Direct3D 12 Support For APITrace Pursued To Help VKD3D-Proton

Joshua Ashton, known for his work with Valve on D9VK and then DXVK for mapping Direct3D on top of Vulkan, is making more strides in their Direct3D 12 effort with VKD3D-Proton.

VKD3D-Proton 2.0 was recently released for allowing more Direct3D 12 Windows games to now run on Linux with Proton (Steam Play) and VKD3D-Proton. For maintaining the support and helping work out new capabilities in this D3D12-on-Vulkan layer, reliable replaying of D3D12 calls is important for development purposes.

For furthering this cause, Ashton has been working on Direct3D 12 for the well known open-source APITrace program for tracing graphics API calls and replaying them back.

Ashton has an initial version of APITrace with Direct3D 12 working to help the translation layer cause. This allows for consistently replying Direct3D 12 calls into the VKD3D-Proton layer for reproducing behaviors, etc. The APITrace code is working right now for games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Resident Evil 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and others.

More details for those interested via this blog post.

The code at least for now is not in the upstream APITrace repository but is via this GitHub fork.