DXVK, the well-known open-source Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10, and 11, has been updated to version 2.0 today, a major release that brings important changes and improvements. DXVK allows you to run 3D applications and games created for Windows on GNU/Linux systems through Wine.

Major changes in the DXVK 2.0 release include proper support for reading from an active render target in D3D9 games and memory management enhancements for the Direct3D 9 implementation for better support of 32-bit D3D9 games.

This release replaces the insufficient d3d10.dll and d3d10 1.dll implementations for Direct3D 10 with Wine’s implementation of these DLLs to support D3D10 games. On the other hand, the Direct3D 11 implementation now makes use of Rasterizer Ordered Views, Conservative Rasterization up to Tier 3, Tiled Resources, and D3D11 Feature Level 12 1.

“While no games are known to use these features directly in D3D11, some games and game launchers rely on feature support being consistent between D3D11 and D3D12 in order to allow users to enable D3D12 in the game options. While our implementation of these features is generally functional, there may be bugs or performance issues in case a game does use them,” said the devs in the release notes.

In order to further decrease CPU overhead in games and improve compatibility with third-party libraries and mods that hook into D3D11, as well as to provide behavior that is more similar to that of Windows systems, the Direct3D 11 implementation also received improvements to the implementations of ID3D11DeviceContext.

Additionally, DXVK 2.0 makes changes to shader compilation for graphics drivers that support the VK EXT graphics pipeline library Vulkan extension by compiling Vulkan shaders during game loading rather than during draw time. Only the NVIDIA graphics drivers 520.56.06 and later support this change at the moment.

This release adds support for native Linux builds of DXVK for developers who want to port D3D applications without having to change the rendering code, improved waitable swap chain behavior, improved frame statistics implementation, improved memory allocation logic on Intel integrated graphics, and numerous bug fixes.

The Ship, Warhammer Online, Ys Seven, Alan Wake, Alice Madness Returns, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Beyond Good and Evil, Final Fantasy XV, Empire: Total War, GTA IV, Heroes Of Annihilated Empires, Limit King Of Fighters XIII, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, SiN Episodes: Emergence, Sonic Generations, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, and The Ship are among the games that benefit from version.

If you want to compile DXVK 2.0 on your GNU/Linux distribution right away, you can download it from the project’s GitHub page. If not, you should wait for this release to appear in your distro’s stable software repositories before updating and getting a better gaming experience on Linux.