Wine's Direct3D Vulkan Backend Is Seeing Some New Activity

While there exists DXVK offering great Direct3D 9/10/11 support atop Vulkan that is used by Steam Play / Proton and others, Wine developers continue working on their Vulkan back-end to WineD3D as a similar Direct3D-over-Vulkan approach for pre-D3D12.

A year ago saw initial work on this Vulkan back-end for WineD3D as an alternative to their mature Direct3D-on-OpenGL code path. Since then there's been WineD3D Vulkan activity on and off.

The last time we saw any notable WineD3D Vulkan activity was back in January with new patches following the Wine 5.0 release.

Posted today were a set of new patches focused on further bringing up the Vulkan support in WineD3D, but still not yet ready for users/gamers.

The new patch series by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet is moving more OpenGL-specific context code into its own (GL-focused) file, implementing support for tracking buffer usage, wiring up a Vulkan device memory allocator to work in the context of WineD3D, supporting Vulkan buffer uploads, and other work.

The WineD3D Vulkan back-end still has a long road ahead, but given the new patch series does still appear to be an area that is being pursued beyond their mature OpenGL back-end or simply embracing DXVK.