Left 4 Dead 2 Updated With Vulkan Rendering Via DXVK, Many Other Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Left 4 Dead 2 Updated With Vulkan Rendering Via DXVK, Many Other Improvements

Similar to Portal 2 getting Vulkan rendering support earlier this year by leveraging DXVK to convert Direct3D calls to Vulkan, Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 has now received similar treatment alongside a big update out today...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Left-4-Dead-2-Vulkan

[microcode]

Very cool. For many years Valve has used their own translation layers for this sort of thing, particularly when targeting OpenGL. It is promising that DXVK is now good enough to build directly into the application.

There are also potentially performance benefits of this over dynamically loading DXVK, if they build it in with LTO/cross-module inlining.

[sarmad]

Nice, but why do they bother updating old games, when those games work good enough on pretty much all current hardwares?

[StarterX4]

Nice, but why do they bother updating old games, when those games work good enough on pretty much all current hardwares?

Yeah, with last binary's compilation 7 years ago, game anoyingly crashing, having some weird graphic glitches (like too dark textures appearing in the middle of game), missing modern features (like native Wayland support, 64-bit).
L4D2 on Linux needed updates for years.

[cl333r]

Nice, but why do they bother updating old games, when those games work good enough on pretty much all current hardwares?

No. I had a GeForce 1030 GT which supports Vulkan, so isn't too old, but L4D2 would stutter, so I'm pretty sure with Vulkan it wouldn't (because same story happened to Hard Reset), though I don't have motivation to check because that card is on another computer.

[StarterX4]

Finally. They recompiled the Linux binary and libs not touched in 7 years, brought DXVK that fixed all the problems of the faulty GL renderer.

This kind of updates is what L4D2 needed for years, not some community "The Last Stand" content update that borked more things than fixed.

Now we need native Wayland support and 64-bit, to get rid of both Xorg and 32-bit crap, on modern 64-bit systems.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Nice, but why do they bother updating old games, when those games work good enough on pretty much all current hardwares?

If you look at the release announcement, there are a bunch of fixes including things like crash fixes on Linux. Or you know, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. The fact that they are updating it at all after more than a decade, let alone on a niche platform for gaming that wasn't even a choice when the game launched, is quite frankly phenomenal.

[hoohoo]

L4D2 is still an enormously entertaining game.

GG, Valve!

[uid313]

Great!

I wish Valve would open source the Source 2 engine, or at least their old Source engine, like id software open sourced theirs.

[Azpegath]

Michael Comparison benchmarks incoming? I would love to see it on older cards as well, since I'm running Vulkan games on my R290.