D7VK 1.9 brings 2D upgrades for classic Direct3D games on Linux

D7VK has done a lot of work on getting retro 3D games to run well on Linux with older Direct3D versions, now classic 2D games have seen some love.

With release 1.9 out now there's a lot to like about this release. Not just performance improvements but ensuring things are rendered correctly too. In some cases there will also be lower GPU usage, a lower overall memory footprint and better frametime consistency in 2D heavy scenarios.

From the announcement: "It's no big secret that 2D heavy D3D games haven't really been the strong suit of D7VK, to put it mildly... until now. This release marks a major milestone in our support for 2D/3D interoperability. Taking a lesson from the legacy presentation path we've added in v1.8, we've since implemented a system of delayed image uploads and dirty tracking, which postpones any image copies until the last possible moment (in the JIT ethos). This has had a dramatic impact on performance in games which make heavy use of 2D elements and image composition."

Pictured - Anno 1503

Other noted fixes and additions include:

• Implemented full surface dirty tracking, both for DDraw and D3D9 surfaces, with a dramatic impact on performance and the correctness of image composition. This has fixed numerous bugs relating to missing 2D and 3D content, closing over 30 pending issues on our tracker.
• Unified D3D9 objects between object interfaces in order to reduce the overall memory footprint and fix corner case multi-versioned interface use, which has fixed rendering in Dungeon Keeper 2.
• Slightly improved indexed draw performance by tweaking D3D9 index buffer sizes.
• Thanks to @CkNoSFeRaTU we've drastically improved color key transparency precision, especially on Nvidia GPUs.
• Also thanks to @CkNoSFeRaTU, we've fixed clipping related missing geometry and shadows in various games, such as RIM: Battle Planets and Revenant.
• Fixed a color key value overrun issue which was causing white text backgrounds in various Combat Mission series games (discovered by @CkNoSFeRaTU).
• Fixed missing loading screen backgrounds in Gothic 1 / 2.
• Added a workaround for concurrent device use in scene drawing, fixing rendering in The Settlers IV.
• Fixed missing pause screen menu in Metal Gear Solid Integral.
• Fixed a black screen issue with the PlayOnline Viewer (Final Fantasy 11 launcher).
• Added a compatible device name config option, needed to enable hardware acceleration in Dungeon Keeper 2.