NVIDIA sneakily put out a little open source release recently, with a part of the NVAPI SDK now under the MIT license.
This was mentioned by the crew working on the DXVK translation layer in the VKx Discord, who sent along word to me as well. NVAPI is NVIDIA's core software development kit that allows direct access to NVIDIA GPUs and drivers on all Windows platforms.
Now, that doesn't sound interesting for Linux obviously but here's why this actually is important: in the NVAPI Open Source SDK, it directly mentions that the contained "nvapi.h" file that's now provided under the MIT license was done to enable "open source re-implementations of NVAPI for Windows emulation environments"—so the Wine and Proton compatibility layers are what they're getting at without naming them directly.
What's the issue with it then, why did this need to be done? Well, DXVK at times has to work around the NVAPI and it ends up spoofing an AMD GPU for some titles to do this, otherwise they just don't work on Linux with Wine / Proton. Speaking briefly to Philip Rebohle, creator of DXVK, they mentioned to me that there's going to be things that aren't possible to implement but it does now give them something to work with.
It's just another small piece of a much larger puzzle of getting Windows games running on Linux.
You can find the download here if interested. More info on the NVAPI here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
redneckdrow Jul 10, 2020
Good Lord, I hate recursive acronyms, don't you? But in the strictest sense, WINE is more of a compatibility layer; the difference between the two for an end-user is mostly splitting cat hairs.
Quoting: GuestEverytime you think they will never properly support anything open source they do.
Mostly when they don't care. When they do, good luck waiting for them to open anything.
TheRiddick Jul 11, 2020
Last edited by TheRiddick on 11 July 2020 at 4:12 am UTC
Quoting: GuestQuoting: GuestNVidia still suprises me from time to time o.O
Everytime you think they will never properly support anything open source they do.
Once PhysX was open sourced, their contribution to the Vulkan Ray tracing extensions and now NVAPI o.O What next their entire driver or at least proper support for Nouveau? :D
Strictly speaking they haven't open sourced NVAPI, but instead the interfaces so that NVAPI can be re-implemented within wine. I mean it's still nice, but it really is the bare minimum.
Well, this is more or less the same that AMD is doing for AMD AGS. The AGS SDK contains the headers and libraries to link against, see https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/AGS_SDK
So yeah, it is not making NVAPI Open Source, but still the standard way how these kind of SDK's are offered imho.
Having the headers officially available makes it much easier to provide "alternative" implementation. For AMD AGS there is already https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk-ags which maps the interesting AGS methods to DXVK.
I've tried a bit in the past to apply this to NVAPI and succeeded for one method. Having the headers now makes part of it much less of a Google try-and-error approach. For the curious: https://github.com/jp7677/dxvk-nvapi
Note that I do have a programming background, but not in C or C++. I'm also barely familiar with the graphics domain. I know how to spell "shader" and have a rough picture how to position the different 3D API's, but that's it ;). This repository is really just intelligent copy/paste from DXVK-AGS and several other sources, so all credits should mostly go there. It's also quite a hassle to set this up for minimal gain.
Last edited by jens on 11 July 2020 at 1:42 pm UTC
appetrosyan Jul 11, 2020
Spoiler, click me
Quoting: DMJCSure this isn't aimed more at getting NVIDIA GPU emulation working in Virtual machines such as Qemu/KVM/VMWare? VMWare uses WINE's DirectX implementation to support DirectX.No, I spoke to a few people to confirm before publishing. Including NVIDIA.
aufkrawall Jul 12, 2020
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