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You have a fancy game using Direct3D 11 and you want to port it to Linux? In future, DXVK may be able to help with that.

Currently, DXVK translates D3D11 and D3D10 into Vulkan when used with Wine. However, Joshua Ashton who developed D9VK which is the offshoot of DXVK to do the same for D3D9 put out word on Twitter that they've begun working on "a way to use DXVK on your native platform! (ie. D3D11 on Linux! :D)".

We don't usually comment on unfinished code (a lot can change), but since Ashton announced it and it does sound quite exciting we decided to share. Some work to help towards this has already made it into DXVK too.

Giving developers any easy way to get Vulkan on Linux, without doing an entirely new renderer themselves could be a pretty big boost. Ashton said it currently supports SDL Windows and all of D3D11 apart from "GDI interop". Developers should be able to just set SDL to use Vulkan, no need of Wine and it "should work".

Something to certainly keep an eye on. You can see the work in progress DXVK code they linked to here.

Hat tip yokem55.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Game Dev, Vulkan
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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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14 comments
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crt0mega Nov 15, 2019
This reminds me of that old d3d11 state tracker for gallium3d
rustybroomhandle Nov 15, 2019
My brain hurts.
Sir_Diealot Nov 15, 2019
So if you have a Windows game that uses DX11 but nothing else Windows you can compile it against that (once it's done). I guess this is way less useful than it at first sounds.
pb 10 years Nov 15, 2019
But isn't various middleware what causes the most problems?
YoRHa-2B Nov 15, 2019
Quoting: Sir_DiealotI guess this is way less useful than it at first sounds.
I've received several mails in the past from people who had been interested in this since porting a renderer to a different API is significantly more work than e.g. porting input handling, so there's some merit to that.

Of course the core issues won't go away, namely that DXGI is built around win32 APIs which makes the SDL integration a massive hack.
lqe5433 Nov 15, 2019
This is Perfect!! I hope also Big Game Devs will use it to port GTA V, Heroes VI to Linux :)

M$ is not open-sourcing Dx11, or DX12 so we need to translate them to Vulkan.
This is something that Rocket League is using on Linux but with OpenGL.

This is even better than Proton, Wine etc.
drmoth Nov 15, 2019
Very interesting! Is there likely to be a performance hit due to the DX11->Vulkan translation or is it going to be more native performance?
Ardje Nov 15, 2019
Might be a good idea, since on proton, a vulkan native renderer can be a slideshow, while DX11 with DXVK is fast.
Jarno Nov 15, 2019
Btw, has Feral said anything about sharing their DX12 -> Vulkan translation layer?
Goldpaw Nov 15, 2019
Anything that brings more gaming that works to linux is a good thing.
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