VK9: Still Pursuing Direct3D 9 Over Vulkan

VK9 is the project formerly known as SchaeferGL as an open-source project implementing Direct3D 9 over Vulkan.

It's been a few months since originally writing about this open-source project and fortunately pleased this week to see its development continuing, albeit now under the name VK9. The developer, Christopher Schaefer, recently passed his "third milestone" with getting to the point where the geometry is correctly being passed to the render pipeline, texture loading is beginning to work, etc.

Via his blog he shared this screenshot a few days ago of a Direct3D 9 sample being rendered over Vulkan:

Back at the end of August he also made this video about VK9 that I only noticed now:

Once it's further along, it would be interesting to see how well VK9 works under Linux and if it can be tied into Wine... Another alternative to Wine's D3D9 to OpenGL translation layer, similar to the Gallium3D Nine state tracker. It would be interesting to see how this Vulkan-based implementation compares.

Those wishing to learn more can visit the VK9 Git repository for this still in-development project.

It was also pointed out to me there's a bit of an inverse project happening too: a Vulkan API for Direct3D 12. That's basically layering a Vulkan implementation over Direct3D 12 for environments where there may be a D3D12 driver but not a Vulkan driver. This is just another interesting project among dozens (or hundreds?) of the technically interesting, original, open-source, community-driven Vulkan projects over the past few months.