VKD3D-Proton 2.10 Released With More Performance Improvements, Game/Driver Workarounds

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's stellar Linux graphics/Proton team has released VKD3D-Proton 2.10 as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop Vulkan that allows for modern Windows games to run on Linux atop Steam Play.

VKD3D-Proton 2.10 adds support for using NVIDIA's NV_memory_decompression extension to implement Microsoft DirectStorage GPU-accelerated GDeflate compression support. There is also a fallback shader-based implementation that works for the Radeon RADV driver.

VKD3D-Proton 2.10 also supports using NV_device_generated_commands_compute to make for more efficient GPU compute with the DGC extension. Today's VKD3D-Proton 2.10 update also has Shader Model 6.7 support, support for various new Vulkan extensions, batch acceleration structure builds, and other performance work.

As with most VKD3D-Proton releases, there is also a number of bug fixes and game specific workarounds. Among the fixes this round are for Age of Wonders 4, Halo Infinite, Street Fighter 6, Unreal Engine 5 games, and more.

VKD3D-Proton now using batch acceleration structure builds should provide for very nice speed-ups at least for RADV ray-tracing. The release notes mention it "massively improves build performance" for at least the RADV driver. Previously was this Mesa merge proposal for RADV to batch acceleration structure builds in the driver before it was decided instead to just build the functionality into VKD3D-Proton itself.

More details on the many changes to find with VKD3D-Proton 2.10 via GitHub. A new Proton release will presumably be rolling out soon on Steam for having these latest improvements in Steam Play, which is quite likely given that DXVK 2.3 and DXVK-NVAPI 0.6.4 also released in recent days.