More Details On The WineD3D Vulkan Plans & Why DXVK Isn't Being Used

Yesterday we shared that Wine developers at CodeWeavers have begun exploring a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D for their Direct3D 11 support and lower, separate from their work on VKD3D that is targeting Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. More details on that effort have now been shared.

With the brief comments yesterday about working on a Vulkan back-end for WineD3D, it was mentioned that they tried working with DXVK but it "didn't work out." This led many to assume yesterday that it was because DXVK is written in modern C++ code where as the Wine project prefers C code. That is partially true, but Henri Verbeet of CodeWeavers commented today that the fundamental reason is the lead DXVK developer not responding to their inquiries. In February of last year and before WineConf 2018 they reached out via email, but to no response.

As for why a Wine D3D Vulkan back-end didn't happen sooner, Henri commented that between the release of Vulkan and now, CodeWeavers didn't have the resources to work on it due to being busy with other customer engagements. He also noted that the lack of Vulkan transform feedback for Stream-Output, Vulkan pipeline compilation speed, and other pains could have held up the work in the past.

Also shared was that CodeWeavers has done some work in recent months on exploring MoltenVK for allowing their Vulkan code to operate on top of macOS via Metal.

His comments on this WineD3D Vulkan project, which is going under the "Damavand" codename, can be found on the Wine mailing list.