VKD3D-Proton 2.7 Released With Eight Months Worth Of Changes

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 has finally been released as the first tagged release of this Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying an increasing number of D3D12 Windows games on Linux.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 is the first release since v2.6 in early March. Particularly due to all the increased usage and test coverage with the Steam Deck, there have been a ton of improvements merged over the past nearly eight months. But with Proton having shipped with VKD3D-Proton Git snapshots, not all of the v2.7 changes will be new to Steam Linux gamers.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 ships with an improved pipeline cache, a wide variety of GPU performance optimizations, mesh shaders support when having a Vulkan driver with VK_EXT_mesh_shader exposed, various DirectX Ray-Tracing DXR 1.1 features implemented, Advanced ExecuteIndirect in order to get Halo Infinite and other games running, initial HDR support, and tons of bug fixes.

The success of the Arch Linux powered Steam Deck continues to mean good improvements coming to the Linux ecosystem.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 also brings improved compatibility with the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver, debugging improvements, and is in the process of relicensing the code under the MIT license. Currently VKD3D-Proton is under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 while moving to MIT.

More details on the VKD3D-Proton 2.7 release via GitHub.