VKD3D-Proton 2.9 Released With Performance Improvements

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux.

VKD3D-Proton 2.9 is exciting in the performance department with having "greatly reduced" system memory requirements during the first run of the game/application. SPIR-V code previously held in memory for "just in case" purposes is now no longer done so.

Another notable VKD3D-Proton 2.9 performance improvement is making use of VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_libraries "GPL" functionality to avoid shader compilation stutter in select cases. The Vulkan GPL support works with the likes of Mesa 23.1's RADV driver.

Some of the other performance work includes various CPU optimizations, improved vRAM over-subscription behavior, improved performance with certain bad occlusion query patterns, and more.

VKD3D-Proton 2.9 also has added VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d usage, improved DXR 1.1 support using VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles, completion of DX12 Feature Level 12.1 support, now requiring Vulkan 1.3 and newer drivers, and D3D11on12 interoperability interfaces are supported. The VKD3D-Proton update also splits its DLLs into d3d12.dll and d3d12core.dll to match the layout used by the Microsoft DirectX Agility SDK on Windows.

There is also now native Linux swapchain support, various compatibility improvements, new developer features, and other changes. Downloads and more details on this big VKD3D-Proton 2.9 release via GitHub.