DXVK 0.41 Released, Slightly More CPU Efficient & Offers A Heads-Up Display

[babai]

I frequently come across discord discussions where DXVK is having problems with some Vulkan drivers. I think DXVK has the potential to uncover many Vulkan driver bugs and low performance code paths.

[Etherman]

Steps to set up DXVK:
Install vulkan drivers for linux, both 64 and 32 bit.
Verify that vulkan works in linux. eg.
$ vulkan-smoketest

Install wine with vulkan eg. Wine 3.5.

Install LunarG Vulkan sdk in wine.

Run Bin/cube.exe and Bin32/cube.exe from vulkan sdk in wineprefix to verify that 64 and 32 bit wine vulkan works.

Now you can install DXVK. :-)
That's all there is to it.
If DXVK_HUD does not work DXVK is not loaded.
You can also look at console messages and .log files if there are VK_ things.

32 bit vulkan, both wine and linux, and 32 bit dxvk is important since even recent 2018 windows games are 32 bit.

[Dukenukemx]

DXVK could be a game changer for Linux.
Most people don't care for politics and rather just be able to PLAY their games at decent performance level so this could pull some windows gamers towards linux whom want a change or wish to get away from the annoying Microsoft echo-system, and IMO that is a good thing because the more people on Linux the more likely we will see native ports, but you need stuff like DXVK to attract the population first.

This could be a problem for Microsoft as well. Who says you can't use this for Windows? I think some people already have. You can use Vulkan to speed up DX11 games on Windows, basically making the DX11 API useless. I'm assuming there might be a speed up.

[Niarbeht]

This could be a problem for Microsoft as well. Who says you can't use this for Windows? I think some people already have. You can use Vulkan to speed up DX11 games on Windows, basically making the DX11 API useless. I'm assuming there might be a speed up.

I somehow doubt DXVK will offer any sort of speedup on Windows systems. You'd be trading vendor-optimized code paths for unoptimized vendor-neutral code paths. Maaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyybe ten years down the line, if Vulkan is still in use and DX11 is long-dead, when hardware is no longer optimized for DX11 operations, it'll offer speedups by virtue of simply offering a more generically optimized code path than whatever DX11 backwards-compatibility junk some driver still has lying around, but by then does it really matter?

[VikingGe]

You can use Vulkan to speed up DX11 games on Windows

What makes you think that D3D11->Vulkan->Hardware would be faster than D3D11->Hardware? That's obviously not the case, native D3D11 is significantly faster.

[R41N3R]

Steps to set up DXVK:
Install vulkan drivers for linux, both 64 and 32 bit.
Verify that vulkan works in linux. eg.
$ vulkan-smoketest

Install wine with vulkan eg. Wine 3.5.

Install LunarG Vulkan sdk in wine.

Run Bin/cube.exe and Bin32/cube.exe from vulkan sdk in wineprefix to verify that 64 and 32 bit wine vulkan works.

Now you can install DXVK. :-)
That's all there is to it.
If DXVK_HUD does not work DXVK is not loaded.
You can also look at console messages and .log files if there are VK_ things.

32 bit vulkan, both wine and linux, and 32 bit dxvk is important since even recent 2018 windows games are 32 bit.

I thought the LunarG Vulkan sdk is not required anymore in Wine. Is this specific to DXVK?

[Etherman]

I don't think it's needed anymore but i am unsure. It provides example programs so you can verify that vulkan works in the WINEPREFIX before setting up DXVK.

[fgblomqvist]

I thought the LunarG Vulkan sdk is not required anymore in Wine. Is this specific to DXVK?

It is not required as of Wine 3.5 (staging/normal). Just install/setup DXVK and you're good to go.

[theriddick]

The only way DXVK could be made to be faster for some games is if the threaded workload was handled better within Vulkan. There are plenty of DX11 games that just ignore X CPU cores, so perhaps DXVK can pick up some slack there. I do believe atm DXVK has a slight texture buffering issue as I see occasional hickups with the games people have tested so far, not sure whats causing that.

[VikingGe]

There are plenty of DX11 games that just ignore X CPU cores, so perhaps DXVK can pick up some slack there.

That's impossible. If a game only uses one core to do all its rendering work - and most games do, the multithreading capabilities of D3D11 are laughable and poorly designed - then dxvk cannot magically evenly split that work across all cores. It does offload most of the work to a separate thread just like Wine (with CSMT) and Mesa (with mesa_glthread) do, but that's about it.