VK9 Milestone 28 Reached With Improvements For Unreal Tournament (1999)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VK9 Milestone 28 Reached With Improvements For Unreal Tournament (1999)

While DXVK captures much of the limelight these days when it comes to accelerating Windows gaming on Linux by mapping Direct3D 11 (and D3D10) over Vulkan, the VK9 project and its main developer continue advancing D3D9-over-Vulkan for those preferring to relive over Direct3D Windows games...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VK9-Milestone-28

[pal666]

this could be interesting for nvidia blob users and maybe for some intel users. and for poor people on macos with vulkan wrapper over metal. for people with gallium driver nine should work faster and it is already more stable and featureful. i hope iris will prompt valve to enable nine in proton

[DMJC]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

[Spooktra]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

No you're not, this is the type of half-assed prioritization that has relegated Linux based OSes to an also-ran on the desktop.

[pal666]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

what makes you think it is worse than "optimizing code" for some d3d9 samples? game exhibits some bugs, bugs have to be fixed

[CuriousTommy]

While I was playing Mirror's Edge with Proton, I noticed that I occasionally received lag during gameplay. I wonder if using wrappers on Vulkan (instead of OpenGL) would reduce this problem.

[ssokolow]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

Note: The native Linux port has always segfaulted when you try to run it with one of the most popular mods. (Popular enough that it's included on the second disk in the Game of the Year edition.)

[geearf]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

D3D9 is D3D9, what does it matter if the game used to test has a port or not? Any improvement for this game would benefit any other game that makes similar calls.

[DMJC]

D3D9 is D3D9, what does it matter if the game used to test has a port or not? Any improvement for this game would benefit any other game that makes similar calls.

Except Unreal Tournament was released in 1999 before DirectX 9.0 even existed (DirectX 9 was released in 2002). UT99 needs DirectX 7.0 why does that even need a Vulkan wrapper? Also where is the work on DirectX 1-6 which still have bugs more than 20 years after release? This is just double handling for nothing. Also if that mod is so critical, why not push Epic Megagames to get the Linux port updated? Why should we just accept being shit on by second rate support all the time without even asking for the updates to get made? I've at least tried to contact some of the press outlets about this stuff and all I got back was "blah blah Bethesda doesn't like Linux" none of them even bothered to address Epic Megagames' shit behaviour, e.g where is UT2K3 and UT2K4 on Steam???. Maybe we should be leaving these games buggy and broken and work instead on games with no native ports. Make the commercial devs actually look bad instead of covering up bad behaviour. I mean do we actually want to discourage native ports by making emulation the better option? It's entirely counter productive to the goal of getting more native games on Linux.

[randomsalad]

Am I the only person who finds it really weird that we're optimising code for a game that's had a Linux native port for the last 20 years?

That's not weird at all, because the native Linux port serves as an excellent reference point when comparing the accuracy, performance and stability of VK9, which gives the developer some very valuable data on his own progress. It'd be much harder to do the same for a game that doesn't have a Linux port, or can't run on Linux in any form at all.