Running your DirectX 9/10/11 games in Vulkan

[Omega]

For those who are not aware DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for DirectX 9/10/11. This tool is mainly used by Linux gamers to translate DirectX over to Vulkan.

Here comes the cool part which will be relevant to you people; it also works pretty well on Windows.

So if you have an old game which runs like crap, has bugs or doesn't run at all due to something graphics related you can try using DXVK.

Or use it on your modern games because why not, using Vulkan gives you bragging rights.



I am quite interested how DXVK will change performance in CPU-bound scenarios on Windows, so this is something you people could test.



You can get the latest release of DXVK here;
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

How to use it? Simple, copy all .dll files and put them next to the game executable in the game installation directory.

- Although it's unlikely to cause issues, I do not recommend using it on games which use overly agressive anti-tamper software.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

That shouldn't even be an issue if you put such games on an ssd

[62]

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

That shouldn't even be an issue if you put such games on an ssd

If only. Doesn't make even a slight bit of difference if you put black ops 3 zombies on m.2 ssd or sata hdd, upgraded to 4070ti still lag spikes on actions like turning on power.

Put these dlls in the game folder but don't know if they're even activating, game runs exactly the same anyway.

[Snow]

Publicado originalmente por 62:

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

That shouldn't even be an issue if you put such games on an ssd

If only. Doesn't make even a slight bit of difference if you put black ops 3 zombies on m.2 ssd or sata hdd, upgraded to 4070ti still lag spikes on actions like turning on power.

Put these dlls in the game folder but don't know if they're even activating, game runs exactly the same anyway.

You can use RTSS overlay to check it, it says the currently running API before the framerate number.

[62]

Publicado originalmente por Snow:

Publicado originalmente por 62:

If only. Doesn't make even a slight bit of difference if you put black ops 3 zombies on m.2 ssd or sata hdd, upgraded to 4070ti still lag spikes on actions like turning on power.

Put these dlls in the game folder but don't know if they're even activating, game runs exactly the same anyway.

You can use RTSS overlay to check it, it says the currently running API before the framerate number.

Ok it still says d3d11 even though all dlls in my game folder

[Snow]

Publicado originalmente por 62:

Publicado originalmente por Snow:

You can use RTSS overlay to check it, it says the currently running API before the framerate number.

Ok it still says d3d11 even though all dlls in my game folder

Then it's either wrong dlls, or wrong folder. Inside DXVK archive, there are x32 and x64 folders - the DLLs should be used accordingly to the game, so x32 for 32-bit ones. The dlls should be placed in the same folder where the game exacutable is; not all games have their exacutable in the root folder, i.e. for Borderlands 2 it's "\Borderlands 2\Binaries\Win32\".

[Crashed]

Publicado originalmente por Snow:

Publicado originalmente por Crashed:

Does this have the same risk of glitching that turning on async in yuzu can?

Not sure what you mean by glitching, but you can expect to briefly see something like a mono-coloured or missing effect or object if it's shown before the shaders are fully compiled. Although IMO those microstutters aren't a big deal to begin with, but this is the only alternative to having them.

According to the yuzu website some games have it particularly bad. Specifically, when you "fuse" a weapon in Tears of the Kingdom, the game actually saves the thumbnail in the system's cache storage. According to the yuzu May progress report enabling async shaders would corrupt those thumbnails.

That said, I suppose it is less risky with PC games than Switch games since the PC is less resource constrained and thus you don't see such caching behaviors.

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

That shouldn't even be an issue if you put such games on an ssd

Pretty sure shader stutter is the result of a CPU bottleneck due to recompiling the DirectX shaders into SPIR-V.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Publicado originalmente por 62:

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

That shouldn't even be an issue if you put such games on an ssd

If only. Doesn't make even a slight bit of difference if you put black ops 3 zombies on m.2 ssd or sata hdd, upgraded to 4070ti still lag spikes on actions like turning on power.

Put these dlls in the game folder but don't know if they're even activating, game runs exactly the same anyway.

Does the game have a sub-folder with the game EXE? If so that's most likely where the these files needs to go. Then go to Settings > System > Storage in WinOS and click Temp Files on C Drive and delete everything except for Downloads. This will dump the DX GPU Cache.

Then launch a game and run around in the game world a bit build up a cache. Then exit the game and relaunch it and see if it's any better now.

In NVIDIA Control Panel set Shader Cache to 10GB and set Power Management to Prefer Max Performance. If you still have such a lag in-game after this then I'd suggest enforce a max fps limit

[62]

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

Publicado originalmente por 62:

If only. Doesn't make even a slight bit of difference if you put black ops 3 zombies on m.2 ssd or sata hdd, upgraded to 4070ti still lag spikes on actions like turning on power.

