In late December last year, the developer of the VK9 project emailed us about hitting another milestone with their project to get Direct3D 9 applications to run with Vulkan.
The 23rd milestone required "the implementation of basic shader support":
It does this by taking the older Direct X "DXBC" bytecode and converts it to SPIR-V, the cross-API standard from Khronos Group which Vulkan uses.
An interesting project for sure, will be fun to see what happens with it and if anyone actually makes use of it in future. You can see the full blog post here, the GitHub page is here.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
Quoting: TheRiddickI can imagine it being great for NVIDIA users but RADV users have some issues with Vulkan performance under Linux, so until that happens the inbuilt Wine D3D9 methods are likely to be better for AMD users for a while.
I'm developing DXVK on RADV, and even though it tends to be slower than radeonsi in GPU-limited scenarios, it's quite reliable and has much lower CPU overhead than AMD's Windows driver, and CPU overhead is basically what needs to be minimized. Nier is quite a bit faster on Vulkan than on wined3d already (see https://imgur.com/a/Byrph ), although it still isn't playable due to frequent crashes and GPU lockups.
Both projects may eventually implement something like CSMT as well in order to further improve performance. As others have mentioned, binding pipelines and updating descriptor sets etc. can be quite expensive.
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