probably the next VKD3D-Proton version will ship with VK_EXT_descriptor_heap:
From Hans-Kristian Arntzen:
This is likely the last release before
VK_EXT_descriptor_heaplands.A
ton of work on descriptor heapshave been happening in the background as well,
but that is not included in this release.
This is a pretty good news. But be carefull, the next release that will include the work on descriptor heaps could still takes months.
Does that mean the fix will have been fully implemented on that release? And do we have some sort of beta release where have an idea of how much performance gain we can expect from the fix?
Probably no one can answer this as the whole thing is split into several distinct parts handled by different teams as explained a few posts above by @hurikhan77. For example the NV driver may seem finished for now, but when the feature is released in VKD3D, some bugs in the NV driver may get revealed.
Simply saying: no, there is no. As also explained by @hurikhan77, making all the parts play nicely together in majority of corner cases (not to even say “in all of cases”) may take several iterations. In the end we all hope for the perf comparable with Windows: that’s the gold standard for now (as much as hate to say this ;-] ).
Right now the only performance i gain with the current drivers and vkd3d branch for heap is many black screens and broken dlss.
Idk of any cases yet that this removes that performance delta with Windows. Im sceptical we will see that big a benefit and im just hoping any benefit+ finally stable drivers like 575 was.
The expectations of results at this stage are the equivalent of looking to a new born baby and then complaining to the doctors because it can’t run…
At least the heap features will most likely surface with the next minor vkd3d bump 3.1. So we are now reaching a phase of “publicly available”, and are no longer testing half baked, custom built development branches which certainly not reveal the intended picture.
I’m still not confident that this will be an easy ride, there will be rough edges, but proper reporting (as valuable input instead of complaining) to both sides (vkd3d and NVIDIA) should get us somewhere pretty fast.
Only then, I’d expect starting development on performance improvements. We shouldn’t expect much better performance right from the start. We maybe can expect “slightly better” performance, maybe even performance regressions in some edge cases, but the clear goal should be correctness first (no crashes, no render errors etc).
Otherwise we could end up in a rabbit hole where some games work with perfect performance while others completely fail due to broken rendering or even crashing, and fixing one breaks another.
So guys, be prepared for a first rough ride, but stay fair, report real stability issues, don’t expect good performance just yet. And wait until 3.1 landed… :-)