Two months after its previous 2.5.3 release, DXVK, a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10, and 11, primarily used to improve the performance and compatibility of Windows games on Linux through Wine or Proton, just released its latest update, v2.6.
The big feature—Nvidia Reflex (a suite of GPU, G-SYNC display, and software technologies that measure and reduce system latency) can now be enabled in D3D11 games—including popular favorites like God of War, Overwatch 2, and Quake Champions—provided they are running with Proton Experimental and an Nvidia driver that supports VK_NV_low_latency2.
If you’re curious about actual latency figures, you can display approximate input latency in these games by setting DXVK_HUD=latency. However, one caveat remains: this feature currently does not work as expected in most Unreal Engine 4 games running in D3D11 mode, since necessary LatencySleep and related functions aren’t called.
Beyond the Reflex integration, DXVK 2.6 addresses a common bug that has been causing garbled output on Nvidia hardware when using MSAA. This fix impacts several well-known games, such as Assassin’s Creed 3, Black Flag, Watch Dogs, and Stalker: Clear Sky, among others.
On the performance side, games that rely on the NVAPI UAVOverlap feature, such as Baldur’s Gate 3, benefit from potentially improved GPU-bound performance thanks to a less conservative implementation than before. Also, DXVK 2.6 brings mild performance boosts in titles that intensively use pixel-shader UAVs—like Trine 5—and delivers lower CPU overhead for games that employ inefficient resource binding methods, such as God of War.
Regarding bug fixes, creating the D3D11 video processor view now properly handles layering. Moreover, various game-specific hiccups have been addressed, including missing geometry in Clanfolk on Intel hardware, plus a Vulkan usage fix in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Watch Dogs 2 players on RDNA3 GPUs can also sigh in relief; the flickering sky bug has been worked around.
On the D3D8 and D3D9 sides, DXVK 2.6 fixes a race condition that occasionally leads to crashes in games doing multi-threaded asset loading. Additionally, some rendering and shader model issues have been resolved, benefiting classics such as Global Operations, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and Silent Hill 2 (especially with the Silent Hill 2 Enhancements mod).
Players can also expect smoother transitions between software and hardware cursors, improved behavior for half-rate Vsync, and alt+tab fixes for various older titles, such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell.
General improvements are equally worth mentioning. The Vulkan swapchain implementation has been reworked to bolster robustness, while multisample resolves on tiling GPUs have been made more efficient. A recently introduced regression causing memory allocation errors on certain unified memory setups has now been patched, and software rasterizers (like Lavapipe) can once again be used via DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAME.
For more information, see the changelog.
Content retrieved from: https://linuxiac.com/dxvk-2-6-brings-nvidia-reflex-support/.
