D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan translation layer DXVK 1.8 is out now

Usually used for Wine and Steam Play Proton, the translation DXVK layer that moves Direct3D 9, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 to Vulkan has a new release available with DXVK 1.8. The first release since December 2020, while a lot of work is currently ongoing with VKD3D-Proton to do the same for Direct3D 12 to Vulkan.

Nice to see it quite alive and well though, and you're likely to see smaller updates for years to come due to thousands of games being released ever year and some end up needing tweaks.

Here's what's new in DXVK 1.8:

• Fixed some build system warnings with newer Meson versions.
• CPU-based Vulkan implementations such as Lavapipe will now always be enumerated last. This should avoid issues on systems without a dedicated GPU where games could potentially default to a CPU rasterizer.
• Optimized image layout transitions, which may improve performance on Intel GPUs in some games.
• D3D9: Improved performance of texture uploads and occlusion queries in some cases.
• D3D9: Fixed an issue where supported back buffer formats would be reported incorrectly.
• DXGI: Enabled multi-monitor support. This requires a relatively recent Wine version with XRandR 1.4 support to work correctly.
• D3D11: Fixed a number of reference counting issues that could potentially lead to stability issues (PR #1887, PR ##1888).
• D3D11: Improved correctness of NaN handling in shaders with VK_KHR_shader_float_controls, and removed most app workarounds setting d3d11.enableRtOutputNanFixup.
• Enabled d3d11.enableRtOutputNanFixup by default on older RADV versions.
• Enabled d3d11.invariantPosition option by default to fix common Z-fighting issues, especially on RDNA2 GPUs.
• Atelier Ryza 2: Added workaround for video playback breaking D3D11 rendering, like in other games of the series.
• Battle Engine Aquila: Fixed broken textures (PR #1759).
• Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Work around out-of-memory issues on startup.
• Everquest: Work around performance issues.
• F1 2018/2020: Work around broken compute shaders causing artifacts on AMD drivers, similar to F1 2019 (#1897).
• Hitman 3: Work around AMDAGS issues on AMD GPUs similar to Hitman 2 (PR #1909).
• Nioh 2: Work around black screen issues.
• Tomb Raider Legend: Work around performance issues (#1685).

As a reminder: if you're making use of Steam Play Proton which includes DXVK - you can upgrade this by itself, without waiting for a new Proton release. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.8. 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.