DXVK Reportedly Going Into "Maintenance Mode" Due To State Of Code-Base

[archibald]

As a software developer you want to develop some stable code that is reliable in the long term, but this is quite impossible with the current platform, not sure if a CI system could be designed to test with every commit a broad game base. Development without the fear of break something fundamental is essential!

Building such a CI system is certainly possible, it just requires a large amount of money/machines so that tests can be effectively parallelised. Importantly, the test machines need to be centrally administered and kept in known states, so it's not feasible for people to volunteer their own PCs to help out.

[AdamOne]

It's commendable that Rebohle chooses to get under the hood instead of polishing the exterior stuff.
Hopefully it hasn't gotten out of hand.

[LeJimster]

It's questionable how much more performance he could get out the project anyway. In some games it's already running @ 90% of native. This is frankly amazing.

[Ananace]

Building such a CI system is certainly possible, it just requires a large amount of money/machines so that tests can be effectively parallelised. Importantly, the test machines need to be centrally administered and kept in known states, so it's not feasible for people to volunteer their own PCs to help out.

What would probably have to happen to solve that is for DXVK to adopt a similar CI design to what some emulators use, where they have a renderdoc-or-alike (of Direct3D) dump that's run with each commit, and that logs any pixels that differ.
The Dolphin emulator is one of the projects that does this in order to make sure code changes don't affect rendering.

Running actual games is just going to be far too chaotic to be able to use as test cases, far too many places where parallelism or randomness - particles etc - could introduce noise in the resulting images.

[ix900]

What would probably have to happen to solve that is for DXVK to adopt a similar CI design to what some emulators use, where they have a renderdoc-or-alike (of Direct3D) dump that's run with each commit, and that logs any pixels that differ.
The Dolphin emulator is one of the projects that does this in order to make sure code changes don't affect rendering.

Running actual games is just going to be far too chaotic to be able to use as test cases, far too many places where parallelism or randomness - particles etc - could introduce noise in the resulting images.

Sounds like it could be the best way to get through it considering regressions are his problem. He would have to have access to basically every Steam game however and set it up to churn through all games, etc. Probably still more than what this guy wants to deal with.

[spykes]

D3D drivers on Windows are full of workarounds to improve or fix some AAA games... Trying to match that in a generic driver like DXVK is probably impossible without introducing regressions. The only way to go further would be to introduce specific paths for specific games, but that would make the driver completely messy.
I think it's better to focus on maintenance and stability for now.

[ssokolow]

D3D drivers on Windows are full of workarounds to improve or fix some AAA games... Trying to match that in a generic driver like DXVK is probably impossible without introducing regressions. The only way to go further would be to introduce specific paths for specific games, but that would make the driver completely messy.
I think it's better to focus on maintenance and stability for now.

Of course, the messiness could be mitigated somewhat by implementing it as some kind of "profiles" support that makes the combinatorial explosion and maintenance for game-specific hacks external to DXVK itself.

[skeevy420]

Of course, the messiness could be mitigated somewhat by implementing it as some kind of "profiles" support that makes the combinatorial explosion and maintenance for game-specific hacks external to DXVK itself.

You know damn well that "profiles" are more evil than systemd and that no program should ever, EVER require any form of profiles or if/thens to work around a bug in a game from 23.4 years ago

I has a sad because I know damn well that someone defend the "profiles are bad and you should feel bad for using them" stance because that person be more tarded than my cat

[ssokolow]

You know damn well that "profiles" are more evil than systemd and that no program should ever, EVER require any form of profiles or if/thens to work around a bug in a game from 23.4 years ago

I has a sad because I know damn well that someone defend the "profiles are bad and you should feel bad for using them" stance because that person be more tarded than my cat

Wine has profiles and, without them, it would be far less useful to me. I think they come with the "Running Windows things on Linux without a massive Microsoft appcompat team" territory.

[skeevy420]

Wine has profiles and, without them, it would be far less useful to me. I think they come with the "Running Windows things on Linux without a massive Microsoft appcompat team" territory.

Yeah, so do our graphics drivers and more. FWIW, I'm in support of profiles.