DXVK 2.0 Released – Can Fix Shader Stutter in DX11 Games

You may or may not have heard of this one before, but it’s certainly worth bringing to your attention! The team behind the excellent DXVK have just released a new version. If you don’t know, DXVK is a Vulkan-based DX9, DX10 and DX11 translation layer. Dumbing it down a little further, it basically aims to improve the performance and feature support of older games by allowing them to run on modern hardware using modern APIs such as Vulkan.

The latest update to DXVK brings it up to DXVK 2.0, which addresses shader compilation changes to minimise the shader compilation stutters in DX11 games, and we all know those bloody stutters suck. Vulkan shaders will now be compiled at the time the game loads its D3D shaders, vs the current system of loading at draw time, which causes stutters. The team noted that drivers which support VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library, including the IndependentInterpolationDecoration feature, will benefit from this.

However, keep in mind that games such as The Witcher 3, and most Unreal Engine 4 games will still exhibit some stutter as they only allow loading at draw time. However, you should still see performance improvements thanks to DXVK 2.0. Other features include the ability to expose D3D11 Feature Level 12_1. It also features memory management improvements for DX9 games.

Still no bloody clue what all this is? Read the bullet list below, it tells you outright what games get what benefits from this.

You can download DXVK 2.0 from here.

DXVK 2.0 PC Games Tweaks, Fixes, Improvements & Changes

• Alan Wake: Fixed a regression that caused grey rectangles to appear on screen on AMD GPUs.
• Alice Madness Returns: Fixed an issue with flashing bright spots.
• Anomaly: Warzone Earth: Fixed a deadlock when starting the game.
• Beyond Good and Evil: Enabled 60 FPS limit to work around game bugs.
• Dragon Age Origins: Work around an out of memory issue when alt tabbing out of the game.
• Empire: Total War: Fixed rendering.
• Final Fantasy XV: Improved performance when VXAO is enabled.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Disabled support for DF texture formats to make the game render mirrors in higher quality.
• Heroes Of Annihilated Empires: Fixed crash.
• Limit King Of Fighters XIII: Enabled 60 FPS limit to work around game bugs.
• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes: Work around texture streaming issues on GPUs with 4 GiB or more VRAM.
• SiN Episodes: Emergence: Work around an out-of-memory issue caused by the game creating an infinite number of textures.
• Sonic Generations: Improved performance by reducing GPU synchronization.
• Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions: Fixed a lighting issue.
• The Ship: Work around an out-of-memory issue caused by the game creating an infinite number of textures.
• Warhammer Online: Enabled 100 FPS limit on 64-bit executable to work around game bugs.
• Ys Seven: Fixed a regression that caused the game to only render a black screen.