DXVK Is Aiming To Get Direct3D 11 Over Vulkan In Wine

[Hi-Angel]

Another option is to just play Direct3D 11 and 12 games natively at full-speed within a Linux environment:

It requires to own a Windows license. And you need to understand that running a GNU/Linux as a guest instead of host imposes restrictions. E.g. GNU/Linux doesn't schedule your CPU anymore, so expect lags and freezes for any kind of task consuming all CPU resources (like compilation on all cores), and β) silly restrictions, such as that you can't use Win+l in your OS to focus the left window, because it locks Windows even if you seemingly have keys grabbed by VM. If you really want running an OS in VM, you better off buying two GPUs, and dedicate one to a Windows guest.

[Hi-Angel]

I'm asking myself a question, what's the point of having VK9? If I correctly understand, games on Windows doesn't use DirectX9 (at least exclusively) for a long time — and although there still are DX9 games, they're mostly old. My point is, Vulkan support is only present on GPUs powerful enough to handle those games in a playable rate even with DX9→OpenGL translation. The older GPUs — ones where VK9 would really matter — don't have Vulkan support anyway.

So I think VK9 is a waste of time and resources, am I wrong?

[Xaero_Vincent]

It requires to own a Windows license. And you need to understand that running a GNU/Linux as a guest instead of host imposes restrictions. E.g. GNU/Linux doesn't schedule your CPU anymore, so expect lags and freezes for any kind of task consuming all CPU resources (like compilation on all cores), and β) silly restrictions, such as that you can't use Win+l in your OS to focus the left window, because it locks Windows even if you seemingly have keys grabbed by VM. If you really want running an OS in VM, you better off buying two GPUs, and dedicate one to a Windows guest.

* A Windows license isn't required to use Windows 10. Windows is a free download from Microsoft's website and can be used in an inactivated / unlicensed state with just the personalize options disabled.

* Last time I checked, any kind of task that taxed all CPU cores caused my systems to lag really bad, including on bare metal Linux and Windows.

I tried out 'stress --cpu 8' in the VM to max out all 8 virtual CPU cores and yes it lags but not any worse than on bare metal. Likewise, on bare metal Linux you can sometimes see processes with high CPU usage temporary make the system become completely unresponsive for several seconds while processing. This is probably why kernels like Linux-Zen and Linux-CK exist to help improve desktop responsiveness under load to a certain extent. My VM runs with the Linux-Zen 4.14 kernel.

* This configuration terminates the Windows shell so when I press "Win + L" inside the VM, it causes the LightDM login manager to show up. Typing the password just resumes where it left off with open apps.

* That would be nice except that I haven't read about anyone successfully using GPU passthrough on laptops and both of my running computers are laptops, even those with with discrete Nvidia or AMD GPUs inside. It appears only possible on desktop computers with fully IOMMU compatible hardware.

[Hi-Angel]

* Last time I checked any kind of task that taxed all CPU cores caused my systems to lag really bad, including on bare metal Linux and Windows.

I tried out 'stress --cpu 8' in the VM to max out all 8 virtual CPU cores and yes it lags but not any worse than on bare metal. Likewise, on bare metal Linux you can sometimes see processes with high CPU usage temporary make the system become completely unresponsive for several seconds while processing. This is probably why kernels like Linux-Zen and Linux-CK exist to help improve desktop responsiveness under load to a certain extent. My VM runs with the Linux-Zen 4.14 kernel.

Hmm this is odd. My experience was that I am often running a build on Archlinux host with twice threads as I have cores, and I still can watch youtube with Chromium-vaapiᴬᵁᴿ without slightest lags. When I tried to run a build on all cores on WIndows PC in office — which is 3 times more powerful than my laptop — the PC started locking up so heavily that I hardly could launch task manager.

