Fedora's FESCo Approves Using DXVK As Their Default Wine Direct3D Back-End

Last month was the proposal for Fedora to make DXVK their default back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage with their packaged Wine build rather than WineD3D. That's now been approved for Fedora 33!

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the proposal to use DXVK by default with their Wine package rather than WineD3D, which maps D3D 9/10/11 over OpenGL. With DXVK going from Direct3D to Vulkan it generally delivers sizable performance benefits especially for modern Windows games.

For a few releases Fedora has been shipping "wine-dxvk" that pairs Wine with DXVK while now for Fedora 33 later this year this should be the default configuration, similar to Valve's Steam Play / Proton using DXVK as opposed to the upstream WineD3D code. WineD3D has been seeing work to add Vulkan support itself, but for the time being at least DXVK is in better much better standing and actually workable.

FESCo approved the change along with other proposals around reserving resources for active users, Ruby on Rails 6.0 packaging, and the X.Org utility deaggregation.