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Some information on why Wine is not going to be using DXVK

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It seems things aren't all rosy between CodeWeavers and DXVK, as developer Henri Verbeet has written into the Wine Development mailing list to give more details.

The developers working on Wine seem to be going their own way with their Vulkan plans and most thought this was due to DXVK being written in C++, a different license and so on. Apparently, that's not the main issue as Verbeet notes and they didn't pull any punches:

In February 2018, we reached out to Philip Rebohle—the author of DXVK—to start a conversation around whether there were any areas we could cooperate on. One obvious area was the vkd3d shader compiler, which translates Direct3D shader byte code to SPIR-V (much like DXVK has to do), but there would have been other possibilities, like sharing the DXGI implementation, or using a scheme like vkd3d where Wine's d3d11 could have optionally loaded DXVK as a regular shared library. That e-mail went unanswered. Now, I appreciate that different people have different ideas about what's acceptable and what isn't, but personally I think that's extremely rude and uncivilised.

They continued:

Nevertheless, e-mail gets lost sometimes, sometimes people are busy, everyone gets a second chance. So a few months later, since I was organising WineConf 2018, I sent Philip a personal invitation to attend WineConf, and perhaps discuss things there. That invitation went unanswered too, at which point I was pretty much done with DXVK.

It is my understanding that since then both Jeremy White and CodeWeavers' partners at Valve have tried reaching out to Philip on the subject, but evidently with little success.

Personally, this all feels like it's getting a little too heated for me. Still, it shows that there's clearly some communication issues that need to be solved between all parties involved for the better of us all who use Wine, DXVK and so on.

Hopefully the situation can be resolved in an amicable way, calling someone out in such a way doesn't seem particularly fair though. I've picked up on emails months after they were sent before, it's very common when you're busy and working alone. I did speak to Philip Rebohle after this, who said they would rather stay out of "unnecessary drama in public".

The good news, is that they are working on an official wined3d Vulkan backend going by a codename of Damavand which will be interesting to see.

You can see the mailing list entry here.

Cheers, Phoronix.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Vulkan, Wine
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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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Nanobang Jan 26, 2019
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I'm left wondering what led up to this because the Verbeet announcement quoted in the article feels weirdly defensive---or even preemptive---in its tone. Were the Codeweaver cats catching heat for not implementing DXVK or for creating their own solution or something? Has there been hubbub about bad blood between these two camps for awhile, such that Verbeet saw a need to air their dirty laundry?

Philip Rebohle was communicative enough to respond to Liam's enquiry, and sounds like he knew about the issues ... so its not like he couldn't have cleared this up had he wanted to.

Verbeet's version of this story---that Rebohle was being "rude"---just rings hollow. What's going on here, really?
namiko Jan 26, 2019
Better to not make assumptions in a potential game of "broken telephone". Just hope that they do start to talk amicably, even if it means one or both parties have to say "I can't work with you because of x." Getting that unpleasantness over with would be a good idea because there's huge demand from the community for both projects.
Comandante Ñoñardo Jan 26, 2019
People!
Maybe WINe is not going to be using DXVK, but CROSSOVER 18 indeed allow you to install and use DXVK v0.94 with a single click, so there isn't a real problem between Codeweavers and Rebohle.
ElectricPrism Jan 26, 2019
Rule #1 to fixing problems: Communicate.

Honestly if I was CodeWeavers I would take it all the way and be loud enough and obnoxious enough, throw some tweets, discord, get phone contact, whatever -- at least get the guy to SAY outright "he prefers to work alone" or some other response even if it's BS.

Then you clearly have accomplished the goal and exhausted the possibility for telephone fuckery and butthurt from no contact from the WINEO camp.

The number of reasons the two emails got no response could have a billion answers, don't tell me that our generation lacks the persistence required, because if that's true our comfy world where we can buy cheeseburgers and have the comfort of our homes and cars will collapse like every other prosperous nation in history from complacence.

Reminds me of H3H3: "Did you try clicking 'try again', guy's clearly' they've done everything! they clicked try again"


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 26 January 2019 at 5:35 pm UTC
bolokanar Jan 26, 2019
„UNIX wars“… anyone? xD

By the way, who the f**k cares? I mean… seriously?
Let them deal with their shit.


Last edited by bolokanar on 26 January 2019 at 8:32 pm UTC
mao_dze_dun Jan 26, 2019
Maybe he just doesn't feel like it. I get offers from people trying to sell me stuff and services all the time. Am I rude for not replying? And I'm not talking about spam.
gurv Jan 26, 2019
There's simply too little information to reach any conclusion so I think we should stop discussing it ad nauseam.
Nothing good will come out of it.

Personally, I'm really happy both Wine and DXVK exist because it has really improved gaming on my favourite OS and I'm thankful to developers on both of these projects.
Sundragon Jan 27, 2019
This is pretty mysterious. I would understand entirely if Doitsujin just wanted to keep DXVK its own project, but that would be a pretty simple point to get across to the community as well as to them. I do know there has been talk -- which he's been involved in -- about adding compatibility to DXVK's DXGI implementation for VKD3D, so I know at the very least he's not against some collaboration.

While I don't want to take sides or make assumptions, tbh his decision not to say anything publicly vs the codeweaver's dev kind of whining about it sure doesn't look good on the latter.

It's definitely a shame though. DXVK is damn good and lately I actually do just replace wined3d11 with it using TKG's PKGBUILDs. I don't play anything that uses DX12 so it hardly matters. DXVK seems to perform better when compiled as a wine library in a lot of cases and the issues where it doesn't would probably be smoothed over if it was fully integrated into Wine itself...
Shmerl Jan 27, 2019
Quoting: GuestThis already happened, and was closed. I'll let the reader find it through google.

That wasn't by Wine developers though, so nothing stopped them from doing it again.
Omnibus Jan 27, 2019
DXVK has no purpose apart from Wine.

It doesn't matter if Wine uses DXVK, because DXVK is made for Wine.
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