Since Sony realized it’s been leaving money on the table by ignoring the PC market, we’ve been irregularly peppered with releases like Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, and most notably, God of War. It would seem that Sony is keen to release any and all titles that reach critical mass on Playstation, though standouts like The Last Of Us have not been announced.
Ahead of next month’s Steam Deck launch, DXVK gets a performance boost and support for DLSS in God of War. DXVK is the software that translates DirectX 9, 10, and 11 calls to the Vulkan API. While the game has already achieved ‘Gold’ status on ProtonDB, performance and reliability are a mixed bag among different Proton versions. Many of the users who report success are using experimental builds. DVXK 1.9.4 is bringing some of the experimental changes into the stable build.
Here are the notable changes the new version brings:
- Fixed an issue that would cause VRAM to not be utilized on RBAR-enabled Nvidia GPUs if the dxvk.shrinkNvidiaHvvHeap option is enabled (#2438).
- Enabled strict D3D9 float emulation by default on future versions of RADV. This may improve both accuracy and GPU-bound performance (PR #2448).
- Improved memory allocation behaviour. This may reduce memory usage especially in games that create multiple processes or D3D devices.
- Removed obsolete options to disable OpenVR support.
- God of War: Enabled performance optimizations and DLSS support. Note that these changes are already included in Proton Experimental.
Of the three games mentioned above, all have ‘Gold’ status or higher, while Days Gone is Platinum and has native Steam Controller support. Horizon Zero Down also advertises native Steam controller support. None of these games, however, are ‘Deck Verified’.