Fedora Looks To Make DXVK Their Default Back-End For Direct3D 9/10/11 On Wine

Fedora like most distributions ship their Wine packages as-is at the defaults, but for Fedora 33 we could see DXVK used by default on Wine in place of the conventional WineD3D back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage.

While upstream Wine is working to ultimately support Vulkan with their WineD3D back-end, for now at least DXVK generally offers a far better and more performant experience for gamers by translating D3D9/D3D10/D3D11 calls to Vulkan rather than WineD3D that currently relies upon translating to OpenGL. Steam Play and Proton have shown the success and tremendous capabilities of DXVK while now Fedora is looking at possibly using DXVK by default with their Wine package.

Red Hat's Frantisek Zatloukal has made the proposal for Fedora 33 to replace their default WineD3D back-end with DXVK. DXVK has already been available since Fedora 31 as the wine-dxvk package while this change for Fedora 33 is about making it the default. The move is motivated in the name of better game compatibility and performance.

This tentative change proposal for Fedora 33 is laid out on the Fedora Wiki.