VKD3D Is Beginning Flight As Wine's Direct3D 12 To Vulkan Library

Back at WineConf 2017 VKD3D was announced for bringing Direct3D 12 to Wine by implementing Microsoft's latest graphics API atop the Vulkan graphics API. The initial code for this new library is beginning to take shape.

VKD3D is a long-term play for getting viable Direct3D 12 support working within Wine. As noted back at WineConf, this library is being developed independently of the Wine Git repository. This will potentially allow in the future others to make use of this D3D12-to-Vulkan code without pulling in Wine entirely, should porters look to this project for easing their process of getting Windows games running on Linux, etc.

VKD3D aims to be similar in nature to VK9 that is mapping Direct3D 9 to Vulkan or the other DXVK project mapping Direct3D 11 to Vulkan.

Unlike VK9 and DXVK, VKD3D is an official Wine project. Leading the VKD3D development so far is Józef Kucia, a CodeWeavers developer. With CodeWeavers taking up this massive task of getting Direct3D 12 running on top of Vulkan, it gives us hope we could see some working progress made in 2018. In fact, it's been surprising how quickly DXVK is up and working on basic samples. Getting Direct3D 12 implemented over Wine shouldn't at least be as much of a burden as it's been getting Direct3D 11 mapped to OpenGL within Wine.

Development on the VKD3D library can be tracked via their WineHQ.org repository that as mentioned is separate from the rest of the Wine code-base. As VKD3D advances in 2018, you'll certainly be able to read about it on Phoronix.