While the Proton compatibility layer already has DXVK for translating DirectX 9/10/11 into Vulkan, VKD3D-Proton has become the official version for translating Direct3D 12 on top of Vulkan.
Are you confused what Proton is? See our dedicated Steam Play page for info.
VKD3D was originally a project created directly by the Wine team, the compatibility layer that Proton is built upon. However, the original founder passed away and it seems Valve-funded developers are taking the torch to push it much further. It's actually been a thing for a while but today they adjusted the name of their project as VKD3D-Proton, to give it some official status plus preventing any naming conflicts elsewhere and just be clear about their goals.
They're going for supporting the "full" Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan, with an aim of both performance and compatibility using modern Vulkan extensions and features, so this comes at the expense of compatibility with older drivers and GPUs. They're also not looking to keep backwards compatibility with the original vkd3d.
Recently, the project also merged in code to allow for a standalone D3D12 build. Like with DXVK, we might even see gamers on Windows using it in future. Yes, that's actually a thing and there's many more like it as it can boost performance on Windows too for older games.
See all the details on the updated VKD3D-Proton page on GitHub.
With the recent news that the massive Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be DirectX 12 only, perhaps VKD3D-Proton can get into a state before release where it might run it well on Linux, since CD Projekt aren't likely to bring it to Linux officially.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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if the marketshare keeps going up we may see alot of ports.it has been a very interesting year so far.the marketshare is the biggest its been ever.its currently sitting at over 3% almost hitting 4%.
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aufkrawall Jul 6, 2020
Can anybody tell whether it will be possible to completely avoid any additional shader compile stutter vs. native D3D12?
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They're also not looking to keep backwards compatibility with the original vkd3d.Need more forks...
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Wow, I had missed the original piece of news. This was a saddening moment, but that person has my respects. Kudos on Valve for picking the baton up :)
Can anybody tell whether it will be possible to completely avoid any additional shader compile stutter vs. native D3D12?IIRC (I might be wrong on this one) Windows game ship with precompiled shaders for common GPUs, so we're quite far from this. Fossilize and Steam's distributed shader cache should help a whole lot (also on windows if/when it's there)
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Can anybody tell whether it will be possible to completely avoid any additional shader compile stutter vs. native D3D12?Yes, if the game isn't completely broken. A Vulkan extension to allow that came out recently, we're still waiting for proper driver support though.
18 Likes, Who?
Great news!It will be very interesting in the future to see will the dog(Windows 10) wag his tail(Linux) or the other way around so to speak.I believe that the latter option(Linux) prevails
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aufkrawall Jul 6, 2020
Thanks for letting us know, these are terrific news.Can anybody tell whether it will be possible to completely avoid any additional shader compile stutter vs. native D3D12?Yes, if the game isn't completely broken. A Vulkan extension to allow that came out recently, we're still waiting for proper driver support though.
I guess for <= D3D11 this will remain impossible?
I was keen about Gallium Nine due to this, though its CPU bound performance can't cope with DXVK.
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I knew the dxvk guys were working on vkd3d, I didn't realise it was a fork of the original wine project. Interesting.
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if the marketshare keeps going up we may see alot of ports.it has been a very interesting year so far.the marketshare is the biggest its been ever.its currently sitting at over 3% almost hitting 4%.If? I am very confident marketshare will go up. More pressing questions will be how fast and what are the threats to this growth. One way to stifle Linux adoption would be introducing a tech that will be either impossible to make work through WINE or very difficult (DXR). In other words baking more proprietary software into games to hinder them from running.
Below is a graph that displays suscribers to /r/Linux_Gaming. Notice how ever since 2018 (Proton announcement) there has been a sharp uptick?
I would guess 2016-2017 is Steam machine hype dying totally down.
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So does it also compile into DLL like dxvk? Also, was it forked due to original project stalling or due to relying on cutting edge Vulkan features that original vkd3d might try to avoid?
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 July 2020 at 10:05 pm UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 July 2020 at 10:05 pm UTC
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so steam comes with 2 proton version now?
one for old drivers and one for latest?
one for old drivers and one for latest?
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...That's a very interesting plot, I would be very curious to see how this data compares percentage-wise to some of the major gaming subreddits. Any chance you would enlighten us?
Below is a graph that displays suscribers to /r/Linux_Gaming. Notice how ever since 2018 (Proton announcement) there has been a sharp uptick?
...
Last edited by compholio on 6 July 2020 at 10:26 pm UTC
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That's a very interesting plot, I would be very curious to see how this data compares percentage-wise to some of the major gaming subreddits. Any chance you would enlighten us?I downloaded the graph from https://subredditstats.com.
This is how it compares to /r/pcgaming/ (blue). The only thing I can derive from it is that interest for gaming on Linux is growing. If people didn't care about gaming on Linux surely the graph for /r/linux_gaming/ would have been more flat than it is. T growing interest for should translate to some if not many switching.
