DXVK 3.0 Released With DXBC-SPIRV For Shader Compilation, Descriptor Heaps By Default

Philip Rebohle announced the release today of DXVK 3.0 as the latest major feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for use by Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

With DXVK 3.0 one of the big changes is now using DXBC-SPIRV for shader compilation to replace the legacy shader translation code. DXBC-SPIRV is a SSA-based compiler for D3D SM 5.1+ that is also developed by the DXVK developers. This new shader compiler should fix a number of rendering issues, the generated code is more compact than natively translated SPIR-V, and the shader compilation is fully offloaded to worker threads that in turn will help with game load times.

The other big change of DXVK 3.0 is now using Vulkan descriptor heaps (VK_EXT_descriptor_heap) by default on supported Vulkan API drivers.

DXVK 3.0 also brings a number of Direct3D improvements, enhancements around shared resources, frame-rate limiter support, and a variety of other bug fixes and improvements. In turn, DXVK 3.0 now requires Vulkan 1.4 driver level support.

Downloads and more details on the DXVK 3.0 release can be found via GitHub.