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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[artivision]

What are you talking about people, the bugs are introduced with new future levels of support and not with drivers. You have to equally share the development time between introduce new futures and debug the new problems. DXVK reached almost future parity with D3D11 in one year, this speed is unnatural. Time for debugging and then continue normally.

[marlock]

The way I read this news is: he braved the waters swiftly by being a bit chaotic and now will be part of the team doing the better-planned rework under another name... its good news in my book, except that likely there will be a perceived slower pace in improvements for a while.

[loganj]

Mystro256 that company might as well be valve. they can work with devs to make some automations for their games to test dxvk/d9vk. it doesn't even have to be the entire game. just some demos