Direct3D 9 Over Vulkan Hits New Milestone

A developer's effort to implement Direct3D 9 (D3D9) over the Vulkan API has now reached its "fourth milestone" but a lot of work remains.

The project is known as VK9, an open-source project formerly known as SchaeferGL. It may not be as exciting as seeing D3D11/D3D12 being implemented over Vulkan, but hey, still a nifty project that could potentially impact Linux Wine users and an alternative to Gallium3D's "Nine" state tracker.

This is where Christopher Schaefer is at this week with VK9:

Multiple vertex buffers are working. And yes, he's still testing on Windows for obvious reasons, but VK9 is designed for cross-platform support with Vulkan. Details on his blog.

It may not look like too much, but at the start of the summer he was just bringing up basic geometry support and prior to that really wasn't rendering anything with Vulkan. While progress is being made, he appears committed to reaching his personal goals and the road-map does realistically acknowledge it might not implement all D3D9 functionality until 2020. The Wiki explains he wants to pass all D3D9 unit tests and get at least 75% the performance of a native Direct3D 9 implementation.