[Hi-Angel]

Hmm this is odd. My experience was that I am often running a build on Archlinux host with twice threads as I have cores, and I still can watch youtube with Chromium-vaapiᴬᵁᴿ without slightest lags. When I tried to run a build on all cores on WIndows PC in office — which is 3 times more powerful than my laptop — the PC started locking up so heavily that I hardly could launch task manager.

By the way, I believe the reason is this (occasionally found it, whilst reading on scheduling algorithms):

The Linux kernel received a patch for CFS in November 2010 for the 2.6.38 kernel that has made the scheduler fairer for use on desktops and workstations.
[snip]
A simple explanation is that, with this patch applied, one will be able to still watch a video, read email and perform other typical desktop activities without glitches or choppiness while, say, compiling the Linux kernel or encoding video.

[nanonyme]

What is the point of this project?
Is better performance expected by using Vulkan as a backend instead of OpenGL?

I'm expecting the practical reason is that DirectX12 is in same level as Vulkan and on lower level than OpenGL so just thinking about doing it that way would be silly. There are more DirectX11 games than DirectX12 games so doing DirectX11 with Vulkan allows getting something easier testable and gathering Vulkan programming experience to the people who would be doing the DirectX12 implementation later

[nanonyme]

I'm asking myself a question, what's the point of having VK9? If I correctly understand, games on Windows doesn't use DirectX9 (at least exclusively) for a long time — and although there still are DX9 games, they're mostly old. My point is, Vulkan support is only present on GPUs powerful enough to handle those games in a playable rate even with DX9→OpenGL translation. The older GPUs — ones where VK9 would really matter — don't have Vulkan support anyway.

So I think VK9 is a waste of time and resources, am I wrong?

Yes and no. There's still a massive amount of DX9 games out there that people want to play. Vulkan drivers are simpler to make and tend to work more consistently so if someone actually finished up on that, they wouldn't need such a quirky implementation and it would be reasonable to maintain

[R41N3R]

This is native. Windows is running bare-metal and Linux is running inside a VM but in this case the VM replaces the Windows shell with GNOME or any other Linux desktop and my software integrates host Windows apps into Linux desktop environments with launcher icons and taskbars. Only VT-x is required, not VT-d/IOMMU nor GPU passthrough and it works on laptops as well.

Worst solution ever ;-) We are Linux users because we do not want to jail Linux in a VM on a Windows host. This solution is not contributing anything to a real Linux solution and I guess most people here have that interest.

[Dehir]

Best of luck with the project. Remember the times when ppl used to mark Wine being waste of time and use windows for gaming instead. Well those ppl still exist but look at wine right now. I can actually play StarCraft2 hell of a lot faster(close to native speed in my opinion) with gallium nine that i used to play with my old i5 3570k + gtx 460 + regular wine when sc2 were released. Still played through wings of liberty campaign like a champ even with reduced graphics.

Currently have ryzen 7 1700 + rx480 4g. So cant be more opensource oriented gamer. Yet happy to support best i can.

[Dukenukemx]

I'm asking myself a question, what's the point of having VK9? If I correctly understand, games on Windows doesn't use DirectX9 (at least exclusively) for a long time — and although there still are DX9 games, they're mostly old. My point is, Vulkan support is only present on GPUs powerful enough to handle those games in a playable rate even with DX9→OpenGL translation. The older GPUs — ones where VK9 would really matter — don't have Vulkan support anyway.

So I think VK9 is a waste of time and resources, am I wrong?

Lots of games still use DX9, like Project Cars which uses DX9 as well as DX11. The DX9 Wine version works pretty well right now, but not the best. If you're an AMD user you have Gallium Nine which is even better, but as an Nvidia user you only have Wine Nine. VK9 gives Nvidia users at least the ability to get better performance, especially since Nvidia does so well on Vulkan in Linux. There is Nouveu but the benefits you get from Gallium Nine are probably not greater than the loss of using Nouveu.

The DXVK project is pretty good but I'd like to see a Gallium Eleven for us AMD users.