DXVK 2.0 Released With Many Improvements For Direct3D Over Vulkan

DXVK 2.0 is out as a major update to this Direct3D on Vulkan implementation used by Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying D3D9 to D3D11 Windows games on Linux with great speed.

With DXVK 2.0 there is now a requirement on the underlying Vulkan driver supporting Vulkan API v1.3. Vulkan 1.3 is now a firm requirement so better assumptions can be made by DXVK about the underlying capabilities and efficiently mapping Direct3D atop this industry standard API.

DXVK 2.0 brings a number of Direct3D 9 changes including improved memory management, support for D3D11 Feature Level 12_1 with various new features now wired up, support for new D3D11 feature queries, shader compilation improvements by making use of EXT_graphics_pipeline_library for compiling shaders at game load time, state cache improvements, and other enhancements.

DXVK 2.0 also has fixes/improvements helping out Dragon Age Origins, Empire: Total War, Final Fantasy XV, Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Sonic Generations, Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions, The Ship, Warhammer Online, and numerous other games.

DXVK 2.0 also marks the point that DXVK-Native has been upstreamed into the DXVK project itself as a drop-in replacement for porting D3D app code over to Linux.

DXVK 2.0 is a big update for this important piece of the puzzle to the Linux gaming stack. DXVK 2.0 sources are available for download from GitHub while should also be pulled into a new Proton update soon for being easily available on Steam and with the Steam Deck.