Philip Rebohle has announced the launch of DXVK 1.5, the latest version of the Direct3D renderer on Vulkan which is also one of the most essential components of Steam Play, since it is responsible for “translating” Direct3D instructions to Vulkan to facilitate execution of Windows games on Linux and Mac.
If so far it has focused on the support of Direct3D 11, the most used API in recent years for the development of video games, DXVK 1.5 stands out for the decision to merge with the code of D9VK, another Direct3D renderer (or translator) on Vulkan in charge of doing the same (or something very similar) with the ninth version of the proprietary API of Microsoft. The fact of rendering Direct3D 9 on Vulkan would have to improve the performance of the games compared to the translation to OpenGL to perform WineD3D, something to which is added the possible reduction of the dependence of the driver when operating Vulkan at a lower level.
At the specific games level, we find the correction of a fault that caused the screen to go black when playing videos using Direct3D 9 on Atelier Ryza; From now on all GPUs are reported as NVIDIA in Crysis 3, reducing the overheating of the graphic but making it possible to disable the nvapi.dll file in Wine prefixes; Fixed a crash in FIFA 19 caused by the loss of the DXGI function; the number of log messages in Halo: Master Chief Collection that are generated by the invalid use of API D3D11 has been reduced; and corrected a regression in Star Citizen introduced in DXVK 1.4.3 that caused problems with lighting.
We remember that the fact of having been published does not mean that DXVK 1.5 is already introduced in the Proton packages that Steam makes available to make use of Steam Play, although it will not be necessary to wait long for that to happen unless some is detected serious problem. The fusion of D9VK into DXVK would have to improve the performance in GNU / Linux and Mac of the old Windows titles built with Direct3D 9, having to work this out of the box (without any additional configuration) just after installing the version of Proton that include DXVK 1.5.