While VKD3D-Proton continues to be the downstream used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and receiving a bulk of the Windows D3D12 gaming optimizations, Wine's upstream VKD3D project continues to evolve for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan. Released on Thursday was VKD3D 1.9 as the newest feature update.

VKD3D 1.9 is out as the latest update to this Direct3D to Vulkan translation library. In turn the VKD3D 1.9 code was already merged into Wine Git ahead of next week's Wine 8.17 release. Among the VKD3D 1.9 highlights are more enhancements to the HLSL shading language compiler, a new utility to inspect the contents of DXBC blobs, and various bug fixes.

VKD3D 1.9 adds support for the ID3D12Fence1 interface within libvkd3d, the libvkd3d-shader library supports many more HLSL features, the VKD3D compiler now honors a "--matrix-storage-order" option, and the vkd3d-dxbc utility is the new offering for inspecting DXBC (DirectX Bytecode) blobs.

More details on the VKD3D 1.9 release via WinHQ.org .