Gallium3D's Direct3D 9 Support Is Coming Along Well

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2015 there was a status update concerning Gallium3D Nine, the Direct3D 9 state tracker that runs Windows games in conjunction with Wine.

Axel Davy, one of the open-source developers working a lot recently on the Gallium3D "Nine" state tracker, presented at FOSDEM last weekend about the work that's been going on for this state tracker for converting D3D9 commands into hardware commands. As has been reported for months on Phoronix, it offers great performance and can out compete a stock Wine build using its Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. Mesa 10.4 merged the D3D9 state tracker but Wine developers have yet to accept the Gallium3D Nine patches upstream given they only benefit the open-source Radeon/Nouveau Gallium3D drivers on Linux and present yet another code-path the developers have to verify and test.

While this state tracker is most generally used with Wine, it could also be used outside of Wine with any applications/games implementing D3D9 directly on Linux.

Axel's presentation concludes that when the state tracker works that it's usually faster than stock Wine. Besides the FPS improvements, the CPU usage is generally lower. Right now PlayOnLinux does have Gallium3D NIne support and hopefully in the not too distant future will be support within the Wine-Staging code.

More details on the current state of Gallium3D Nine can be found via Axel's Gallium3D Nine FOSDEM 2015 presentation.