Last edited by Linuxwarper on 6 July 2020 at 10:33 pm UTC
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...!100*linux_gaming/(pcgaming + linux_gaming)
This is how it compares to /r/pcgaming/ (blue). The only thing I can derive from it is that interest for gaming on Linux is growing.
...
It definitely looks like we leveled off our decline, and maybe even have a bit of an uptick (percentage-wise) now. Note that the more recent data has that fuzz because there's a bunch of missing data there for /r/pcgaming/ (not sure why that's the case, but I'm not going to go to the trouble to try and clean it).
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TheRiddick Jul 7, 2020
Hopefully RTX features can somehow be supported under DX12 also. That be nice.
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So it looks to me like, contrary to many claims about the death of PC gaming, what those graphs show is massive growth in gaming on general purpose desktop/laptop computers, with Linux growth within that initially strong but slower than the whole PC gaming platform, and more recently holding its own.
Of course all that is just within the context of "people who use Reddit" which is big and broad but not a proper sample of the planet.
I'm not sure how this all relates to the apparent growth in the general Linux desktop. I don't think the PC desktop overall has been growing that fast, while gaming on PCs has. So let's imagine for example that the proportion of PCs used for gaming doubled from 30% to 60%, while the percentage of those that are Linux desktops held steady at 1%--that would mean the percentage of total PC desktops that were Linux gaming desktops would only go from 0.3% to 0.6%, not a huge difference. And that's over years. The recent apparent couple-of-percentage-points boost in desktop Linux use generally dwarfs that in a much shorter time, but doesn't yet seem to have dragged a whole lot of new Linux gaming with it.
All in all, the stats lately are weird.
Of course all that is just within the context of "people who use Reddit" which is big and broad but not a proper sample of the planet.
I'm not sure how this all relates to the apparent growth in the general Linux desktop. I don't think the PC desktop overall has been growing that fast, while gaming on PCs has. So let's imagine for example that the proportion of PCs used for gaming doubled from 30% to 60%, while the percentage of those that are Linux desktops held steady at 1%--that would mean the percentage of total PC desktops that were Linux gaming desktops would only go from 0.3% to 0.6%, not a huge difference. And that's over years. The recent apparent couple-of-percentage-points boost in desktop Linux use generally dwarfs that in a much shorter time, but doesn't yet seem to have dragged a whole lot of new Linux gaming with it.
All in all, the stats lately are weird.
2 Likes, Who?
Doubled number of users is significant. Percentages don't matter. Absolute numbers do, that's what brings money.
4 Likes, Who?
So it looks to me like, contrary to many claims about the death of PC gaming, what those graphs show is massive growth in gaming on general purpose desktop/laptop computers, with Linux growth within that initially strong but slower than the whole PC gaming platform, and more recently holding its own.....Great post. I didn't quote everything, but you make some important points.
All in all, the stats lately are weird.
I'm now old enough to have heard the death of desktop gaming pronounced for a few decades, and always wrong. I just heard last week a well known "tech analyst" (cough, cough) declare that, this time, desktop gaming's days were really numbered because... ready for this? Because of Apple now developing its own silicon and, with it, Apple is going to slay the mobile gaming market. Because those mobile games will run across the Apple mobile, tablet, and desktop ecosystem, that will translate into Apple gaming dominance wrestled away from MS because, this time, Apple is serious about gaming. Really!!! I almost rolled my eyes out of my head. Give me an f-ing break... Hahahahaha....
Again, as I say on all such posts, I think we're in a huge moment of transition in gaming and I still believe that, fast forward 20 or so years, a lot (not all) of mainstream gaming will be cloud based and there will be a dwindling list of AAA titles to d/l to metal that will cost ever more money to support their development to a dwindling on-metal market. Google wants Chromebooks to be able to game through Stadia or Steam. Nvidia wants cloud gaming. MS seems to realize that a cloud based X-Box service is their gaming future. Does DX12 have any role in such a service?
Linux will be fine as long as:
- All these cloud based options run on Linux
- As long as Linux becomes the defacto easy option to play the last 50+ years (by 2040) of computing's past gaming...
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Apple being serious about gaming? What kind of koolaid is he drinking? Apple let OpenGL support rot, refused to support Vulkan, dropped 32-bit, then decided to change hardware architecture. If some early steps in this list didn't kill gaming for Apple users, the later ones for sure did. Serious gamers left Apple already a long time ago. These last developments were killing a dead horse. Apple was and is run by mobile eggheads who don't care about gaming.
Last edited by Shmerl on 7 July 2020 at 2:44 am UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 7 July 2020 at 2:44 am UTC
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MS seems to realize that a cloud based X-Box service is their gaming future. Does DX12 have any role in such a service?
Luckily MS decided to abandon their cloud gaming. So one more DX lock-in bites the dust.
Last edited by Shmerl on 7 July 2020 at 2:46 am UTC
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