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DXVK, the open-source Vulkan-based implementation of D3D9, D3D10, and D3D11 for Linux on Wine, has been updated today to version 1.9, a release that brings several improvements and many bug fixes.
Coming about four months after DXVK 1.8, the DXVK 1.9 release is here to implement Conservative Rasterization for supported graphics cards, allowing the enablement of the Nvidia ShadowLibs option in the Final Fantasy XV game, which provides improved PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows) for better performance and higher quality. This change is also beneficial for enabling similar options in other games.
DXVK 1.9 also implements basic support for various sub-sampled YUV texture formats like NV12 used for video playback in games, basic support for the ID3D11VideoProcessor APIs used for video playback in NieR Replicant and Contra: Rogue Corps, as well as a frame rate limiter as a workaround for games that don’t work correctly at high frame rates.
Another interesting change in this release is the fact that software-only Vulkan implementations like Lavapipe are no longer reported to the application if there’s a Vulkan-capable graphics card present, which should crashes with some games that try to use Lavapipe instead of a regular graphics driver on systems using a recent Mesa graphics stack. This change was tested successfully with the The Witcher 3 game.
“Lavapipe can now be used with DXVK by manually setting the
VK_ICD_FILENAMESenvironment variable. While some of DXVK’s feature requirements have been lifted in order to allow it to run, note that limitations of this driver may still cause some games to crash or render incorrectly,” explained the devs.
Among other noteworthy changes, DXVK 1.9 reduces the presentation latency by up to one frame on some setups to improve games that are limited by external frame limiters, DXGI frame latency settings, or vertical synchronization, improves the upload of buffers and textures in D3D9, further reduces the size of state cache files, and fixes numerous other bugs.
As with all new DXVK releases, more games will perform better, including Atelier Mysterious Trilogy Deluxe Pack, Demon Stone, Dal Segno, Days Gone, Dragon Quest Builder 2, Final Fantasy XIII, GTA IV, Halo 2, Kohan II, Nights of Azure, Second Sight, Spec Ops: The Line, and TrackMania Forever. Check out the full release notes on GitHub for more details, from where you can also download the source tarball.
Last updated 3 years ago
