Wine Will Be Working On "VKD3D" As A Direct3D 12 To Vulkan Library

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 2 November 2017 at 12:18 PM EDT. 25 Comments
WINE
Following last weekend's WineConf 2017 and its announcement, Wine project founder Alexandre Julliard has sent out a detailed action item list as a result of the developers' meeting in Poland.

Perhaps most exciting is that they will be developing VKD3D in its own Git repository. The VKD3D code-base is to be a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan library for eventually allowing D3D12 Windows games to run on Linux via translations to Vulkan, similar to the project's work on converting Direct3D calls to OpenGL.

Separately there has also been the VK9 effort for running Direct3D 9 over Vulkan, but this Wine VKD3D project is just about Direct3D 12 with that matching more nicely to the semantics of Vulkan. Besides, Wine's Direct3D 10/11 support backed by OpenGL is already getting into good shape.

But don't expect vkd3d to become usable overnight as it will likely be quite some months involved before it will be helping out for running Windows D3D12 games under Wine. It will also be interesting to see once full-featured if any game studios/porters will be using it to assist in porting games to Linux, assuming the overhead isn't too high of this yet-to-be-developed library.

At WineConf 2017, developers also agreed to begin producing more detailed Git commit messages, consolidating some of their mailing lists, and to begin building binary Wine packages for Android.

Their current plan is also to do the code freeze for Wine 3.0 around the end of November, meaning the release should be out on schedule in December or January.

The list of action items can be found on Wine-devel.
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