The Latest Winevulkan Patches Make It Usable For Doom, Wolfenstein & DXVK

Roderick Colenbrander and those working with him on "Winevulkan" to provide a clean Vulkan implementation for Wine supporting the Vulkan ICD concept, etc, rather than the old hacked together code in Wine-Staging have done a great job. With Roderick's latest Winevulkan patches, this new implementation is considered usable.

It was just at the start of March that the initial Winevulkan support merged and since then more patch series have landed for this implementation that allows Windows programs on Wine to tap Vulkan support, permitting the host system has working Vulkan API support.

This morning Roderick sent out his latest seven patches for WineVulkan. With that he notes things should be starting to work:

This wave of patches gets winevulkan to a usable state. Many simple applications such as Doom, Wolfenstein II and many others including dxvk should now work.

Once these patches land, which presumably should be in very short order, the Windows-exclusive Vulkan-powered DOOM and Wolfenstein II will now be able to run nicely off mainline Wine. It's also exciting that DXVK can then run nicely off mainline Wine, which is the Direct3D 11 over Vulkan implementation that has been shown to be much faster than Wine's existing D3D11-over-OpenGL support.

This will likely also prove important for the still early in development VKD3D Wine project for getting their Direct3D 12 API support working atop Vulkan.

Besides the latest 7 patches, those wanting to use Winevulkan today also need to manually set the appropriate registry key, install the LunarG Windows Vulkan SDK, and install the Winevulkan JSON ICD file. Roderick mentions this workflow will be improved in the future to make it easier running Vulkan programs on Wine.