Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" State Tracker To Be Retired

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" State Tracker To Be Retired

It's crazy that Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to unset Gallium Nine...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Gallium3D-Nine-Sunset

[Alexmitter]

The main thing this teaches is that Vulkan is quite suitable as a intermediate layer with a few extensions.
DX9 -> Nine -> Gallium -> Driver
DX9 -> DXVK -> Vulkan ->Driver
And it overall is a graceful transition between the technologies and everyone should be happy it happened after all even when Doitsujin said it makes no sense.

[ridge]

Immensely grateful to Axels work over the years, Gallium Nine was a godsend back in the day letting me play games comfortably without having to reboot to Windows, just like how DXVK does now. Hell, Gallium Nine convinced me to completely wipe Windows off my PC eventually, so that was really special.
So long Nine o7

[ahrs]

Are there benchmarks comparing its performance to things like DXVK? I still occasionally hear people say that Gallium Nine gives slightly better performance, seeing its removal would be a shame in that case but I understand everything has a maintenance cost.

It's also a good way for people with Gallium drivers but no Vulkan driver or a poor Vulkan driver (i.e people with older hardware) to still get some use out of it.

[davidbepo]

shame, nine still provides better CPU bound perf than DXVK

Edit: reading the full thing he is aware and still believes deleting it is worth it
i am currently using nine for wine DX9 but i understand it and will have no problem using DXVK for DX9 too

[lorn10]

This comes really surprising - what a pity.

Gallium Nine is definitely useful even in 2024. And this is not only true for non-Vulkan based hardware. Gallium Nine performs really good even on Vulkan compliant systems. Especially if those are not so super-performant like for example mobile class hardware.

But it looks that the transition to Wayland is a too big amount of work. And if no one is motivated to do this work then it is understandable that this project comes to an end.

Whatever, we will see what the future brings.

And by the way, I am fine in using Gallium Nine only in Xwayland.

[GeneralZod]

Probable typo:

It's time to unset Gallium Nine.

though it still kind of works as-is

[mxan]

Typo

"It's time to unset Gallium Nine."

"unset" should be "sunset"

[dragorth]

Just out of curiosity, wasn't Intel using Mesa to provide DX9 support for their Arc GPUs? Is this going to affect them?

[aviallon]

Just out of curiosity, wasn't Intel using Mesa to provide DX9 support for their Arc GPUs? Is this going to affect them?

I believe they just use DXVK for DX9 to DX11.