Great news for AMD fans as Quake II RTX has been updated again, and it now features support for the newly released official cross-vendor Ray Tracing support with the Vulkan API.

With Vulkan, originally only NVIDIA supported Ray Tracing with their own extensions. That's no longer needed, as The Khronos Group formally announced the final and finished Ray Tracing specification for the Vulkan API back in late November.

Quake II RTX was one of the earliest titles to have Ray Tracing, and acted as something of a quick playground just to test out the features available. It was built on top of existing work from Q2VKPT from Christoph Schied with NVIDIA adding in new path-traced visual effects, improved textures and so on.

Thanks to an update to Quake II RTX released today, it adds support for the new official Vulkan Ray Tracing API and enables dynamic selection between NVIDIA's stuff and the new stuff. Any GPU and driver that supports VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline will now work with the Ray Tracing here. Additionally, they also added in "temporal upscaling, or TAAU".

Quake II RTX 1.4.0 comes with various other improvements too including SDL2 upgrades, lots of bug fixes, further enhancements to the visuals like more stable reflections and refractions, reduced blurring in the temporal filter and more.

Find Quake II RTX on Steam with the first three levels free, the rest available if you buy Quake 2 directly.

With more titles out and planned to release that will use DirectX 12, the VKD3D-Proton translation layer is another essential bit of open source tech and a new release is out now.

The what: paired up with the Wine and Steam Play Proton translation layers, VKD3D-Proton will translate Direct3D 12 to Vulkan and hopefully allow you to run some more advanced Windows-only games and apps on Linux. VKD3D-Proton is the Valve fork of the original project from the Wine developers, with a priority on performance and game compatibility.

Today VKD3D-Proton 2.1 went up which mentions that The Division should work (which they missed from the 2.0 release notes), Assassin's Creed Valhalla should also now work but it needs NVIDIA GPUs due to features lacking on AMD for now, and also the big one being Cyberpunk 2077 which is why it works in the latest Proton release .

In regards to Cyberpunk 2077 with VKD3D-Proton and Steam Play Proton, they mention in the release notes that this is mainly for AMD as NVIDIA drivers are missing the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type extension which accidentally works around some fatal bugs within the game itself. Cyberpunk 2077 does work on NVIDIA GPUs but it will randomly hang and issues are likely to change over time since it's a new game, with a lot of bugs.

This release also has various other fixes for the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn and DIRT 5, there's multiple performance improvements, and other misc improvements.

See it on GitHub .

Mesa 20.3.0 is the latest and greatest when it comes to Linux open source graphics, bringing with it new hardware support, performance improvements and more. Mesa drivers are what power the likes of Intel and AMD on Linux with the latest Vulkan and OpenGL support whereas NVIDIA have their own proprietary driver.

As always, with it being a brand new release if you're concerned about stability you might want to wait for the first point release with Mesa 20.3.1.

Lots new with this version like the 'V3DV' Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi now being available, new extension support, big improvements to the Zink driver (OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan), new hardware support across both AMD and Intel for the latest chips and some upcoming stuff, the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs was extended quite a lot too and much more. You can see the release notes here , although they're quite technical and not great reading unless you really know what to look for.

Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site .

War Thunder, the huge free to play online battle game across land, sea and air just had a huge game engine upgrade with the latest release.

Something that has been in progress for a long time, is that the Linux version got Vulkan support as the default now too. This is a feature our contributor BTRE interviewed the CEO of Gaijin Entertainment, Anton Yudintsev, for back in 2018 so we've been waiting some time on it. With their Dagor Engine 6.0, it brings with it tons of visual upgrades and enhancements to existing graphics.

It's not just new visuals though. They're also adding in the first vertical take-off and landing aircraft, 14 new or upgraded tanks, a rework of naval progression and the introduction of Dreadnoughts and much more. Check out the trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

They also announced their own Battle Pass system is coming, which will be a Seasonal item you can unlock items for free on or purchase it to access everything from it. So it sounds like the same system a lot of other free to play online games use.

Currently, they're still working out some of the major kinks in the Vulkan renderer and the update has caused quite a big mess on Linux. For starters, it seems in my own testing it no longer runs directly from Steam, instead I had to run the launcher directly from the folder. Additionally, I've seen that if you're on the xorg display server, you're likely to see a black screen whenever the launcher or game is in focus. Apparently the game works well on the newer Wayland display server. Hopefully they will fix those quirks soon because it stops it being playable for a lot of Linux users.

You can download War Thunder for Linux direct from the website or Steam .

It seems NVIDIA are no longer reserving the two extra digits in their Linux driver versioning for their special Betas, as a new stable driver is out today as 455.45.01 .

