Now that nvidia are releasing new GPUs, it has occurred to me that games that leverage ray tracing will be starting to appear. At least during the next 2 years. Problems is:
How to run them on linux?
Well I looked into this further and discovered that dxvk is only meant for dx10 and dx11.
But Microsoft’s Direct-X based Raytracing API seems to be written as an extension to dx12.
Problem: dxvk does not support dx12. Therefor it cannot support Microsoft’s form of raytracing APIs (for the new nvidia cards). That is likely what new windows games will be using that support raytracing.
(They could be written in vulkan instead, of course, then that would not be such a problem here, and I’m not sure how good / appealing vulkan’s ray tracing api is for windows games devs, vs the microsoft one).
Then I found this lutris forum thread, which was quite illuminating:
It seems to say that vkd3d is the conversion layer for dx12 to vulkan (on linux). And that it is being done by the wine project.
However there is no github repo, and little information about it. Other than it’s rather new, and not finished yet to any standard that’s going to be broadly useful. Without specifically programming those games to ‘go around’ the missing bits.
The other thing is there does not seem to be such a great deal of community involvelment around wine’s vkd3d project. At least when compared to dxvk anyhow. So is it really our best bet, for dx 12 support on linux ?
Nevermind the raytracing extensions yet. I would assume that means the goal is still rather far off into the future?
Or is there also another different / competing linux project aiming for the same dx12 compatibility goals? That I did not come across? For example will the more popular dxvk project be adding dx12 support at some point in the future? Seems not?
—> Does this mean that our best bet is running a windows virtual machine instead?
Then I have some follow up question(s):
If I need 2 gpus for running under a vm, then can the linux one be a gt 1030, if the vm is using an nvidia rtx gpu? Or will having 2 nvidia gpus cause some typs of a drivers conflict? Or the gt 1030 not be powerful enough, to cope with coping over the framebuffers, and all that?
Or can I make the host gpu the intel igp graphics? Would that be better than the gt1030, or is it impossible to use intel igp in the first place, in this scenario?