D7VK version 1.4 brings further enhancements for older Direct3D via Vulkan

Even more improvements have arrived for D7VK that brings Direct3D 5, 6 and 7 via Vulkan for use with Wine / Proton in version 1.4.

This release brings support for colour key transparency, which the developer explained as a "cheaper alternative to alpha testing which was somewhat common in early D3D". This will fix up various games having opaque colour artifacting in the likes of Arx Fatalis, Messiah, Darkstone, Divine Divinity, Mortal Kombat 4 and many others.

Pictured - N.I.C.E 2

The full changelog:

• Thanks to the efforts of @CkNoSFeRaTU, we now (finally) have support for color key transparency, which gets rid of opaque color artifacting in a lot of games, such as: Arx Fatalis, Messiah, Darkstone, Divine Divinity, Mortal Kombat 4 and many others.
• A lot of work has gone into consolidating legacy DDraw interoperability with all the supported D3D versions, which means Plants vs Zombies and possibly other PopCap Games titles of the time are now playable.
• Also thanks to @CkNoSFeRaTU, a bug related to DDraw instancing via IClassFactory has been fixed, and as a result Re-Volt and Sea Dogs are now playable.
• Thanks to some intriguing hints from @Trass3r, support has been added for DDraw initiated depth clears, which has fixed rendering in Star Wars Episode I: Racer.
• Preliminary support for depth write-back has been added, as of now only supporting D16, which has fixed light source occlusion, or rather the lack thereof, in Star Wars Episode I: Racer.
• Fixed a bug which caused a crash on startup in V-Rally 2 Expert Edition.
• Fixed various corner cases which caused hangs and crashes in older D3D and DDraw titles (the latter of which simply loaded our dll and crashed), e.g. Revenant, Powerslide, Slave Zero etc.
• Worked around a potential crash in GTA 2 on returning to the main menu.

Source: GitHub