Quite a small driver that's just a few bug fixes but nice to see NVIDIA do updates both big and small. Here's what they say has changed in this version:

• Fixed a bug in a Vulkan blending optimization that could produce incorrect results. Some of the Vulkan titles affected by this bug were:
  • Life is Strange 2
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.

This is part of their "Short Lived" branch, and should be safe for everyone to upgrade to if you're sticking to that. They also have their "Long Lived" branch currently on version 450.80.02 that was released back in September.

Since the difference isn't obvious, here's our usual reminder on what the changes are between their stable driver branches on Linux as explained by NVIDIA:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

On the Collabora blog, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has given an exciting update to Zink, an open source Mesa Gallium driver for Linux that provides OpenGL on top of Vulkan.

Announced two years ago last month, the point of it is for providing hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. Not really a situation we're going to see right now but perhaps an important project for some time in the future and perhaps if it can eventually provide better performance - an option to pick later on.

Blumenkrantz mentioned how they've been mentored by hackers at Collabora on their work, and that if a Mesa update shipped now it would come with OpenGL 3.3 support, macOS support and even RaspberryPi 4 support, which curiously why done with the help of Igalia to help test the RPi 4 V3DV Vulkan driver.

Coming up next, Blumenkrantz mentioned numerous areas that will see improvements with hundreds of patching waiting to be upstreamed to add in more advanced features and bring up OpenGL 4 support and then keep going from their advancing it onwards.

Pictured - Unigine Heaven running with Zink with an Intel GPU, credit: Mike Blumenkrantz

Feature support is one thing but what about performance? Looking at Unigine Heaven running with Zink, the driver has come a long way there too. From failing to render textures, to 14FPS (compared with 50FPS on normal OpenGL drivers) up to around 95% of native OpenGL performance which is seriously impressive. Through 2021 Blumenkrantz is hoping to improve that even further.

Supporting newer and more advanced Windows games like Control and Death Stranding, the Direct3D 12 to Vulkan layer vkd3d-proton has a 2.0 release. This is the Valve-sponsored fork of the original vkd3d project from the Wine team, with this having a pure focus on working with the Proton compatibility layer for Steam Play .

Today a new release of vkd3d-proton went up tagged by DXVK creator Philip Rebohle, who mentioned that it should now work with these titles along with having D3D12 Feature Level 12.0 and Shader Model 6.0 (DXIL) support:

• Control
• Death Stranding
• Devil May Cry 5
• Ghostrunner
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Metro Exodus
• Monster Hunter World
• Resident Evil 2 / 3

Find the release announcement here .

You're going to need the most up to date drivers possible to use it fully. For AMD that means Mesa's RADV driver, which according to the readme the current recommendation is for drivers right from the current Git development. For NVIDIA you want at least driver version 455.26.01.

NVIDIA just quietly released another fresh update to their special developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.

After moving it over to the 455 series at the end of September, they released driver version 455.26.01 on October 9 which is a small bug-fix cleanup with these changes:

• Reduce host memory consumption for descriptor memory when VkDescriptorSetVariableDescriptorCountAllocateInfo is used
• Handle SPIR-V 1.4 non-Input/Ouput entry point variables correctly
• Fixed a blending optimization that sometimes produced an incorrect result
• Fixed SPIR-V intersection shader compilation issue when multi entry point ray tracing modules are used

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 450.80.02 released on September 30 from their "long lived" series or 455.28 released on October 7 from their "short lived" series. The difference can be a little confusing, NVIDIA explained the difference between short / long lived drivers as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

Want to keep up with the latest Linux driver updates? You can follow our dedicated Drivers tag , all our tags have an RSS feed you can follow.

Developer Philip Rebohle announced today the release of DXVK 1.7.2 to further improve the D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan translation layer.

Used with Wine, and part of the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, it's great to see it still moving along. This is the first release since August and while it's technically a minor release in versioning, the actual fixes included look to be quite important.

There's a "major" regression fixed for D3D9 titles that caused crashes in many games, a fix for D3D9 crashes on AMDVLK due to invalid Vulkan API usage, they've worked around some stack overflows in some 32-bit D3D9 games, a workaround is now in place for rendering issues on AMD drivers in some Unity Engine games, another workaround is added for Unicode on Windows "being garbage" and you can disable log files being created.

Additionally these games saw some fixes that should help them run better: Baldur's Gate 3, Final Fantasy XIV, Just Cause 3, Marvel's Avengers, Need for Speed Heat, PGA TOUR 2K21 and Trails in the Sky SC.

Release notes can be found here .

As a reminder: it's possible to update your Steam Play Proton install with this newer DXVK release, without waiting on a new Proton build. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.7.2. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, to refresh it you can usually just re-install Proton from the Tools menu in Steam.