WineD3D Vulkan Back-End Is Back In The Works Following Wine 5.0

One of the features that didn't materialize in time for Wine 5.0 as the annual stable Wine release was the work-in-progress Vulkan back-end to WineD3D. Rather than going from Direct3D to OpenGL as WineD3D currently does, there has been efforts to introduce a Vulkan back-end similar to the likes of DXVK.

The WineD3D Vulkan back-end just began forming in 2019 via CodeWeavers developers. This is at the same time the Wine developers have been working on VKD3D as their solution for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan albeit developed outside of the Wine code-base.

During 2019 was early work on Vulkan support in WineD3D but nothing that approached a usability state in time for Wine 5.0. But now with Wine 5.0 out of the way and back to feature work on the bi-weekly development snapshots, there has been some new code.

Landing on Friday were several WineD3D commits around Vulkan including buffer creation and the mapping of Vulkan buffers, and passing OpenGL information onto the appropriate new data structures.

Hopefully this is just the start and ideally by this time next year with Wine 6.0 we'll see not only WineD3D Vulkan working but also VKD3D for offering good Direct3D-12-over-Vulkan support for running modern Windows games on Linux.