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

[M@GOid]

Their original binary strongly favored Nvidia drivers. But that was at the time the Gallium AMD driver didn't exist. I currently still play this game. Will report back if I notice performance improvements.

[khnazile]

I get framecaped with both APIs. And if I remove the framecap, it crashes the amdgpu kernel driver. Or a gpu itself, I didn't have enough time to investigate. GJ

[lumks]

Is this change also available for Windows?

[chocolate]

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

Out of all the in-house proprietary engines, Source (& Source 2) is indeed the one that makes the least sense to keep closed. It doesn't appear to be important for their business model, either. Maybe it has to do with the competitive scene around CS:GO and TF2? There have been hacks developed ad hoc after a source code leak, just recently (or maybe last year, can't remember).

[Mario Junior]

Is this change also available for Windows?

Same question here

[gfunk]

So this was done by Valve, not the community who did the last stand update?

Why wouldnt they add Vulkan to CSGO first given how much money it generates

Grateful regardless, I had fun with the last stand update

[humbug]

Why wouldnt they add Vulkan to CSGO first given how much money it generates

It seems like they want all their games running on Vulkan by the time the SteamPal launches. Newer games on the Source2 engine are not a problem (Dota2, Half Life Alyx, Underlords) as they have native Vulkan support.

For older games like Portal2, Left 4 Dead, CS:GO the strategy is to use a translation layer. I reckon they wanted to do a couple of other games first and hone their skills before tackling CS:GO. Cause that is a very sensitive and competitive community; they will freak out if something goes wrong or if performance drops on certain rare configurations.

[gfunk]

Thats a good point, I know Linux users accidentally got VAC bans after they changed some OpenGL thread configuration

[Flaburgan]

Hm, but why is DXVK involved here? I mean, on Linux it's currently running OpenGL, not DirectX. So the translation should be OpenGL -> Vulkan not DirectX -> Vulkan, what do I miss here?

[chocolate]

Hm, but why is DXVK involved here? I mean, on Linux it's currently running OpenGL, not DirectX. So the translation should be OpenGL -> Vulkan not DirectX -> Vulkan, what do I miss here?

DXVK is bundled with the game so that its original Direct3D renderer is left untouched and translated to Vulkan. The game was initially ported using another layer called ToGL, to achieve the same with OpenGL. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ToGL