Wine-Vulkan Is Making Progress For Windows Vulkan Programs On Linux

Free software developer Roderick Colenbrander has made public his Wine-Vulkan repository that he is using to stage his work around better Vulkan support within Wine.

Roderick's Wine-Vulkan patches are in a state for experimenting with Vulkan on Wine and implements Vulkan 1.0.51 with few optional extensions currently. This is enough to run the Vulkan information utility, a Vulkan cube demo, and the vkQuake game along with other basic Vulkan apps. Both 32-bit and 64-bit programs should be working now.

This work is newer/better compared to the Wine Staging Vulkan code. The Wine Staging Vulkan code is basically a hacked together Vulkan library without the loader/ICD separation where as this new code is developed as an ICD driver and will work with the official Vulkan Windows loader library from LunarG. This clean approach is basically developed as how a proper Vulkan driver should look and also allows for integration with different Vulkan layers not possible with the older staging code.

The work is still experimental but those wishing to learn more can see the Wine-Vulkan Git repository where he has been pushing his commits over the past several days. When building this patched version of Wine, the Vulkan SDK for the Windows Vulkan loader also needs to be manually downloaded along with creating a JSON Vulkan ICD file for this new winevulkan.dll.

This work is unlikely though to be found in Wine 3.0 that will be entering its code freeze stage soon.

Roderick Colenbrander has been a longtime Wine developer (since 2002) mostly working on D3D/GL code (and now Vulkan) while by day is a manager for PlayStation. And for longtime Linux users, yes, he is the developer who ages ago developed NvClock for NVIDIA GPU overclocking support.

Meanwhile, nothing new to report yet on VKD3D for Direct3D 12 to Vulkan on Wine, which should be quite exciting once developed.