Put these dlls in the game folder but don't know if they're even activating, game runs exactly the same anyway.

Does the game have a sub-folder with the game EXE? If so that's most likely where the these files needs to go. Then go to Settings > System > Storage in WinOS and click Temp Files on C Drive and delete everything except for Downloads. This will dump the DX GPU Cache.

Then launch a game and run around in the game world a bit build up a cache. Then exit the game and relaunch it and see if it's any better now.

In NVIDIA Control Panel set Shader Cache to 10GB and set Power Management to Prefer Max Performance. If you still have such a lag in-game after this then I'd suggest enforce a max fps limit

Thanks, tried all that before and I did get vulkan working but its no different whatsoever

[Bad 💀 Motha]

If games still experience the same kinds of lagging hiccups as you play them then I'd have to suggest it is the OS and/or GPU Settings, Game Settings at fault.

If you have NVIDIA and the game has a DX12 option and you're using WinOS, try the DX12 option. Vulkan usually runs better on an AMD GPU for the most part, but it can also run well on NVIDIA gpus as well. Just that if your game has both a Vulkan and DX12 option you might see more stability with DX12.

However if you are using NVIDIA GPU along with Win10/11 and have NVIDIA Game Ready GPU driver of around 531.xx or later, within NVIDIA Control Panel now are various options regarding Vulkan that weren't there before in older drivers. Vulkan settings regarding Performance vs Compatability

[Crashed]

Publicado originalmente por Bad 💀 Motha:

If games still experience the same kinds of lagging hiccups as you play them then I'd have to suggest it is the OS and/or GPU Settings, Game Settings at fault.

If you have NVIDIA and the game has a DX12 option and you're using WinOS, try the DX12 option. Vulkan usually runs better on an AMD GPU for the most part, but it can also run well on NVIDIA gpus as well. Just that if your game has both a Vulkan and DX12 option you might see more stability with DX12.

However if you are using NVIDIA GPU along with Win10/11 and have NVIDIA Game Ready GPU driver of around 531.xx or later, within NVIDIA Control Panel now are various options regarding Vulkan that weren't there before in older drivers. Vulkan settings regarding Performance vs Compatability

There's also the option to have OpenGL and Vulkan present via DirectX which has the effect on Windows 11 of enabling Auto HDR on some games and emulators.

It's not perfect; in some cases it can cause flickering or tearing (and yes tearing even in window mode thanks to independent flip).

[Richargood]

I always get this error: "dx11 feature level 10.0 is required to run the engine"

[Crashed]

Publicado originalmente por Richargood:

I always get this error: "dx11 feature level 10.0 is required to run the engine"

Make sure your graphics driver supports Vulkan; I think the latest version of DXVK requires Vulkan 1.3.

[r.linder]

Publicado originalmente por Midnight Aurais:

fun part dxvk in windows works better on nvidia cards worse on amd then if you use linux dxvk runs better on amd then nvidia

also there is a hdr mod version of dxvk aswel
https://github.com/EndlesslyFlowering/dxvk/releases/

I actually get better performance in some of my games on Linux than Windows, it's probably more to do with the individual distributions of Linux and how they're set up than just NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. Windows itself just isn't built for performance, not by a long shot.
The benefit of AMD drivers on Linux is that there's more variations to choose from that are updated more frequently, NVIDIA's Linux drivers are fine so long as you don't have an issue that has to wait for the next update.

I optimized performance on EndeavourOS well enough that it's slightly faster than Garuda Linux with its own performance optimizations, with an RTX 3080.

[Capt Spack Jarrow]

Publicado originalmente por 尺．し工几ᗪヨ尺:

Publicado originalmente por Midnight Aurais:

fun part dxvk in windows works better on nvidia cards worse on amd then if you use linux dxvk runs better on amd then nvidia

also there is a hdr mod version of dxvk aswel
https://github.com/EndlesslyFlowering/dxvk/releases/

I actually get better performance in some of my games on Linux than Windows, it's probably more to do with the individual distributions of Linux and how they're set up than just NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. Windows itself just isn't built for performance, not by a long shot.
The benefit of AMD drivers on Linux is that there's more variations to choose from that are updated more frequently, NVIDIA's Linux drivers are fine so long as you don't have an issue that has to wait for the next update.

I optimized performance on EndeavourOS well enough that it's slightly faster than Garuda Linux with its own performance optimizations, with an RTX 3080.

:VBCOOL:

Can confirm the same.

Also some games run way worse under Vulkan than DX11 / 12 for me, Rise of The Tomb Raider is one of those.