Wine Lands Initial Vulkan Adapter Support For Direct3D

As the first step towards the plans to have a Vulkan back-end to WineD3D itself for Wine mapping older versions of Direct3D to Vulkan, an initial Vulkan adapter implementation was merged today.

CodeWeavers is pursuing a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D akin to DXVK but one that could work with older versions of Direct3D and also continuing to maintain the mature Direct3D-to-OpenGL back-end that has been the default implementation. Pursuing this modern Vulkan back-end for WineD3D could yield better performance and also potentially work on macOS in the future via MoltenVK.

Merged today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet is just the initial Vulkan adapter implementation for enumerating the device in WineD3D rather than the OpenGL renderer, but not actually doing anything real for end-users yet.

It will be interesting to see how far this WineD3D Vulkan code advances over the months ahead and if it will be usable come Wine 5.0 in early 2020.