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With the news earlier about D9VK being merged into DXVK, to make DXVK the all-in-one solution for D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan - we now have a fresh release of DXVK with it all together.

Today, DXVK 1.5 is out and the big headline feature there then is D3D9 support included! D9VK did actually have a standalone release just before all this happened with D9VK 0.40/0.40.1 and this DXVK release includes a few extra fixes too.

What does all that above mean? Simply put: DXVK will now run games that use D3D9, 10 and 11 and turn it into Vulkan when paired with Wine/Proton as of DXVK 1.5.

In this release the HUD you can enable gained an improved overall appearance, it can also now show the amount of memory allocated per Vulkan memory heap "which allows distinguishing between video memory and system memory allocations" and draw call and queue submission statistics are now updated every 0.5 seconds to make them more readable.

A few game-specific fixes made it in for Atelier Ryza, Crysis 3 (all GPUs now reported as NVIDIA), Halo MCC and Star Citizen.

See the full release notes here.

On the subject of DXVK possibly going into "maintenance mode", something a few others picked up on due to a comment on the DXVK GitHub. I spoke today to DXVK creator, Philip Rebohle, who said this to me:

Basically, not too much will change, bugs will still get fixed and if a game requires a feature to run, it'll get implemented. DXVK has been more or less feature-complete for a while now, and most of the changes in the 1.4.x releases were bug fixes and some optimizations anyway. What I want to avoid going forward is large-scale changes to the code base since those are prone to introduce breakage, and it's really getting harder and harder to debug any new issues.

So, nothing really changes. It continues on getting additions and fixes where it's needed.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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28 comments
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somebody1121 Dec 16, 2019
What i find interesting is the Crysis 3 bug fix, anyone knows if the game uses AMD ags, or it's just the "regular" dx11 path it's just that bad?
YoRHa-2B Dec 16, 2019
Quoting: somebody1121What i find interesting is the Crysis 3 bug fix, anyone knows if the game uses AMD ags
I don't think it does in any meaningful way, it's just that for some bizarre reason, the game takes a different code path that is significantly slower than the Nvidia path in terms of CPU performance.

And it's really bad. We're talking about going from ~23 FPS to ~30 FPS in some scenes, and that is on a Ryzen 2700X (which admittedly isn't very good for gaming, but not all that bad either).


Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 16 December 2019 at 2:47 pm UTC
edo Dec 16, 2019
Basically what he wants is to have a better tool to debug issues
KuJo Dec 16, 2019
QuoteOn the subject of DXVK possibly going into "maintenance mode", something a few others picked up on due to a comment on the DXVK GitHub.
I think the more interesting comment at GitHub that caused the fuss is this one:
QuoteIt's because DXVK has become a fragile, unreliable and frustrating maintenance nightmare. Most of the 1.4.x releases introduced major regressions which I cannot reproduce, and therefore cannot debug and fix.

This includes GPU hangs in Overwatch on specific maps with Nvidia GPUs (some users claim it's fixed in 1.4.6 while others still have them), rendering issues in Dishonored 2 which I can't reproduce (see ValveSoftware/Proton#823 (comment)), vertex explosions in some games which I also can't reproduce, an ongoing Star Citizen issue which I still need to debug (see #1262), and tons of weird issues that don't make any sense whatsoever (like #1266 which only seems to affect RADV).

Most of these problems are still unresolved and I have no idea how to even track them down, let alone fix them, and the ones that got "fixed" got fixed by reverting otherwise useful changes because I simply do not understand any of the issues at all.

Doing any sort of active development with this broken mess of a code base would only make this worse, and I wish I had drawn the line sooner. The only thing I still plan to do is wire up some useful Vulkan extensions and eventually merge D9VK, the rest will be bug fixing only.

This comment expresses a certain degree of frustration. And that there are problems that are no longer solved. Also the statement that the line should have been drawn before doesn't sound as if there will be special fixes for single games in the future. Either a game runs with the status of DXVK or it just doesn't work:

QuoteThe only thing I still plan to do is wire up some useful Vulkan extensions and eventually merge D9VK, the rest will be bug fixing only.

This is a significant change in development.

But don't get me wrong! I can understand him (I am a developer myself (SAP ABAP) and know what he is talking about) and understand his decision. And I am endlessly grateful to him for making it possible for me to play almost like a Windows gamer under Linux. But we should be aware of that.

DXVK will not disappear and will continue to make sure that many Windows games will run with good performance under Linux. But if this doesn't work with some games, there won't be any special adaptations or fixes anymore.

At least if this comment is still valid on GitHub from December 10th. His statements he made to GOL now actually sound a little different.


Last edited by KuJo on 16 December 2019 at 3:38 pm UTC
edo Dec 16, 2019
Quoting: PatolaDoes it being in maintenance mode means there will be no D3D12 support?
dx12 to vulkan is already been worked on by wine devs, and already part of proton
KuJo Dec 16, 2019
Quoting: PatolaDoes it being in maintenance mode means there will be no D3D12 support?
D3D12 support will not come via DXVK. This will come via VKD3D of the Wine project.

Unfortunately the development of VKD3D has stalled due to the death of Jozef Kucia as main developer:
-> https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/jzef-kucia-wine-developer-and-founder-of-vkd3d-has-passed-away.14973

But Philip Rebohle has announced that he wants to contribute to VKD3D. At least that was his statement in November this year:
-> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DXVK-Philip-More-For-VKD3D
EagleDelta Dec 16, 2019
Quoting: PatolaDoes it being in maintenance mode means there will be no D3D12 support?

There is a separate project for D3D12 to Vulkan support and, unlike D9VK which was a fork of DXVK anyway, it's a wholly separate codebase.
YoRHa-2B Dec 16, 2019
Quoting: KuJoAt least if this comment is still valid on GitHub from December 10th. His statements he made to GOL now actually sound a little different.
I think people are just blowing what I said on Github (admittedly in frustration) WAY out of proportion.

Liam asked me to give the statement quoted in the article above today, just refer to that (and everyone, please stop annoying him via email about the whole thing).


Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 16 December 2019 at 4:36 pm UTC
Comandante Ñoñardo Dec 16, 2019
Ok. Do I still need to put PROTON_USE_D9VK=1?
iiari Dec 16, 2019
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Quoting: YoRHa-2BI think people are just blowing what I said on Github (admittedly in frustration) WAY out of proportion...
People blowing things out of proportion? On the Internet?? :D

Whatever phase of development you and your creation are in, thank you so much for DXVK, which brought gaming on Linux to a place many of us never imagined as being possible, and always let us know if you open a Patreon or something similar to assist your work .


Last edited by iiari on 16 December 2019 at 5:49 pm UTC
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