DirectX Vulkan 2.0 released: Improve shader rendering and fix some game bugs
The 2.0 version of DirectX Vulkan (DXVK) has been released recently, which mainly improves memory management, shader compilation, supports more advanced functions of DirectX 11, and fixes some game bugs.
Users who like to play games in the Linux environment must be familiar with DXVK. As we all know, DirectX is the most common graphics API in Windows. Most games under Windows support this API, but Linux does not. If you want to play games that only support DirectX under Linux, then you need DXVK. The role of DXVK is to convert the game’s DirectX calls to Vulkan calls. It should be pointed out that DXVK only supports DX9, DX10, and DX11, not DX12.
It needs to be explained in advance that if you want to run DXVK 2.0, the user needs to install a driver that supports Vulkan 1.3. In previous reports, we have mentioned that Nvidia’s Maxwell to Ampere architectures, AMD RDNA and RDNA 2 architectures, and Intel’s UHD and Iris Xe core graphics have all provided support for Vulkan 1.3 by updating graphics card drivers.
The first is an optimization for DirectX 9 games. To reduce the possibility of running out of address space in 32-bit DirectX 9 games, DXVK 2.0 uses memory-mapped files to store shadow copies of textures. This improvement doesn’t affect 64-bit games, as DXVK 2.0 doesn’t work the same on the two systems.
The second is an improvement to the shader compilation. DXVK is used to compile Vulkan shaders at draw time, and after the update, it compiles when the game loads, which reduces or eliminates stuttering issues caused by shader compilation in many games. Games such as The Witcher 3 and most Unreal Engine-developed games will benefit from this improvement. Although the stuttering cannot be completely avoided, the stutter situation will be alleviated compared to the old version of DXVK.
