The release of a new version of the DXVK project has been announced, which is a of the tools included in the Steam Play function from Steam. It is a fantastic tool thate can convert Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectX 10 graphics calls to Vulkan, the open source graphics API that is compatible with Linux. To use DXVK, in addition to Wine and Vulkan, you obviously need a Vulkan-compatible GPU.
While DXVK is still primarily used on Steam Play, it is not the only place Linux users can take advantage of this fantastic technology. It also contributes the Vulkan-based D3D11 implementation for Linux and Wine, Regarding performance and optimization when running Direct3D 11 games on Wine since they also provide support for Direct3D9.
Main new features of DXVK 1.5.2
With the launch of this new version one of the most important changes is el Discontinued support for older drivers which are not compatible with the Vulkan Graphics API 1.1 AMD / Intel (Mesa) 17.3 and earlier versions, as well as NVIDIA 390.xx and earlier versions.
As Vulkan version 1.0 was discontinued since it had not been tested to a great extent and it did not always work correctly and that also allowed a code cleaning.
It is also highlighted that recently identified bugs in Direct3D 9 implementation have been fixed and small optimizations for performance and memory consumption have been added.
Added option d3d9.forceSwapchainMSAA to force the inclusion of the MSAA anti-overlap method (Multi-sample anti-aliasing) for images processed in SwapChain. And the settings d3d9.deferredSurfaceCreation is enabled, allowing you to get rid of menu display issues in Atelier series games that use Direct3D 11.
Additionally, some missing virtual framebuffer switching chain operations (SwapChain) were added in the Direct3D 9 implementation, which resolved issues with launching applications such as the ATi ToyShop demo, Atelier Sophie, and Dynasty Warriors 7.
As well It is highlighted that the problems reported in different games were solved with which they have a better performance with Wine + DXVK and Proton.
Of the games that received improvements:
- Dragon Age Origins- Fixed some Vulkan validation bugs.
- Entropia universe: the option was added d3d11.invariantPosition to fix Z-fighting issues in some graphics drivers
- Ferentus / Herrcot / Xiones: Fixed rendering of the sky as well as a minimap regression
- Gothic 3: d3d9.supportDFFormat was disabled to fix shadow rendering
- Tales of Vesperia: fixed a racecondition causing frequent crashes, which was introduced in DXVK 1.4.5.
- TrackMania United Forever- Fixed unnecessary CPU <> GPU timing to improve performance
- Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines: rendering issues fixed with glare windows
- Orochi Warriors 4- Fixed a minor discrepancy in D3D11 query tracking due to a number of game bugs
How to add DXVK support to Linux?
DXVK requires the latest stable version of Wine to run. So, if you don't have this installed. Now we will only have to download the latest stable package of DXVK, this one we found In the following link.
wget https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/download/v1.5.2/dxvk-1.5.2.tar.gz
After having made the download now we are going to unzip the package just obtained, this can be done with from your desktop environment or from the terminal itself by executing in the following command:
tar -xzvf dxvk-1.5.2.tar.gz
Then we access the folder with:
cd dxvk-1.5.2
And we execute the sh command to run the install script:
sudo sh setup-dxvk.sh install
setup-dxvk.sh install --without-dxgi
When installing DXVK in a prefix of Wine. The advantage is that Wine vkd3d can be used for D3D12 games and DXVK for D3D11 games.
Also, the new script allows you to install the dll as symbolic links, making it easier to update the DXVK to get more Wine prefixes (you can do this via the –symlink command).
How will you see the folder DXVK contains two other dlls for 32 and 64 bits these we are going to place them according to the following routes.
Where "user" you replace it with the username you use in your Linux distribution.
For 64 bits we put them in:
~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
O
/home/”usuario”/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
And for 32 bits in:
~/.wine/drive_c/windows/syswow64
O
/home/”usuario”/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/