DXVK 2.0 Released with Major Changes and Improved Support for Many Games

DXVK, the popular open-source Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10 and 11 that allows you to run 3D apps and games designed for Windows on GNU/Linux systems through Wine, has been updated today to version 2.0, a major release that introduces important changes and improvements.

Major changes in the DXVK 2.0 release include memory management improvements for the Direct3D 9 implementation for better support of 32-bit D3D9 games, along with proper support for reading from an active render target in D3D9 games.

For the Direct3D 10 implementation, this release removes the incomplete d3d10.dll and d3d10_1.dll implementations in favor of Wine’s implementation of these DLLs for supporting D3D10 games. On the other hand, the Direct3D 11 implementation now exposes D3D11 Feature Level 12_1 with Tiled Resources and Conservative Rasterization up to Tier 3, as well as Rasterizer Ordered Views.

“While no games are known to use these features directly in D3D11, some games and game launchers rely on feature support being consistent between D3D11 and D3D12 in order to allow users to enable D3D12 in the game options. While our implementation of these features is generally functional, there may be bugs or performance issues in case a game does use them,” said the devs in the release notes.

The Direct3D 11 implementation also received improvements to the implementations of ID3D11DeviceContext to further reduce CPU overhead in games and improve compatibility with third-party libraries and mods that hook into D3D11, while providing a behavior that’s closer to the one in Windows systems.

On top of that, DXVK 2.0 brings shader compilation changes for graphics drivers that support the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library Vulkan extension by compiling Vulkan shaders when the game loads rather than at draw time. Currently, only the NVIDIA 520.56.06 and later graphics driver support this change.

Among other changes, this release introduces support for native Linux builds of DXVK for devs who want to port D3D apps without having to change the rendering code, improved behavior of DXGI waitable swap chains, improved implementation of DXGI frame statistics, improved memory allocation logic on Intel integrated graphics, as well as various bug fixes.

As expected from a new DXVK update, version 2.0 also brings improvements for numerous games including Alan Wake, Alice Madness Returns, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Beyond Good and Evil, Dragon Age Origins, Empire: Total War, Final Fantasy XV, GTA IV, Heroes Of Annihilated Empires, Limit King Of Fighters XIII, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, SiN Episodes: Emergence, Sonic Generations, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, The Ship, Warhammer Online, and Ys Seven.

DXVK 2.0 is available for download right now from the project’s GitHub page if you fancy compiling it on your GNU/Linux distribution, but if that’s not the case, you should wait for this release to arrive in the stable software repositories of your distro to update and enjoy a better gaming experience on Linux.

Last updated 7 months ago