Wine's Direct3D Vulkan Back-End Continues Seeing An Uptick In Activity

Last month we reported on Wine's Direct3D Vulkan back-end seeing new activity as an alternative to the project's mature Direct3D-to-OpenGL path. Over the course of May work on this Vulkan back-end has edged only even higher.

Henri Verbeet and other CodeWeavers developers have been focusing more on this WineD3D Vulkan back-end in recent weeks with many improvements due out tomorrow as part of the routine bi-weekly development cycle with Wine 5.9. This is for the Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan back-end rather than OpenGL, not to be confused with VKD3D for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. Wine developers have been working on this Vulkan back-end to WineD3D for a while now due to differing views/philosophies compared to DXVK that already does a thorough job implementing D3D 9/10/11 on Vulkan.

Among the activity merged in the past two weeks includes support for creating Vulkan vertex buffers, pipeline objects, and other features like:

- Alpha to coverage multisampling

- Primitive restart

- Rasterization object support

- Blend object support

- Scissor rectangle

- Sampler descriptors and constant buffer descriptors

- SPIR-V-based fixed-function fragment/vertex pipes

The plethora of recent WineD3D Vulkan activity can be easily seen from their Git interface. Look for more of this work in Wine 5.9. While this back-end is still a work-in-progress, at the rate they have been advancing lately it looks like by Wine 6.0 early next year this Vulkan back-end could be a viable alternative to their OpenGL usage if all goes well.