While the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline.

Philip Rebohle has released another update to DXVK 1.5, in time for any weekend gamers wanting to enjoy the latest Direct3D-over-Vulkan experience.

Succeeding last week's DXVK 1.5.2 is now a version 1.5.3 release with various fixes.

While developers are hard at work on Godot 4.0 with Vulkan support, that release won't be ready until mid-2020 so as a result Godot 3.2 is out today as their latest stable release and serving as a "long-term support" release until transitioning to Godot 4.

As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more.

Coming a few weeks past DXVK 1.5.1 is now version 1.5.2 and it brings with it quite a number of improvements.

GameMode, the open-source daemon led by the game porters at Feral Interactive for dynamically optimizing Linux system performance when running games, is out today with version 1.5 as its newest feature update.

DXVK 1.5.1 is out today as the latest feature update for this project implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for faster Wine/Proton Linux gaming performance. This is the first update since the big DXVK 1.5 release that integrated D9VK for D3D9 support.

This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive.

For those looking for some family-friendly, open-source gaming fun this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.1 has been released as the Mario Kart inspired cross-platform racing game.

Godot lead developer Juan Linietsky provided a New Year's Eve look at the origins of this wildly successful open-source game engine from their beginnings, the technical advancements of this open-source game engine, the big step forward with Godot 3.0, and what's on the horizon with Godot 4.0.

One of the engine upgrades to Vulkan we have been looking forward to the most has been usage by the X-Plane flight simulator to ultimately succeed their long-standing OpenGL pipeline. Laminar Research shared on Christmas day that the X-Plane 11.50 release with Vulkan support is currently in private beta and will soon be available publicly.

Unigine developers have delivered a nice Christmas present in delivering Unigine 2.10 as the latest version of their 3D engine used by few games but an increasing number of simulation systems.

For those looking for some family-friendly Linux gaming this holiday season, a release candidate of the Mario Kart inspired SuperTuxKart 1.1 is now available for your enjoyment... err testing.

As expected, Feral Interactive this morning released the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux and macoS.

While it's normally recommended switching to the P-State/CPUFreq "performance" governor for the optimal Linux gaming experience and the preferred default of Feral's GameMode Linux gaming daemon, in the case of Intel integrated graphics you may find better results in using the "powersave" governor.

Feral Interactive has announced they are releasing the complete season of Life Is Strange 2 for Linux (and macOS) this Thursday.

Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.5 as the newest version of this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation and is a big release considering last night's merging of D9VK / Direct3D 9 support.

Last year one of Feral's top Linux developers left the company and now another top developer has sadly left the game porting firm.

While DXVK tends to be much-loved by Linux gamers for allowing more Direct3D 10/11 Windows games to run nicely on Linux with Wine or Proton (Steam Play) thanks to its fairly complete translation of D3D10/D3D11 API calls to Vulkan, it looks like Philip Rebohle is at least contemplating shifting it just into maintenance-mode.

DXVK 1.4.6 is out this morning as the first update in two weeks for this widely-used project allowing Direct3D 10/11 games to run atop Vulkan on Linux systems with Wine/Proton.

The SDL2 library has been seeing a number of additions in recent days to its game controller database by Valve's Sam Lantinga. The latest game controller to be added is for Google's now-shipping Stadia Controller.

Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming.

It's been three weeks already since the last DXVK update but that was succeeded this evening by DXVK 1.4.5 as another notable update to this project mapping Direct3D 10/11 onto Vulkan for speeding up the Wine/Proton-based Windows gaming experience on Linux.

Flax Engine is the latest game engine seeing native Linux support and in the process the renderer also picked up Vulkan support.

Besides X-Plane being one of the most realistic PC-based flight simulators, this flight simulator from Laminar Research has long supported Linux. Out this weekend is X-Plane 11.40 as the latest update and the last major release before they roll-out their long-awaited Vulkan graphics API support.

Feral Interactive has just shipped their Linux (and macOS) port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition.

Godot 4.0 continues to be worked on with much excitement by lead developer Juan Linietsky and others. While continuing to advance the Vulkan code in general for its introduction in Godot 4.0, over the past month most of the development efforts were focused on global illumination.

Well known open-source figure Ikey Doherty who rose to prominence for his work on the Solus Linux distribution and then went on to work on Intel's Clear Linux project is now having his hand at game engine development.

As another release in time for weekend gamers, DXVK 1.4.3 was released today as the newest update for this library mapping Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan for accelerating the Wine/Proton-based Linux gaming experience.