Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" State Tracker To Be Retired

It's crazy that Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to sunset Gallium Nine.

In the early years and well before Vulkan came onto the scene, Gallium Nine allowed for better performance of D3D9 games on Wine. This was also a time at which Valve's Steam Play (Proton) didn't even exist yet. But with time the Nine state tracker has become less relevant. Gallium3D Nine developer Axel Davy recently announced his intention to ending Gallium Nine. It hasn't been well maintained in years, there aren't many users left, and "DXVK just works" well these days. Plus there aren't too many Linux enthusiasts/gamers all focused on D3D9 these days compared to the more recent versions of Direct3D that are also supported by DXVK. Plus DXVK going the Vulkan API route works on more drivers than just the Mesa Gallium3D drivers.

Thus as Axel announced, it's the end of the road for Gallium Nine. The pull request for removing Gallium Nine from the Mesa codebase is expected to be submitted soon.