![]() ![]() Phoronix, if you’re unfamiliar, is a website dedicated to Linux hardware news and reviews. “Still, initial development was fast, and I shared my progress with a small Discord community, which in turn forwarded some of the more significant milestones to Phoronix.” “I started the project for real around the time I got out of university and started looking for a job, but it wasn’t really meant to be much more than a hobby project at first,” Rebohle told me. A German developer named Philip Rebohle was the mastermind, and according to him, it started as a passion project. It’s seen countless contributors since its creation, but it started very small. The name of the project is DXVK, which is self-described as a “Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11, which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.” It started with DirectX 11, but now even includes DirectX 10 and DirectX 9. There’s a key piece of technology that’s come to take on the bulk of games, though. The whole thing is built on the back of Wine, but for games, it uses VKD3D for DirectX 12 and Zink for OpenGL. In fact, based on the company’s own commitment to the open-source philosophy, Proton bundles together a few open-source translation layers into a single package. “Vulkan is definitely an important piece of the puzzle,” one Valve developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, explained to me over email.īut Valve didn’t do it alone. And just like that - you can draw the line straight from Vulkan and Proton to the Steam Deck. Around the time Vulkan released, Valve started working on its own effort to bolster Linux gaming called Proton, a compatibility layer that’s integrated directly into Steam. Valve had supported Linux efforts for years, but Vulkan marked a turning point. With games getting increasingly complex, a low-level API like Vulkan was the key to unlocking performance parity when translating DirectX instructions. Created by the same consortium that built OpenGL, Vulkan was designed to give programmers much more control over the GPU - similar to something like DirectX 12. It really wasn’t until a cross-platform API called Vulkan came out in 2016 that things really started to take a turn for Linux gaming. It worked for older or less demanding games, but there was a massive performance hit for modern titles leveraging more complex API instructions. ![]() It would take DirectX instructions and translate them to the OpenGL API. That’s due to how Wine worked at the time for gaming. ![]() Given that most games were designed to work with DirectX, it meant you couldn’t play them on Linux - at least not natively.įor many years, the primary workaround was a compatibility layer known as Wine, but supported games were still very hit-or-miss. Games send instructions to the API, which gets work ready for your hardware. The vast majority of PC games use Microsoft’s DirectX Application Programming Interface (API), which as you might suspect, only works on Windows. In the past, DirectX had been the main hurdle to overcome. Because the commenter was right - Linux gaming has gone through a radical transformation these past few years. There’s a lot to unpack there for the uninitiated, but when I came across that comment, I was hooked. Long story short, one man’s love for 2B is the reason we have any of these incredible DirectX translation layers today.” The game ran great, which is something I’ve learned as I slowly crawl my way through for 30-minute session a few times a week, but it was the first comment on this thread that started an obsession: “ Nier: Automata is 80% of the reason Linux gaming is as good as it is now, maybe 90%. As I typically do when buying a game on Steam, I looked up some information about how it ran on Steam Deck and I came across this Reddit thread. The 2017 genre-breaking,action-adventure game is on Digital Trends’ list of the best games of all time, and though I had played it a bit on PlayStation 4, I never bought it on PC. Privacy Policy Humble origins Jacob Roach / Digital Trendsĭuring the Steam Autumn sale last year, I decided to pick up Nier: Automata. Download Mobile Legends Bang Bang for Android.Download Adobe Flash Player for Windows. ![]()
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