RADV Vulkan Driver Improvements Coming For Wolfenstein 2 On Wine

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus makes use of the Vulkan graphics API on the id Tech 6 engine but sadly remains Windows-only aside from the consoles. While it runs with Wine, there are some bugs when using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but fortunately one of Valve's Linux developers is working on some improvements.

Samuel Pitoiset who has been working for Valve on their Linux graphics driver team seems to be working on Wolfenstein 2 improvements as part of his latest Mesa patch work. Phoronix reader Matt pointed out to us that Samuel has begun posting patches to help the RADV driver deal with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus under Wine in response to an open bug report about the game.

The patches for now can be found attached to this FreeDesktop.org bug report. Hopefully the remaining RADV issues for this game on Wine will be worked out soon and end up in Mesa 18.1 or backported to Mesa stable releases where relevant/possible. It's interesting that a Valve developer is working on Vulkan driver improvements for a game that can only be played currently via Windows, but perhaps they are running out of Vulkan bugs for current Linux-native games or frankly are willing to help improve the drivers when for them it still means a sale on Steam regardless of platform.