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

[dumb ways to code]

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.

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

How are you using Gallium Nine? The linked announcement paints the picture of it being designed specifically for Wine. Are there other pieces of software on Linux that leverage Nine?

[commodore256]

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

Yeah, but when was the last game where the newest API they use is D3D9? I checked the PC gaming Wiki and a lot of them made recently aren't hyper ambitious and Anno 1404 has a DX11 mode.

[schmidtbag]

I don't really see the issue. I doubt there's much more to maintain about this. If you've got a CPU old enough that DXVK gives you a worse framerate, you're probably not in need of any modern patches and aren't using fancy modern DEs.

[dragorth]

Yeah, but when was the last game where the newest API they use is D3D9? I checked the PC gaming Wiki and a lot of them made recently aren't hyper ambitious and Anno 1404 has a DX11 mode.

I don't care it they aren't hyper ambitious, only that they work. As late as 2015, Positech Games, makers of Gratuitous Space Battles and the Democracy games, used DX9.

I believe Chris no longer uses it, or at least had been exploring moving away from it in some blog post a bit back, but that still puts all of his games from before GSB 2, which still has a DX9 engine, as requiring it.

I still want to be able to play those, so I don't really agree with your metric. This is just the example I know of, I am sure there are other examples, maybe even newer.

[davidbepo]

Yeah, but when was the last game where the newest API they use is D3D9? I checked the PC gaming Wiki and a lot of them made recently aren't hyper ambitious and Anno 1404 has a DX11 mode.

not recent games for sure
anyways i was just stating the technical merits, nothing more

[andre30correia]

better to maintain DXVK for new systems, people who still need g9 can always use old software for some more time, in old machines.
There is a lot of lts systems out there who will have support for the next 5 to 10 years untill these old machines stop working

[lorn10]

How are you using Gallium Nine? The linked announcement paints the picture of it being designed specifically for Wine. Are there other pieces of software on Linux that leverage Nine?

Yes, I use it mainly on Wine and X11 but Gallium Nine can be also used on Vulkan via Zink. I think it acts in that way somehow like "d3d9umd" which has benefits over a wrapper solution like DXVK.

Whatever, another use case of Gallium Nine could be the virtualization segment. SoftGPU is one example. When Gallium Nine is present, SoftGPU simply redirects the D3D9 calls from the VM to the host system without any translation.

And Gallium Nine could be used also directly from Linux but because D3D is strongly Windows related this is more a theoretical thing.

So out of my view there are definitely use cases for Gallium Nine even in 2024. But as told, - if the main developer has no longer any motivation then someone other should take over the project. Or it has to come to an end.

[Quackdoc]

This is a bit sad but in the end it's fairly understandable. While gallium nine is performance, IIRC it never got wired up to windows DDI stuff, and well wined3d is fine for what it is, since it's good for both opengl and now vulkan backends anyways, and is rather "fast enough" for a proper conformant application, and dxvk can always be used if you need more speed.

[ElectricPrism]

I was literally distilling some old notes yesterday and came across my Gallium Nine launch commands. Some technological leaps like these just feel like it's already been a lifetime.

I remember how Gallium Nine made photoshop and several games actually work. It was thrilling. Gallium Nine is one of the many tiny kings of our linux day.

[Daktyl198]

That's a shame. GalliumNine proved that a native implementation of these APIs in the Linux drivers provided real benefit. I was hoping Nine's success led to the implementation of Direct3D 10, 11, and 12 in Linux drivers as well. DXVK is nice, but it's not perfect and never will be. Nine has had very little development in years and is still faster and more stable than DXVK.

Game developers are not embracing Vulkan for the same reason they didn't embrace OpenGL. Native support for Microsoft's APIs just makes sense even if Linux people hate Microsoft. These devs are willing to sacrifice everybody else's experience for their own ego.