DXVK 1.9.2 goes out with improvements to CPU overhead for D3D9

DXVK, one of the major parts of Steam Play Proton that translates Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan has a new release out and there's plenty of nice fixes.

Performance has been a focus recently and this release improves on that for Direct 3D 9, thanks to a reduction in overall CPU overhead (something that will be useful for the Steam Deck). Improvements continued there for D3D9 thanks to fixes to various failures in Wine's D3D9 tests, various issues fix for "d3d9.evictManagedTexturesOnUnlock" and also for "d3d11.relaxedBarriers".

On top of that various games saw specific fixes, here's the list:

• Call of Cthulhu: Fixed reflection rendering (#2248)
• Crysis 3, Homefront The Revolution: Worked around poor performance (#2256) (#2241)
• GODS: Fixed gamma curve (#2250)
• Total War Medieval 2: Fixed black lines on the world map (#2258) and settings text (#2247)
  The game still crashes when loading battles due to running out of address space.
• Fantasy Grounds: Fix incorrect rendering (#2251)
• Need For Speed Heat: Fixed ground textures rendering incorrectly (#1764).
• Paranormal Files: Fix black screen (#2192)
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Rightous: Fixed GPU hang in loading screen. Note that the game itself has further issues loading certain parts of the game, which do not appear to be related to wine or DXVK in any way.
• Payday: Fix flickering reflections (#2259)
• Shin Megami Tensei 3: Fixed hang when entering save room (#2161)
• Sine Mora EX: Added 60 FPS lock (#2261)

See more on GitHub.

As a reminder: you can upgrade the version of DXVK used in Proton, without waiting on a new release. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.9.2. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, one way to ensure it gets reinstalled cleanly is just to remove the "/dist" folder.