So what's about Vulkan?

[Meditril]

Hi Linux 3D experts,
can anybody please explain me what’s about Vulkan and how does it improve the EVE Online experience on Linux?

I recently managed to get my EVE working on Ubuntu with DX 11 but the frame rate dropped by 50% compared to DX 9, even though CPU and GPU are still not fully utilized. Is Vulkan a solution for this issue?

Thank you and best regards,
Meditril

[Whitehound]

See here:

Steam Play Beta. All Games are available for Download to Linux Steam Client

Proton is based on WINE 3.7 and uses DXVK for DirectX11, plus some additional patches. So it’s as fast as WINE with DXVK, and a lot faster than WINE without DXVK. DXVK implements DirectX10/11 with the help of Vulkan, which makes it faster than normal WINE, because normal WINE uses OpenGL for it. Vulkan also reduces the CPU usage by a lot. From a first test could I see that Proton renders EVE with DirectX11 without any glitches and with AA. Just as I’m used to from using my own WINE with DXVK my…

When you don’t see similar gains then you probably didn’t set it up right. The numbers you describe seem to be “DirectX11 over OpenGL” versus “DirectX9 over OpenGL”, meaning, you’re running with a vanilla WINE installation, but haven’t got DXVK installed and set up.

If you want to know how to set up DXVK with WINE, then see here:

wineHQ and dx11

It took a bit more than a couple of minutes for me to get DXVK to run and it still occasionally hangs for me, but if anyone wants to try, here is what I had to do to get it running on Debian 10 / “Buster”: Installing a recent WINE version from WineHQ with Vulkan support enabled (i.e. 3.7. from the development branch). The WINE version that comes with Debian does not have Vulkan support compiled in yet (likely for a good reason). wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/pool/main/wine-dev…

If you want to go with Steam Play / Proton then you’ll find a list of steps here:

Steam Play Beta. All Games are available for Download to Linux Steam Client

I’ve now downloaded Steam for Linux and tested it myself. It works. The steps I needed to do to get it working with Debian 10 “Buster” were these: Download Steam for Linux. You’ll get a file called steam_latest.deb. Install Steam. I’ve used dpkg -i steam_latest.deb in a root shell. Any missing dependecies such as curl or python need to be met before it will install. You’ll have to consult your distro on how to install .deb packages if you’re not familiar with it. Note: You’ll also need to…

The whole effort around Vulkan and using it for DirectX is still young and is seeing lots of fixes and further development currently. Best chance for a quick’n’easy installation will likely be Steam Play / Proton, because it entails it all as well wraps it nicely into Steam, which makes it available for a lot of other games, too.

[Meditril]

As usual a great answer from you Whitehound!
Looks like I will have to schedule some time for toying around with this the next weeks…