DXVK Lead Developer Philip Rebohle Has Begun Contributing More To Wine's VKD3D

With DXVK in remarkably good standing for translating Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for use by Steam Play (Proton) and Wine, Philip Rebohle who started that project is now contributing more to Wine's VKD3D initiative for mapping Direct3D 12 on Vulkan.

As DXVK is working out damn well these days for D3D10/D3D11 games and potentially due to whatever funding engagement he has with Valve, Philip Rebohle is now focusing some attention on VKD3D for doing the same to this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer. Just over the past week has been a big uptick in activity from Rebohle. Of his commits, there have been 17 commits by him to VKD3D but 10 of them were just in the past week.

He made his intentions more clear today on the Wine developer list. Philip is currently aiming to get Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's D3D12 renderer working on VKD3D. For that to happen, there are some missing pieces to be addressed by VKD3D.

The reason he brought this up on the mailing list is plotting how to best handle custom shaders within VKD3D for implementing bits of functionality as compute shaders that will then be handled by the Vulkan drivers for areas that don't have a 1:1 mapping between D3D12 and Vulkan. For integrating shaders into VKD3D, his initial idea was compiling GLSL shaders at build-time to a C header containing the SPIR-V representation and then referenced by the VKD3D code itself. That would introduce a new dependency on glslangValidator for the conversion process or there are other alternatives like shaderc.

Though CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet expressed a preference to writing the shaders in HLSL and then using the existing tooling to convert that as opposed to introducing a new build-time dependency, but that could run into problems and Philip would prefer avoiding writing the shaders in HLSL.

That matter of how best to handle shaders within VKD3D is still being decided, but the good news is that Philip is now working his magic not only on DXVK but also VKD3D.

Getting Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's optional D3D12 renderer working on VKD3D would also be interesting as it would allow comparing the performance of D3D11 with DXVK. Additionally, there is the native Linux port of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by Feral Interactive that is in turn routed to OpenGL.