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For those of you with a graphics card capable of Ray Tracing who use the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer we have some good news coming for you. While it's still clearly an early work in progress, work towards getting Ray Tracing working in VKD3D-Proton is well underway (VKD3D-Proton is the Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan that's used with Proton).

Developer Hans-Kristian posted on Twitter about "Ray-tracing support in vkd3d-proton is finally starting to come together. Starting with some meme reflections." and shared two pictures showing the reflections working in Control but the performance drop is huge but it will hopefully be improved over time.

For those interested, Control is available in the current Humble Choice.

To go along with that, there's also the Draft proposal up on the official VKD3D-Proton GitHub titled "Enable RT tier 1.0" for those who do wish to jump in at the deep end and follow it along.

On top of that another update to Proton Experimental went out with an additional controller fix for Slay the Spire. That's on top of all the additional extras in this special Proton build where all the latest stuff goes in like support for the futex2 patches, Wine architectural work to reduce CPU overhead, improved video support and so on.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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14 comments

mahagr Mar 12, 2021
Does this mean that I need to get this months Humble Choice?

Oh, crap, I also need RTX capable GPU!
Brisse Mar 12, 2021
Control was a pretty cool game I have to admit. Finished it along with the DLC's a couple of days ago.
rustybroomhandle Mar 12, 2021
Remember, for now you have to actually set VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr for it to work.
fabry92 Mar 12, 2021
we only miss dlss now right?
SirBubbles Mar 12, 2021
Remember, for now you have to actually set VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr for it to work.
I would love to know how exactly one grabs this version of Proton. Otherwise, how long does one think the wait might be?
rustybroomhandle Mar 12, 2021
Remember, for now you have to actually set VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr for it to work.
I would love to know how exactly one grabs this version of Proton. Otherwise, how long does one think the wait might be?

You don't need a whole new Proton, just an updated vkd3d-proton, which you can get from https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton and following the instructions on how to compile it.

I have also found that the install script does not seem to work right, so I have just been copying the dx12.dll to the place where the game exe lives.

If you want to wait. I don't think it'll be too long before this makes its way into Proton Experimental even though the implementation is very bare bones. So far I have only gotten it to work with Control.
CatKiller Mar 12, 2021
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we only miss dlss now right?

Depending on how you count it, we either already have it, or we're never going to get it.

It's been included with Nvidia's driver for ages, so Linux-native games on Nvidia hardware can use it, no problem. Except we don't get many Linux-native games that are so desperate for the performance and the pretties that they'll use it, and it's hard to justify spending much dev time on something that can only be used by a subset of ~half of a tiny market. Maybe Metro Exodus will use it?

The far bigger market is Windows games running through Wine, and that's not going to happen. Nvidia could put it into Wine, since they can control which parts they disclose, but the Wine devs can't sign an NDA and then put out open source software based on what they learn even if they wanted to.
Shmerl Mar 12, 2021
DLSS is DOA being Nvidia only. AMD are working on cross GPU solution that will work everywhere. Once that is ready may be Wine can pick it up.

I think it's this: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/vsr


Last edited by Shmerl on 12 March 2021 at 5:27 pm UTC
dpanter Mar 12, 2021
RT support for Big Navi in Linux, any day now!
Shmerl Mar 12, 2021
RT support for Big Navi in Linux, any day now!

I think this has to close first: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/3709


Last edited by Shmerl on 12 March 2021 at 5:44 pm UTC
CatKiller Mar 12, 2021
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DLSS is DOA being Nvidia only. AMD are working on cross GPU solution that will work everywhere. Once that is ready may be Wine can pick it up.

I think it's this: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/vsr

I think you're right that AMD are working on some kind of upscaling thing, but that isn't it. That's rendering at higher resolutions and then scaling down - "get the clarity of 1080p and the framerate of 4K!" - rather than the other way round, which is what people want.
Shmerl Mar 12, 2021
I think you're right that AMD are working on some kind of upscaling thing, but that isn't it. That's rendering at higher resolutions and then scaling down - "get the clarity of 1080p and the framerate of 4K!" - rather than the other way round, which is what people want.

May it's using the same thing for a specific case ("virtual"). But what AMD call "super resolution" is the upscaling idea.

https://wccftech.com/amd-fidelityfx-super-resolution-launching-in-spring-to-tackle-nvidia-dlss/
Shmerl Mar 12, 2021
i really don't understand the excitement over dlss. yeah, it tries to be intelligent about how it reduces quality, but it still reduces quality.

I don't think it's something to be exited about either. If anything, Nvidia introduced this idea to have a longer time of arketed exclusive "hot features", because they lost the advantage of actually having better hardware already.


Last edited by Shmerl on 12 March 2021 at 9:40 pm UTC
Linuxwarper Mar 12, 2021
DLSS is DOA being Nvidia only. AMD are working on cross GPU solution that will work everywhere. Once that is ready may be Wine can pick it up.

I think it's this: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/vsr
I don't think so. VSR is for lack of better description AMD's primitive resolution upscaling feature. This was a feature equivalent to Nvidia's Dynamic Super Resolution. I know this because prior to switching to Linux, in 2016, I tried out VSR.

The upscaling AI like AMD is working on will be part of Fidelity FX. And there is no reason to believe Linux will be supported the first year this feature is made available as DirectML is the sole AI implementation. The crossplatform option, whatever it is, will likely come later. I think Sony like always will go for their own implementation.
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