Direct3D 8 Support "D8VK" Merged Into DXVK

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux.

More than one year after the merge request was opened for adding a Direct3D 8 front-end to DXVK via the D8VK code, the merge request landed today by Valve's Joshua Ashton while Jeffrey Ellison was the author of the D8VK code.

Various Direct3D 8 games can now be enjoyed with better performance thanks to this implementation atop the Vulkan API. This Direct3D 8 support is just over five thousand lines of new code for DXVK and expands the scope of the project to now covering Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11. The VKD3D-Proton project is what covers Direct3D 12 API support on Linux.

This is good news for those wanting to enjoy older Direct3D 8 games on Linux with better performance and reliability. But then again WineD3D has been handling D3D8 era games quite well for Direct3D mapped on OpenGL. DirectX 8.0 as a reminder was introduced in late 2000 and went on to power games like Serious Sam: The FIrst Encounter, Max Payne, Star Wars: Starfighter, Grand Theft Auto III, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and many other titles now hitting around the 20+ year mark.

See this merge request for more details on this newly-merged Direct3D 8 support for DXVK.