Valve Working On A VKD3D Fork For Getting Direct3D 12 Advanced For Proton / Steam Play

While upstream Wine developers continue working on VKD3D for providing a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer for Wine, a developer on Valve's Proton team has now forked it as Proton-VKD3D for focusing their efforts on getting the D3D12 support moved along for Proton that powers Steam Play.

While upstream Wine developers and in particular CodeWeavers do continue to work on VKD3D, VKD3D-Proton appears to be Valve's fork or downstream of that where they can more freely work on their game-focused support for enabling Direct3D 12 Windows games to be better supported on Linux with Steam Play. Presumably it will be more along the lines of a downstream / moving fork of VKD3D rather than a hard fork, similar to Proton re-basing against Wine every once in a while.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen who has worked for Valve for a while now on Vulkan and graphics API matters is the one hosting this VKD3D-Proton Git repository. The repository outlines the development priorities: "Performance and compatibility are important targets, at the expense of compatibility with older drivers and systems. Modern Vulkan extensions and features are aggressively made use of to improve performance and compatibility. It is recommended to use the very latest drivers you can get your hands on for the best experience. Backwards compatibility with the vkd3d standalone API is not a goal of this project."

In addition to Hans-Kristian working on this Proton fork, Joshua Ashton of D9VK (now DXVK) has been the other developer contributing to this branch so far since it was started in mid-June.

It will certainly be interesting to see where this leads and how quickly VKD3D-Proton can get up and running for DirectX 12 Windows games on Linux with Steam Play.