under memory pressure and to report available VRAM to applications more accurately".
As for bug fixes, there were issues fixed with Far Cry 3 / 4 / Blood Dragon, Far Cry Primal, Final Fantasy XIV, Heroes of the Storm, Monster Hunter World and Overwatch. Two issues relating to the proprietary AMD driver were fixed and other minor bug fixes.
Finally, there's a new setup script to make things easier. See the full release notes on GitHub.
As you can see, it's a pretty exciting release overall and one with plenty of stuff to play with. Also, this release marked 2,000 commits to the DXVK repository on GitHub! Hopefully the next release of Steam Play will include it, whenever Valve put it out.
In other Wine related news, it looks like Ethan Lee's FAudio work has made its way into Wine.
Quoting: gradyvuckovicThe number of people who have stuck with Windows 7 is a blessing for Linux since it's held back adoption of DX12. It's made a more stationary target. Hopefully those people stick with Windows 7 a little longer or switch to Linux, so we can keep it up, and hopefully if DX12 does become mainstream we'll be ready before it happens. It really does help with pushing Vulkan too, the longer Windows 7 survives and the more users Linux can get, the more attractive Vulkan becomes. If only Apple had gone with Vulkan for Mac.. x_x
While a lot of developers are mentally stuck in the DX world and likely never will look at any alternative no matter how good they are, Vulkan got adopted faster than I personally thought it would be. I also don't see DX11 die anytime soon, even after the end of Win 7. There were a lot of voices that seem to consider DX11 "good enough" for their purposes.
Quoting: mylkaQuoting: scaineEAC compatibility is the last big milestone, at least for the games I want to play - games like Vermintide 2, Strange Brigade and Paladins.
Overwatch will do me nicely for the moment however.
there is a lot to do.
DX11 will die with win7 (i know win7 will die slowly) and DXVK will be useless for new games. the next big milestone for valve is, to make developers use VULKAN and of course fix the uplay and other 3rd party launcher things
With the exception that games studios still make games that use direct x 9 features.
We always point out how few AAA games we have, commenting, often disparagingly, how it's all indies. But there's a flip side to that: Linux games are mostly real indies. As I understand it, Steam overall is supposed to be littered with shovelware, cheap crap put together to do something rudimentary with stock art and tempt a few rubes into buying it. But as far as I can tell, and as I would expect, nobody bothers to port much of that crap to Linux--after all, the name of that game is absolutely minimal effort. A sizable portion of the games Linux is missing are probably in that bottom-feeder category. Which means it's stuff we really don't miss. Subtract them from the Steam total, and the proportion of native real games on Linux may be higher than we think. Or to look at it a different way, the average quality level of games available on Linux may actually be higher than on Windows.
Meanwhile, if Proton, with the help of DXVK, can get us access to a lot of those AAA games, which tend to get effort put into making them work in proportion to how popular they are . . . why, if we get really lucky the complete lack of effort put into making shovelware games work or bothering to whitelist them if they do happen to could leave us in a "best of both worlds" situation where we can still ignore a lot of the worst crap but all the good indies are native and all the AAAs work whether they're native or not. Here's hoping!
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 26 February 2019 at 7:02 pm UTC
Quoting: PhlebiacQuoting: Purple Library Guyhang on a minute, was there a Windows 9? I don't even remember.
M$ skipped over 9, just like Apple. Also just like Apple, they are saying they will keep updating 10 for the foreseeable future (meanwhile, we got X11 for decades, lol! I remember there was a proposal for "Y", but then it went the other direction, with "W"ayland).
Wait, which '9' did Apple skip over? The pre-unix system was called MacOS 9 (in fact they kind of 'skipped over' *8* by retiring it early); and OSX has had a .9 ('Mavericks') release. I know absolutely nothing about ios though.
Quoting: wvstolzingWait, which '9' did Apple skip over? The pre-unix system was called MacOS 9 (in fact they kind of 'skipped over' *8* by retiring it early)
I thought they skipped from 8 to OSX, and then grudgingly did 9 since OSX was still buggy, but wikipedia tells me I am misremembering. Oops.
Quoting: PhlebiacQuoting: wvstolzingWait, which '9' did Apple skip over? The pre-unix system was called MacOS 9 (in fact they kind of 'skipped over' *8* by retiring it early)
I thought they skipped from 8 to OSX, and then grudgingly did 9 since OSX was still buggy, but wikipedia tells me I am misremembering. Oops.
Speaking of OS 9 -- check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1SLCAiGkVQ ... these stage antics quickly became cringeworthy in the 'mobile' era, but back in the day, they were occasionally funny.
DXVK indeed help with this.
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