D7VK 2.4 released along with GXVK for Vulkan-based 3Dfx Glide

29 Oct 2026 at 10:08 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

A nice surprise for more retro gaming! Along with the release of D7VK 2.4 for older Direct3D, we also now have GXVK for Vulkan-based 3Dfx Glide.

While D7VK was forked from DXVK to focus on Direct3D 7, 6, 5 and 3; GXVK was also forked from DXVK to focus on 3Dfx Glide for Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. We're really going into retro territory now, but it's nice to see a modern properly open source project attempt it for Wine / Proton on Linux.

GXVK is still in the early prototype stage, so don't expect a good experience with it yet. But, certain games like Diablo II do already run with it.

Once again I say - Linux is the true platform for preservation with open source.

As for D7VK 2.4, while it's still in maintenance mode no big new features were added, but still various improvements came along for the ride:

• Rebased on the latest upstream DXVK development code, which pulls in present timing, among other things.
• Implemented aspect ratio preservation for back buffer stretching and also disabled back buffer stretching by default.
• Enforced traditional DDraw surface and mode size dimensions where applicable, providing a config option to skip any validations for the more adventurous souls.
• Added a legacy aspect ratio compatibility option which will only report 4:3 and 5:4 modes to an application. This was needed by Earth 2150 and its addons, which crash while accessing certain UI sections when any 16:9 resolution is used.
• Improved present interval handling (and VSync state propagation to the Vulkan backend), which has fixed missing text/artwork issues in Re-Volt and 3DMark 2000, as well as potentially other issues in games/applications that toggle VSync state during presentation.
• Fixed an oversight which caused us to not enable VSync (if it was disabled) when using legacy surface flips.
• Added an option to force proxied gamma ramp handling (using the DDraw swapchain exclusively), which may help resolve gamma ramp issues caused by alternating DDraw/Vulkan swapchain use.
• Moved all bridge handling to the common interface/device objects, as well as improved device/interface creation robustness on failures and in OOM situations.
• Skipped setting any LOD/priority levels on non-MANAGED textures, as per native behavior.
• Slightly sped up cube texture uploads and initial object creation.
• Reworked (D3D9) backend pool selection to be more compliant with newly introduced upstream restrictions.
• Fixed a viewport detachment bug causing null pointer dereferencing, which has fixed crashing in H.E.D.Z. Thanks to @ksc-1 for reporting it.
• Fixed a similar (but purely theoretical) clipper detachment bug.
• Skipped applying a gamma ramp when in actual windowed mode (as dictated by our DDraw overlords).
• Unified all surface description structs into a single backing DDSURFACEDESC2, which reduces memory overhead and slightly speeds up all surface description-related operations.
• Relaxed validations on surface description refreshing, for a slight performance boost.
• Improved vertex buffer lock tracking, to account for multiple possible simultaneous locks.
• Propagated a common shadow surface object across all surface versions, to reduce memory overhead.
• Slightly improved the IClassFactory-based object initialization path, both in terms of speed and corectness.
• Reworked our early HWND caching workaround to always use the latest set HWND until we get an actual value from SetCooperativeLevel calls (some games need that in order to be able to properly create a Vulkan swapchain).

🌐 External Sources: GitHub - d7vk - v2.4, GitHub - gxvk Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Proton, Misc, New Release, Open Source, Vulkan, Wine 12 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Highlights from the Triple-I Initiative Showcase - October 2026 EditionWarhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is Steam Deck & Steam Machine Verified ahead of releaseFactorio 2.1 is out now with the native ARM64 Linux build to run on Steam Frame, Raspberry Pi and moreGE-Proton 11-9 arrives with improvements for Video Playback, Wayland, Controllers and more All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.